THE HALF TRUTH CONTAMINATION.

Do you rework the truth before saying it? Do you hesitate to tell a friend the truth that will hurt him/her but eventually make her a better person? Do you consider massaging the ego of your friends more important than tearing off their blindfolds? Do you feel like hushing the voice of truth when it is tearing you apart? Do you see half truths as forts of solace in perilous times? Certainly not!

Truth inclined minds are rare to find in this age of moral freefall. It appears everyone is becoming a real sucker for half truths. Our generation is not quite acquainted with the warmth of truth told by forthright friends. People who refrain from saying the bitter truth tend to be well-liked. But their names are hardly ever found on the honour list. “Lie to me” has become the unspoken rule of friendship. Tell people they are perfect even when everything about them spells DEFECT, and see how they will work you to the centre of their universe.

You are likely to be a loner if you cannot placate people with abridged versions of truth. But do you give a hoot, knowing that one way to squander life is to trifle with truth? See a refusal to hear the truth as a refusal to accept love. Walk away from anyone who is not thick skinned enough to gradually handle hurtful truths. The truth that heals often hurts at first.

Take a good look at our political terrain. Doesn’t it suggest that only twisted souls with hoggish tongues play in the big leagues? Time was once when only bottom feeders peddled half truths. But today, even top notch achievers are stockists of cants. Life has a way of giving booby prizes to the dishonest. This explains why the airheaded liar appears to be always first, but he/she is first from the rear. Lies may assist a person to quickly get to the top, but they can’t keep you there forever. Don’t forget, those who can’t avoid careless banter and “white lies” are digging their graves with their tongues.

Turn your focus to the pulpit for a while. Don’t you think brave say-it-as-it-is preacher are now an endangered species? Before the advent of political correctness it was polite to say the truth, even if it would hurt the hearer. Today, many people take umbrage if they are told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It seems we expect the tongue of a vendor of refined humbugs to be different from the hollow fang of a viper. It seems we think we can wallow in half truths and build lasting enterprises of honour.

It’s now fad to treat truth like a flyblown notion concocted by crackbrained control freak. The idea of universal truth is increasingly becoming contestable. People live as if absolute truth has gone the way of the dinosaur. “this is my truth” is now reconstructing the architecture of our shared moral space. It is pushing the boundaries of moral and ethical grayness to grounds that were hitherto sacrosanct. Now, everything seems permissible.

Due to the growing dislike for collective wisdom, established percepts and inherited ethics, many have embraced errors as truth. They deny the existence of a shared moral compass and affirm, if it feels good, it is good. Pleasure has become a determinate of morality. Popularity is now preferred to probity. Material fortune ranks above intellectual and spiritual enlightenment.

Perhaps someday, we may look back and weep, because we inadvertently dramatized the tragedy of living true to a lie.

Look at those who crawl into the caves of half truths. Observe those who take refuge on the plateau of soothing lies as a way to avoid the unpleasant realities of life. Aren’t they applauded? It is important to remind ourselves that evasive cowardice is salutary only in the camp of moral dropouts. Techniques for selective exposure to truth are now stock-in-trade of pop icons. This is not a feather in their caps of honour. It merely makes them fly-by-night celebrities.

Scan your environment. Dig deep into history. One thing will become very clear: Moral evils become norms in any culture that is hostile to truth and agreeable to half-truths. Even religious doctrine will be perverted. Hush money will sway the dispositions and messages of gluttonous religious leaders. This may have fuelled the pop gospel of opulence that affirms prosperity is a proof of faith and total wellness.

Isn’t it shocking that many cultured preachers do not boldly and lovingly denounce prevalent falsehoods anymore? Why? Some of these truth propagators are often given the treatment of someone trying to teach her grandmother how to suck an egg. Some are despised because of their personal moral failings. Others simply because of stereotypical tags that portray them as foolhardy promoters of conventional morals and ethics, which moral liberals feel should be treated as leftovers in the museum of theological axioms.

Hence, there is a crop of hypersensitive religious thought-leaders, whose awareness of the prevailing climate of thought and their deep seated hanker for quick success have made them adopt the ambiguous adage “tell the people what they want to hear” as their working beliefs. Also, they flaunt it as the key to career stardom and affluence. It appears they have forgotten that whatever is built on half-truth is short-lived.

Who will remind them that everything good dissipates like the morning dew when set on the foundation of whitewashed fallacy? You and I need to tell them that there is no difference between padded truth and outright lies. The only difference is that the former outlives the latter. Half-truths are more resilient.

Half-truth is everything truth is not. In fact, half-truth can be defined in opposition to truth. Half truth misleads, enslaves, darkens the understanding, impoverishes its receptors and makes them perpetually dependent on psychological props in life’s battlefield. On the other hand, truth gives direction, liberates the mind, enlightens our world, enriches human experience with grace and strengthens the hand to achieve the unfeasible.

Take a look at the playfield of life. Focus on serial victims of abortion trauma syndrome. Spot their common trait. Aren’t they under the corruption influence of whitewashed falsehood? Peddlers of cants are the most heinous abortionist of destiny. Tweaked truths are more deadly than outright falsehood.

For the sake of these ones, would you allow anyone or anything to muffle your voice? Would you stand still and allow half-truths to enslave a generation and mortgage posterity? Certainly you wouldn’t.

At the risk of sounding prescriptive. Let me state the following. To start a quiet revolution, make your allegiance to truth known to everyone within your sphere of influence. Let it be known you take sides with no but with the truth and friends of truth. Lovingly educate those who err ignorantly. Don’t keep company with hypocrites who willingly, gleefully and habitually distort truth to advance some self centered interests. Don’t condone those whose instincts are honed to refine deceit and present it as truth.

We can put an end to the half-truth contamination if we create a culture of zero tolerance for deception. This means war! Those who flourish from propagating half-truths will fight you. It will amount to a failure of the nerves if you keep silent to avoid fight.

Moral heroes stake all for truths.

Felix U. Rogers