Archive for March, 2008
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
That Answer Is
So I’ve been watching this show on that bastion of morality that is the FOX network and I’ve found myself a bit sickened that I’ve become semi-addicted to it. The addiction is not a healthy one, because watching this particular show evokes the same set of emotions as driving by a horrific car accident where you know someone got badly hurt, and your curious self wants to see the blood and body parts.. You can’t help but watch.
I have a very special relationship with what I know as Truth and Honesty, and this particular television program has managed to weaponize in a way I never fathomed possible. I knew previous that truth could be used to destroy, a full on destructive force, objective and unmitigated, but I hadn’t the foggiest that it could be refined into an almost thermonuclear state. If you haven’t seen the show, I can summarize it really quick for you. A person attempts to answer 21 questions truthfully in front of family and friends, with the results of a polygraph test used to compare and contrast answers given, with a firm “True” or “‘False” to varying levels of personal questions.
In “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” fashion, Honesty is prostituted for thrill and laid bare, forced to dance lasciviously before an audience of cheers and cajoling. The Moment of Truth is a meticulous gorey dissection of the physics of Truth itself, generally at the cost of the humanity and relationships of the contestant. Each time I watch the show, I am lessened, and I question my own sincerity. Is Truth objective or subjective? Is it a matter of perspective or is it an absolute? The morale of the show would seem to be that some truth is not meant to be shared, and that there are dark corners of every person’s life which are never intended to be seen in the light.
But can this be? I don’t have anything to hide (famous last words), but I ask myself if I could survive as a person if I were in fact the embodiment of the “open book”, with no areas of my psyche untouched by expression with intent. Could anyone? There is a given level of operational deception that is incurred as a cost for existing in reality, and the real Virtue of Honesty is the practice of minimizing that expense. Without that base deception and set of assumptions, we would be psychologically naked, a series of undefended egos and ids walking about, subject to the slings and arrows of even the slightest emotional variance. But I digress. The Moment of Truth doesn’t ask any of these questions. As a circus of emotional violence, it symbolically exists as the solemn right hand raised in sacred oath to tell the Truth, fatally severed at the wrist.