Objective Truth, Subjective Truth, and Outright Lies

Prayer for Beginning Study from Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan

From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth

From the laziness that is content with half-truths,

From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,

O God of Truth deliver us.

(Reconstructionist Mahzor p.190)

Geneivat Da'at: The Prohibition Against Deception in Today's World

by Hershey H. Friedman, Professor of Business and Marketing,

Brooklyn College of the City University of New York

The literal meaning of geneivat da'at in Hebrew is theft of one's mind, thoughts, wisdom, or knowledge, i.e., fooling someone and thereby causing him or her to have a mistaken assumption, belief, and/or impression. Thus, the term is used in Jewish law to indicate deception, cheating, creating a false impression, and acquiring undeserved goodwill. Geneivat da'at goes beyond lying. Any words or actions that cause others to form incorrect conclusions about one's motives might be a violation of this prohibition. One does not have the right to diminish the ability of another person, Jew or Gentile, to make a fair and honest evaluation, whether in business or interpersonal relations.

Emmanuel Levinas

...It is as if the multiplicity of persons ... were the condition for the plentitude of ‘absolute Truth’; as if every person, through his uniqueness were the guarantee of the revelation of a unique aspect of truth, and some of its points would never have been revealed if some people had been absent from mankind... the totality of the true is constituted from the combination of multiple people: the uniqueness of each act of listening carrying the secret of the text; the voice of Revelation, as inflected, precisely, by each person’s ear, would be necessary to the ‘Whole’ of the Truth...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says in interview he fears ‘erosion of truth’ but defends allowing politicians to lie in ads

Washington Post Oct. 17, 2019 -- Tony Romm

“People worry, and I worry deeply, too, about an erosion of truth,” Zuckerberg told The Washington Post ahead of a speech Thursday at Georgetown University. “At the same time, I don’t think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true. And I think that those tensions are something we have to live with.” ...

But a spokesman for Biden’s campaign, Bill Russo, later assailed Zuckerberg for an unconvincing rationale. “Zuckerberg attempted to use the Constitution as a shield for his company’s bottom line,” Russo said, “and his choice to cloak Facebook’s policy in a feigned concern for free expression demonstrates how unprepared his company is for this unique moment in our history and how little it has learned over the past few years.”

The Rush Limbaugh Show -- September 28, 2016 edition

The fact that The New York Times and The WashingtonPost and USA Today and all these other papers and networks now have fact-checkers is for one reason. It allows them to fool you. The idea that it is a fact-checked story is designed to say to you that it is objective and analytically fair... And all it is is a vehicle for them to do opinion journalism under the guise of fairness, which, if you fall for it, gives it even more power.

This American Life, Episode "Seriously" October 2016- Ira Glass

So that's where we are right now. The presentation of facts is seen as partisan opinion, and then every day a barrage of untruths are presented as truth, and we're just supposed to suck it up. That's the moment we live in. That's our country right now. And this is going to continue after this election, no matter who wins. Like, this is the rest of our lives, I think, this post-truth politics. With so many of us getting our news from social media and from sources that we agree with, it's easier than ever to check if a fact is true, and facts matter less than ever.

Fresh Air with Terry Gross

Interview of Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the New York Times

GROSS: So when Donald Trump says something that is not true, how do you decide if you want to call it a lie or just say it's not true or use a word like baseless?

BAQUET: ...I authorized and pushed us to use lie for the first time in relation to Donald Trump when he finally acknowledged that he thought Barack Obama was born in the United States. I thought there was no other word that would carry that...

...

BAQUET: ... A lie implies that it was done with complete, total knowledge that it was a falsehood and that the person pushed it despite all evidence against. And I think what Donald Trump pushed about President Barack Obama not having been born in the United States was a lie. And I think there's no question he knew it was a lie....

To my mind, lie implies intent and longstanding intent, not just intent as of yesterday but intent over a long period of time. And I think Donald Trump pushed the birther lie for a long, long period of time. And to my mind, that makes no question that it was a lie.

... when we believe something is baseless, (which is a real word, it's not an opinion. It is a word in the dictionary, and it means without any foundation in truth.) I think if that word can be used very clearly and in this case accurately, I think that's journalism. And I think in fact to do the opposite would not be journalism. It would somehow be using language as a guard instead of using language to do what it's supposed to do, which is to tell the truth.

I'm very careful. Lie has not appeared a lot. Lie is a big deal word it has powerful implications, and I will continue to be careful using it. On the other hand, if somebody says something that is known not to be factual, to actually say, "some people say it's factual and some people say it's not factual," is a bad journalistic construct that was created, you know, I don't know how long ago but is actually a relatively new one and has not existed for the life of journalism and probably should go away.

GROSS: When did you become aware of the fake news that's all over the internet now and the impact that it's having?

BAQUET: You know, not early enough, not early enough, to be honest... I guess I thought at the time that it was just sort of part of the traffic of the internet and that - and we could ignore it and that people were ignoring it...

I wish I had paid more attention to it earlier than I did. ... I just thought some of it was so outlandish. I mean, even the - I mean, the most outlandish one that's come into the news in recent days that the Clintons ran a child porn ring out of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C. I guess I thought nobody would believe that. I thought that was so outlandish a claim.

GROSS: Yes, until a man walked in with an assault weapon and started shooting.

Deborah Lipstadt, author of

"Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,"

Behind the lies of Holocaust denial

TED talk Posted May 2017

...Many of us have been taught to think there are facts and there are opinions — after studying deniers, I think differently. There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies. And what deniers want to do is take their lies, dress them up as opinions — maybe edgy opinions, maybe sort of out-of-the-box opinions — but then if they're opinions, they should be part of the conversation. And then they encroach on the facts.

...

So why is my story more than just the story of a quirky, long, six-year, difficult lawsuit, an American professor being dragged into a courtroom by a man that the court declared in its judgment was a neo-Nazi polemicist? What message does it have? I think in the context of the question of truth, it has a very significant message. Because today, as we well know, truth and facts are under assault. Social media, for all the gifts it has given us, has also allowed the difference between facts — established facts — and lies to be flattened.

...

Truth is not relative. Many of us have grown up in the world of the academy and enlightened liberal thought, where we're taught everything is open to debate. But that's not the case. There are certain things that are true. There are indisputable facts — objective truths. ... The Earth is not flat. The climate is changing. Elvis is not alive...

...

And most importantly, truth and fact are under assault. The job ahead of us, the task ahead of us, the challenge ahead of us is great. The time to fight is short. We must act now. Later will be too late.

Cambridge Forum on The Health of Democracy—The Role of the Media

Discussion with award winning journalist Alex S. Jones (not the right wing conspiracy theorist)

I believe in objective journalism... What I'm talking about when I say "objective" is a kind of practical Truth, and a scientific Truth in this respect: That you may have an opinion or a view going in or you may not, but when you do your journalism, you base it on evidence that you can find, that you have the most confidence in. It’s a practical truth. One that can change as the evidence changes. In a journalistic sense we’re not looking for a perfect Truth or an abstract Truth. We’re looking for an honest, honorable, practical truth about any given situation, which is the best truth that a journalist working in good faith can find without skewing the results and trying to be straight with the audience that he or she is trying to serve. It’s an imperfect Truth, and one that changes, but is the one that I find that journalists can maintain if they do their profession honorably.

TED Talk by Pamela Meyer: How to Spot a Liar

Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.