Every morning the world arrives in fragments. A flicker of headlines, alerts, and outrage masquerading as revelation. Each story claims to be the truth, but truth seems to have become a drowned thing, sinking quietly beneath the noise of the living.
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Some people I trusted lied to me recently, knowing full well that I would find out within a matter of days. I, of course, found out earlier because of the relationships I have built over time, and so it came back to me almost immediately that I had been lied to.
Clearly, I’m not going to trust those two people as much again, but I suspected them not telling me the truth because of their behavior. The confirmation only proves what I suspected: They are poor liars.
It wasn’t about something important enough to make a difference, but two things bothered me about it: First, they knew I would end up finding out and were dishonest anyway, and second, that they would risk a relationship built over years to be dishonest to me.
There are reasons people lie even over inconsequential things, and research has shown the most common reasons people lie, but it’s easy to go into the weeds with that and lose one’s bearings. It’s best to stick to the simpler aspects until more complex aspects present themselves – Occam’s razor.
Clearly I had valued the relationship more than they did, which is often the issue when it comes to forms of betrayal. If you value a relationship highly and the other values the relationship less than you expect, ‘betrayal’ is often what we feel. This is an important thing to know since I may have positional authority over them soon, particularly since as I have come to understand that they may have been instructed to lie by someone who will be an equal in the near future, which also tells me that the equal doesn’t see themselves as equal. They see themselves as above, and that does not bode well for any sort of relationship. Or maybe it’s just insecurity.
I tend to live my life openly and transparently. I value authenticity of people and provide the same. If I can’t say something because it might betray a trust, I say that or avoid being put in a position where I would have to say that. The people I try to surround myself with respect those sorts of boundaries, because if I invoke it for someone else, I will invoke it for them. Because of this, I have a small circle of people I call friends where the level of trust is high, and this could be because of my own attachment disorder as well; I understand I have one and have pushed back against it for some time. It’s hard to tell where it begins or ends. How one feels about a person isn’t always about the person.
This is pretty important to be able to work through. It seems like a life skill that we should pay more attention to, particularly in an age where people are having their text generated by algorithms trained on the output of what could be the most dishonest and delusional species on the planet.
In that regard and a few others, I am thankful for the dishonesty – it tells me who is not trustworthy over little things, and when they are not trustworthy over the little things, the big things are always suspect – for they are made of the little things.
I like looking into the background of quotes that I come across – I source just about everything I write, with the exception of what is imagination or opinion. In doing so this morning, I was thinking of using a quote by Musashi, and I thought to use:
“Truth is not what you want it to be, it is what it is, and must bend to it’s power or live a lie”.
I went to my copy of the Book of Five Rings, which is pretty much where all legitimate Musashi quotes come from. That quote wasn’t there. I check Project Gutenberg for the book, since they would likely have an older copy, but strangely they do not have that book – which should be in the public domain by now! – at all1.
No one who uses the quote cites a source. No one.
It seems that this was something added by D.E. Tarver in his rendition of Musashi’s “Book of Five Rings”- but apparently it’s not in the original Japanese. No texts by Musashi seem to have this quotation.
This does not mean it doesn’t express some of his teachings, such as in the Dokkodo – accepting things the way they are, though extrapolating to living a lie does not seem to be something he actually did.
The fact that this quote circulates so much is pretty much the exact opposite of what his teaching would be.
これは翻訳者によって追加されたようです。(Kore wa hon’yaku-sha ni yotte tsuika sa reta yōdesu.)
In a time where immediacy is demanded when it comes to social media, we undervalue waiting. Twice this week there were stories that demanded the wait, but we wouldn’t wait. Time lost that we can’t get back.
There was a period in the world where news was much more slow. It could take months, sometimes years, to get news and when that news was had, it was aged and even out of date. That doesn’t do well either.
News stories need time. I am not a journalist, at times in my life I was maybe a citizen-journalist of sorts, but I never thought of myself as a journalist and I don’t aspire to be one. This is not to say I don’t respect those who have chosen this path – I do, when they can balance waiting with immediacy. When a story isn’t ready, it is simply not ready, and when it’s late, it’s too damned late.
But Media is society’s mirror. Most people don’t realize it.
An example? The Titan. Early on, the US Navy had heard a possible implosion on their network (which isn’t really that secret) at around the time the Titan went missing, in the same area, and reported it to the relevant Coast Guard people involved in the search. This was not in the news.
