The world isn’t ready for honesty. Sure, we like to think we prefer it, but the issue depends on our own internal willingness to be honest with ourselves.
One of the pillars of Christian Mysticism is a radical commitment to the Truth. Truth is always defined as the Person of God, and most assertively is not some disembodied objective entity out there. Ultimate truth depends entirely from the Person of God, and all truth is God’s truth. Truth is mystical; only facts can be handled objectively, and even then with severe limitations. When you commit to truth, you commit to embracing and upholding whatever God reveals, particularly truth as He reveals it. Truth is whatever God says it is.
Most people reject all that, even most Christians (sadly) at some level in their minds. We should hardly be surprised when people easily believe propaganda. It requires a holy cynicism about humanity — we are all born fallen — to question inputs from humans. The ultimate test of truth for a Christian Mystic is whether it meets the demands of the spirit, whether it is consistent with the bedrock of conviction. All else is merely intellectual speculation. The intellect was never designed to rule our decisions; that was the original issue involved in the Fall. When Eve and Adam chose to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, that was the choice to put reason on the throne, and displace God’s Spirit. If you miss that point, you don’t understand the Creation narrative.
The choice to let reason rule is death, it is what ties us to this prison world, this fallen plane of existence. You can debate all day long on the human level whether this or that is true (meaning consistent with the facts), but it won’t change anything eternal, which is the only thing that matters. Still, it requires only good critical thinking about facts to realize, for example, the Wikileaks hullabaloo is sly propaganda. But we have this weakness in our damaged ability to discern lying:
Despite the decades of research that have demonstrated that people cannot reliably tell who’s lying and who isn’t, most people believe they can. There is something so fundamentally threatening about the notion that we cannot really know whether or not to trust someone that it is very difficult to get anyone — clinicians, citizens, even police — to take such results seriously.
Self-honesty it not a concrete goal, but an emphasis for life, a path and direction. If you realize you can’t really trust yourself at times, you realize you can’t trust anyone else. You should certainly care (another pillar of Christian Mysticism), but don’t let your sense of peace depend on people (the other pillar), including yourself. Your sense of peace comes from seeking to make your life consistent with God’s revelation, and at that, it only requires you commit to what revelation you have already received, even while you seek more.
One of the most critical facts we so easily forget is most every political leader is at least partly psychopath. The ambition and desire to rule over the lives of others does not arise from good morals. A good moral person tries to avoid such a burden, though they will take it up as a wise parent does for their children. Without that familial piety, the power to decide for others is inherently evil. We are badly damaged enough by the Fall; without a living, breathing sacrificial love for those affected by your decisions, you can’t hope to do them any good. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is a defender who is determined to tear down government political power.
I’m willing to bet you don’t know of any political leader who isn’t a psychopath on some level.
