A Fox after crossing a river got its tail entangled in a bush, and could not move. A number of Mosquitoes seeing its plight settled upon it and enjoyed a good meal undisturbed by its tail. A hedgehog strolling by took pity upon the Fox and went up to him: “You are in a bad way, neighbour,” said the hedgehog; “shall I relieve you by driving off those Mosquitoes who are sucking your blood?”
“Thank you, Master Hedgehog,” said the Fox, “but I would rather not.”
“Why, how is that?” asked the hedgehog.
“Well, you see,” was the answer, “these Mosquitoes have had their fill; if you drive these away, others will come with fresh appetite and bleed me to death.”
-Aesop
One of Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules for Life that I latched onto several years ago was this one:
Rule No. 8: Tell the truth, or at least, don’t lie.
I’ve been meditating on the implications and variations of this since I read it, because it’s considerably deeper than you think it is when you’re first taught the Ten Commandments.
A lot of my thoughts have revolved around telling the truth as an antidote to the chaos of the unknown future. To some extent, telling lies are trying to shape the future to what you want it to be. But because humans don’t have perfect foresight, inevitably things don’t go as planned, the lie is discovered, and you’re left in a worse place than you were when you started.
The ideas behind this are a big reason why I started this Substack in the first place. When I started living in a truthful manner, to speak the truth in love and then be comfortable with what results, I found my life got much more manageable. And when I started seeing so many half-truths, mistruths, and deceptions around COVID, I knew I had to begin telling the truth in this arena as well.
So one of the things I’ve been pondering over the last eighteen months is the incredible damage done by lying on the part of our elites, decision makers, and politicians. This Slate article ponders the same issues in “The Noble Lies of COVID-19”.
There’s this video from the weekend, of hospital administrators discussing how to lie about their metrics and up the scare tactics.
There was Dr. Fauci saying that masks don’t work, then saying that he was lying at the time to save PPE for health care workers.
Then the tweet that went viral a couple of weeks ago about the supposed call from a hospital in Idaho looking for an open ICU bed to a hospital in Connecticut. Fortunately we live in an era where this can be checked within seconds.
So much of this has been pandering on the part of our decision makers. “The people can’t handle what’s actually happening, and we can’t trust them to make the right decisions, so we will lie to them in ways that will encourage them to do what we know is in their best interest.”
Let’s leave aside the arrogance involved in these thoughts, because that’s not what I’m exploring here. Instead, I want to talk about the unintended consequences of these kinds of actions.
When a public health official tells what they consider a noble lie in the greater good, there are two potential - and I would argue inevitable - consequences:
When the lie is discovered, their reputation will be damaged, and people will be less likely to listen to them in the future. Let’s call it the Law of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
They will not have accounted for the multitude of actions that people will take in response to the lie for which the public health official will not have accounted despite having the best intentions. They will have intended people to do X, and people in response do X, Y, and Z. Let’s call this the Law of the Fox and the Mosquitoes.
How much better would it have been if several times within the last eighteen months, we’d heard this from our elected officials:
“We believed A to be true. We now know from these published studies and from what we have seen in the world around us that A is not true. Rather than lie to you and continue to say that A is true, we’re going to admit that we were wrong and change course accordingly, because we know you can handle it.”
Instead, they double down, so as never to be seen as admitting they were wrong about anything.
What have we seen in response to the lies about masks working? They knew from decades of studies on influenza that respiratory viruses aren’t stopped by masks. That’s why Dr. Fauci wrote in a private email on February 5, 2020 that “[t]he typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.” But after the WHO changed its guidance to say that masks work, he changed his tune. CDC Director Robert Redfield even said that masks may be better than vaccines.
Again, I’m not interested in why they were lying, but the evidence is fairly overwhelming that they have time and time again said things they they had to have known not to be true.
What’s happened since? Since masks are such a visible sign, they immediately became a tribal signifier. Masks became a symbol of your piety — “Your mask is for me, my mask is for you.” People put full faith and trust in the ability of cloth to stop air.
Now what do we see? In spite of every bit of evidence contrary to the idea that masks stop the spread, mask mandates still abound, particularly in schools. People are dismissing their COVID symptoms, presuming that the mask will keep them from being infectious. And someone not wearing a mask in a required setting is a heretic, a heathen, not following The Science, likely to die themselves or kill others.
I suspect a large part of the societal unease we’re seeing now is from people being asked to ignore the cognitive dissonance between the lies told to them by the media and elected officials and the reality of what they see around them. The cracks are starting to show, as people are told that this is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated, yet areas with a high vaccinated percentage of the population are seeing increased cases and hospitalizations, and I suspect this will continue into the winter cold & flu season. Vermont has 77% with at least one dose and 69% with two doses, and yet:
But that must be just in the US because we’re so backwards, things must be better overseas… oh.
People are told “get vaccinated and you’ll get your life back,” and like Lucy with the football, their life is not given back to them.
Brown University has a vaccine requirement on campus, and has a 97% vaccination rate among the students. It doesn’t matter. They’ve been told that vaccination will end this, and it won’t. Now there is a “strict mandate for indoor masking, limit on social gathering for up to 5 students, a halt in in-person dining and abstention from ‘small-group hopping’”.
Students at Connecticut College were told that their vaccine requirements would end this. Now they’ve been told not to leave their dorm rooms, not to let anyone else into their rooms, and to interact with no more than two other people outside, while socially distanced and masked. This is what $57,000 a year gets you in 2021.
(Thanks to Michael Tracey for his reporting on this.)
Again, how much better off would we be if we heard, “This is now an endemic virus that we need to learn to live with. We’re going to shift our approach towards that end.” Instead, we continue to hear things that we know to be untrue.
Like usual, I don’t know where this leaves us.
Mark Twain’s adage about a lie getting halfway around the world before the truth can put on its boots seems more appropriate than ever with the speed of communication. But also, with communication being freer than ever, we can check these facts in real time and try to combat the lies.
No matter how hard it is, we need to trust in people’s abilities to be interested in the truth, live by the truth ourselves, and be willing to boldly tell the truth whenever possible.
Those who live in the truth know the contentment it brings you, the peace of not trying to maintain conflicting ideas in your head and your heart. It’s a big part of my ethos, to constantly search for what’s true, to live by it, and to preach it wherever possible.
We are fortunate to live in a time and place where that’s possible.
If you tell enough lies, often enough, the truth will become entirely hidden from you, and then you are in Hell. -Jordan Peterson
Brilliant essay Joshua! My favorite part is: "I suspect a large part of the societal unease we’re seeing now is from people being asked to ignore the cognitive dissonance between the lies told to them by the media and elected officials and the reality of what they see around them." This will only grow this winter I think... Then what happens? I feel like I'm at a movie. Keep up the great essays! :-)