Telling the truth won’t make you any money. There might be a jillion different reasons, but I’m sure one of them is truth doesn’t really care about making money. That’s the way truth works.
Of course, we all know the consuming public doesn’t want truth, but entertainment. That’s why Rush Limbaugh is so popular. Legend has it he once admitted his schtick was not about accuracy and truth, but entertainment. He’s a performer first and foremost. So it goes with Hannity, O’Reilly, Michael Moore, and even portions of the 9-11 Truth Movement. Even when you don’t have to pay to get a seat, you can tell when someone is using the entertainment value to make a buck. That is, you can tell, provided you have this irreverent tendency to poke around backstage.
To keep that money rolling in, we have an all-encompassing system in place to prevent truth from interfering with the profits. Any truth anywhere is a threat to wealth because, as I said before, truth is willing to take a loss for truth’s sake.
The quest for truth and justice in politics is dead from the start. Politics is the art of lying to get and maintain control.
The problem, I suggested to Bob, was to be found in the fundamental tension between individual liberty and institutional success. While, as social beings, each of us has a need for cooperation with others – which allows us to enjoy the benefits of social organization – there comes a point at which the success of such associations seduces us into wanting to establish them as a permanent presence in our lives. We soon find ourselves attracted to thinking of the organization not simply as a convenient tool for the accomplishment of our mutual interests, but as an end in itself, as its own reason for being. Once people begin thinking this way, it becomes easy to accept the idea of having the government confer trillions of dollars upon corporations that are no longer capable of functioning in the marketplace, or to rationalize the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in the name of glorifying the empire that inflicts such death and destruction.
Yet, to identify the conflict as merely “individual versus community” is itself propaganda. A community is only so viable as the individuals live in freedom to be themselves. Once we get past the assumption of zero aggression, that you must accept some limits for the sake of fairness and freedom for others, we don’t really need too much organization. Things organize themselves pretty much spontaneously among adults. I’ve seen it a thousand times in my own personal experience; it’s a reliable fact of human nature on which you can build community. The real leadership takes place in keeping folks from demanding too much organization.
When you are secure and comfortable in your own skin, you aren’t too worried about the skins of others, nor the contents. You can afford to let folks be whom they are without feeling threatened. We can love them because there is the unspoken assumption we are free to opt out of things we find distasteful, and no one gets hurt.
There’s no money in that. People who understand it don’t need much money, and people who don’t understand it don’t want much else besides money. It boils down to money as the means to gaining the illusion of control over the illusion of a dangerous world. Yes, the world is fallen, and there are predators and threats everywhere. But they usually know when you aren’t a victim-in-waiting, and true freedom and truth tend to make you confident in God’s provision. A critical element in predation is the entertainment factor of seeing fear in others. Take that away and you’ll see far fewer attempts to intimidate.
The whole idea is to realize people are alive, and all their associations are alive. Predation is hardly different from government, regardless of any claims to legitimacy, simply because it demands things be static. In humanity, “static” is a synonym for “dead.” As it is for individual people, so it is for communities. Change is the essence of living things, and a community without constant change is dead.
The problem is that, the more successful an organization becomes, the greater is the tendency to want to protect its existence. Bankers, investors, and members who had been attracted to this body for reasons other than philosophic commitment, soon begin to look upon the uncertainties that accompany liberty and change as a form of entropy to be disposed of in the least-costly manner possible. The short-term materialistic benefits that derive from organizational activity begin to overwhelm the principled purposes from which the body began.
Life, liberty and truth — all names for the same thing — won’t add much to the quarterly bottom line. Instead, it tends to drain resources. When all you care about is some MBA-style measure of success, you don’t want freedom for all, only yourself. When you value that one thing, you’ll pay any price to get it. That scares people who don’t already have it.
