Lies on the Ides of Fib

Truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. We are all “liars,” though some lies are more credible than others.

Josh Powell of Washington State could not handle his truths. His wife Susan missing since 2009, and himself a person of interest in the case, hacked his 7-year-old son Braden and 5-year-old Charles while on a supervised visit with a Child Protective Services worker and vaporized all of them by exploding the house’s gas. The children had been remanded to the care of his in-laws who, in Josh’s mind, poisoned his kids’ mind.

We often associate such behavior with persons of the caliber of Khmer Rouge Pol Pot and Nazi Joseph Mengele, thinking them to be isolated and rare, until we realize that our neighborhood teems with similar types. Or so a blanket judgment of our contemporary psychology suggests, after all the news of mayhem and homicides becoming common in our awareness, all academic until it hits you in one of your genetic kind and grabs you from the stools of Godfather’s Bar.

In the journey of the mind, we posit that the only authentic knowledge is that based on sense, experience, and verification. As an approach to the philosophy of science, thinkers replace intuition and imagination with positivist methods.

Contemporary social science acknowledges observer bias and structural limits, conducts methodological debates concerning clarity, replicability, reliability and validity, as if these easily have quantifiable goals. Psychology relies on behavioral and operational patterns, e.g., once a thief, forever a felon, “correctional” intent of institutions notwithstanding. We now engage focus groups as a source of wisdom and knowledge, truth reduced to statistical probability.

This is NOT an academic lecture. It is context to our current mindset of fear and a disdain of neighborly trust in favor of assumptions of conspiracy and ill will. 9/11 might have shoe horned us into this. But fear is deep in the subconscious; somehow meme’d by the Aryan collective distrust of physiological humanity from way back to Zoroaster and Abraham’s children.

Our recent trip to Hawaii confronted us with this reality. Not only does the climate of fear and homeland security’s combative defense posture easily attest to this, but a dear colleague associated with the State’s penal system has began rationalizing his knee-jerk judgments on kin and friends aligned with the “abusive” treatment of elders by own relatives, and it hit at the personal level.

There is a verifiable pattern of transference that often occurs between counselors and counselees, in this case between inmate/parolees as wards and charges and their supervising officers. My colleague, in his moments of lucidity, claims that he has become an “organizational” creature, one who reflects the thinking and methodology of his organization.

Reagan had his “trust but verify” re the Russians, but my colleague is convinced that once a person is in a certain groove, the chances of behaviorally getting corrected, in his experience, is practically nil. Recidivists in the CNMI prove this point. Thus, the fundamental distrust in what we might refer to as human nature.

The recent cynical movie, The Ides of March, takes the American political scene played by an incredible cast led by George Clooney and Ryan Gosling into the glare of truth.

We do not mean this to be a philosophical discussion. We mean to highlight the fact that statistical truths like “many nurses and doctors have been charged with elderly abuse when they take advantage of wards in their charge, including their own kin,” has become the basis of a blanket assumption that nurses and doctors are to consider themselves guilty until they prove themselves innocent.

We make light of immigrants’ claim that they are presumed guilty until they prove themselves deportable! The same bureaucratic sentiment and cynicism apply here in regards to Hawaii’s correctional system and it is no longer a joke. Anything that fails factual truth is thus a lie.

In this sense, I am a liar. I spin stories, weave perspectives, and write opinions. In fact, we all do, but as a journalist once commented about the alleged “Tiananmen massacre” of 1989 that never occurred but is still repeated by the media, “my hearsay is more reliable than yours.” My lies are more credible than my colleagues’ straitjacketed ones!

My correctional colleague claims that the system has made him a dictator, for which his wards are grateful for they allegedly get unequivocal guidance. However, this social worker has also become a legal prosecutor, judge, and executioner to his friends and kin, reminiscent of the fascists of other clime, all in the name of social morality and order. Another colleague mused that he would have been at home with Savonarola and the Spanish Inquisition. Ironically, his fear that he has come to embody his organization’s modus operandi has sadly come true.

We understand. We do not condemn. For in his own words, after a litany of friends’ shortcomings, acquaintances and kin, myself included, he affirms: “I still love you.”

We lie, we fib, we all use “deceptive” mirages, to survive. Past credible lies, are credible lives. That finally is the crucial issue.

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