Overcoming our conflicting realities

By striving to be painstakingly neutral, mainstream media has become banal; we've been pushed out of the public sphere by those peddling a more exciting product fear and anger

- CAROL OFF

In all my years as a journalist, and then as the longtime host of CBC’s “As It Happens,” where my job was to talk nightly to the people making the news or caught up in its repercussions, I’ve never experienced a time in which the notion of truth has been so mistrusted. Yet reaching a shared understanding of the truth of any situation is fundamental to our security, our politics, our trust in our neighbours. Not surprisingly, the ancient Greeks and Romans had both a word for and a profound grasp of the concept of truth, to go along with their unique understanding of democracy and freedom. The Greek goddess Aletheia, whose name means truth, represented the word’s merits as the Greeks saw them. The Romans had Veritas, also a female divinity, the daughter of Saturn. In fact, every ancient language had a word for truth, if not a deity to represent it. Truth has long been regarded as a guiding principle of both societies and individuals. We are political animals, with virtues such as honesty as parts of our social survival gear, and so truth is essential.

Truth is also the foundation of our social relationships. Children are punished for lying; we swear to tell the truth in court; we marry our loved ones, vowing to be true. On the other hand, deceit has traditionally been grounds for divorce. Lying is regarded as a betrayal that will end friendships. People lose their careers if they are not truthful. Truth matters to us profoundly, because without an agreed-upon truth, we sink into conflicting realities and lose the ability to trust each other. Without trust, we become irrational, and our societies tend toward chaos, the precondition for despots.