One word of truth can bring down a whole tyranny.

As a researcher, scientist, academic, truth-seeker—whatever you want to call it—I ask myself pretty much everyday: ‘what’s the point of telling the truth?’.

That’s a serious question you may want to ask yourself; or more specifically if we want to get to the crux of the matter, “why not lie?”. You can craft your words so that you can avoid taking responsibility for things you probably should, or to get some sort of advantage that you don’t really deserve—which happens all the time, by the way, and for good reason. There’s certainly appeal to it. So, you might wonder ‘if I can get what I want, when I want it, why not do that?’. I think part of the answer is, you aren’t necessarily the best judge what it is you need.

I like this idea that Solzhenitsyn presented, to paraphrase, one word of truth can bring down a whole tyranny. I think that’s true, and I also think it’s the case that the tyranny you subject yourself to, when you lie, is the tyranny of your own narrow, self-serving impulses. It’s the ‘tyranny of want’ that Plato talks about; you become a slave to your whims.

So back to question of ‘why tell the truth’, or taking it a step forward in my case, ‘why do all this blogging publicly?’. Quite simply, if you think it might be good to understand the world and the sort of truth that put its all together, perhaps you’re better off not doing it alone. You can imagine how productive the academic entreprise can be, if it’s not corrupt that is. A single true discovery made public can let the entire world continue—it’s the reason you don’t pull out a chemical tester every time you drink water; it’s the reason that hunter gatherers realized they’d find more success while sharing.

You can try and force the world into your own self-serving delusion, or you can see what happens when you help the productive flow of the universe take its course, and I think that’s what happens when you don’t lie, and you say what you believe to be true when you’re called to say it. Perhaps you’re more productive alone, but perhaps not. You alone, versus you and others together. In the long-run, I’d vote for the latter. If you don’t think so, perhaps we need to reconsider your definition of ‘together’, and perhaps also your time-frame.

I guess we’ll try to take apart some ideas, and figure out which are wrong, maybe miscalculated, or perhaps rationalizations of my own immature, hedonistic, arrogance—and we’ll do it here. So, who knows how productive that might be…