The Other Pandemic.

We all know the words; dishonesty, duplicity, deception, spin, misinformation etc, all the million names we have for lying. Honesty is speaking and acting on what you know to be true irrespective of repercussions.

Ever since the human brain expanded to cope with our complex socialisation we have had a dilemma, to act for the common good or for our own personal advantage by means of deception. Deception is our unique invention as a species, at least at the levels we employ it. As such it defines our social order from the rich and powerful to the turf wars of drug gangs and the millions in-between. it’s that part of our brain that asks, “How do I get the better of the rest?” In our many hundreds of years of history this question has been played out like a contagious virus many million times. It’s hardly a coincidence then that we’re experiencing two pandemics at the same time, one the Coronavirus and two a pandemic of untruths where the ‘healthy’ truth is almost dead and buried by an explosion of duplicity. This non-coincidence is because at every stage in its progression Coronavirus has been aided by our growing capacity for falsehood.

One can condemn lying on a moral level as we’ve done for many years, but when the escalating effects of it could well lead us to extinction by virus, global warming and environmental destruction the result becomes far more explicit than a debatable moral judgement. Basically we have thought and still think ‘we can get away with it’, but this humanity changing circumstance is proving we can’t, not any longer. But it’s hard for those who prosper by lieing to throw off that protective cloak: Profits may suffer, I might lose my job or be crucified on social media, my country might be weakened, I might lose popularity, I’m frightened; all things that appear to require multiple layers of dishonesty to continue. In my own lifetime I have seen this pandemic grow as dishonesty becomes the bedrock of success and the avoidance of failure, from the selling of chocolate to the acquisition of wealth and propagation of state power: all based on deception. The problem and the reason for our jeopardy is that that thing out there called reality only works on truth, it is it, it defines it. And when we shout, “No this is the truth” when it isn’t is like a little kid fighting a bear; the poor thing ain’t never going to win the argument, and likely as not will die. And reality has way less sympathy than a bear. So while we’re busy fighting the Coronavirus as if our life depends on it could we also formulate a vaccine to expunge dishonesty?