Meanwhile, for some time, the media gets to inundate us with stuff we want to know about – which in a peculiar way seems to have not been as much about the fact that the submersible should have surfaced within 24 hours. That too was left out for a while. The information, like the Navy report, was there – but people get to look really busy, and the politics of it plays well.
We want to believe that they would look for us, don’t we? That even if there was the faintest chance, that someone would come looking. It’s a Hollywood story. As it ends up, it’s a Hollywood Story with half of a James Cameron ending. Everybody died, there wasn’t a woman who would become an old lady to tell a story to someone about the guy who couldn’t get next to her.
Immediacy with respect to the Titan would not have worked for the media or politicians, because most people wouldn’t watch a news story about recovering wreckage to study. It’s sad, and unfortunately it’s true. It is, however, what’s really happening at this point: figuring out why it failed. The side benefit is that someone will get blamed and everyone will get to feel good about wagging their fingers, while the majority of humans inhabiting the planet are on to the next story.
It’s like the whole Russian issue yesterday. A 24 hour uprising lead by the head of the Wagner group. I normally keep up to date with Ukraine, but I had some noise pollution that kept me up later than usual so by the time I found out it was well underway – but it wasn’t adding up. I didn’t write about it. I polled my source stuff. It still wasn’t adding up, and there was no clear direction. I told people to listen to the Benny Hill track while watching any news they got.
It’s really a good soundtrack when you’re getting ‘live updates’ on anything because what’s happening is that in the want to be first, stuff gets reported that may not be worth reporting. Much of it was.
Even the brokering of a truce by Belarus’s Lukashenko seems weird to me. Neither party involved really has listened much to Lukashenko, so I don’t see why they would now – now there is a story, something worth researching and investigating, but that’s where the story really is. Because without that solid piece to lock it all in, it’s all a bunch of floating pieces clinging together for dear life.
Sometimes it’s best to wait. Sometimes not.
When I write something, particularly on KnowProSE.com, it has to feel worth writing about. The Titan I wrote about a bit because we didn’t seem to be getting the whole story – and we weren’t. We probably still aren’t. That US Navy network is really good at what it does, as old as it is, and anyone who has read, “The Hunt for Red October” knows how awesome Jonesy the Sonar Tech was on a submarine. The movie lacked that depth.
That search was a ‘Hail Mary’ for the media. Everyone in the know knew with a high degree of certainty that if that submersible didn’t surface within 24 hours, that Navy sonar network was probably 99.9% correct. That was the story. It still is the story, now it’s about finding scapegoats while advancing knowledge on why that deep sea submersible (It had one job!) was not a deep sea submersible.
And the Russian ‘coup’? It was never a coup. It was a threatened coup. A well televised threatened coup. A too televised threatened coup. It bordered on theatrical, if it didn’t jump solidly on that part of the line occasionally. As someone who has gotten well educated on that part of the world through friends made since, I definitely want Ukraine’s victory. My spirits lifted a bit for Ukraine, that this would make the reclamation of territory extremely easy, but to me it also did not smell right.
And so, I didn’t write about it and was rewarded with not looking like a complete idiot after the fact. It still doesn’t make sense, that whole 24 hour thing.
The point is that when we write, we have to recognize the responsibility we have. Journalists are supposed to understand this. Social media stars generally don’t with a few exceptions.
Writing good stuff is a responsibility. Writing good true stuff on such occasions is also a responsibility, and making sure the stuff is true is not an easy task. Rewriting someone else’s facts is borderline, but sometimes good if you can make it more readable or otherwise add value.
But simply writing what everyone else is writing about during a real world event when you don’t do those things is just littering, really. We shouldn’t litter.
Sometimes we should wait. And sometimes we shouldn’t.
Let that feeling
Born in shadow
Let it make you
Make you strongLet the demons
You got to carry
Carry you on and on and on‘Cause all these things, all these things are yours
All these things, all these things are yours
Oh oh, all these things, all these things are yours– “All These Things Are Yours”, Dopamine,
Third Eye Blind (Jenkins Stephan Douglas), June 16 2015
That anger, that sadness – all those things you feel and do not understand are a part of you, for better and worse. They are tools in a world that defies the definitions others have given the world long before you were born.
There are truths. Then there is society. Sometimes they’re incompatible – not all the time, and some of the rules are pretty good – not killing, not stealing, (violence is generally a bad idea) etc – and even when others do it legally, ‘within the rules’, you can see the cracks in society – the lies.
And all you can do is apply truth vigorously, live it… and the first part of that is being true to yourself, to who you are.
To allow yourself to be whole. To recognize your flaws, your faults, and fix them as best you can as you own them even when the world might suggest otherwise.