Dear Editor,
There is a yawning deficit for truth in today’s world.
It is a default that has been given the approval of people like sales representatives, traders, telemarketers, politicians, clergymen, and a groundswell of commercial players who see the duping of a client and customers as the roadway towards true success.
Truth has thus become so antiquated and dysfunctional that the word ‘post-truth’ has emerged in recent times and is popularised to describe our current situation. Maybe for many this apparent fuzziness and undefined nature of truth is what accounts for their impatience with the expression ‘the truth’. No doubt, that was the similar impatience that prompted Governor Pontius Pilate’s dismissive response to Jesus: “What is truth?” And so he did not wait for an answer. Thus, for many, an unregulated freedom to live and believe in your own standard of right and wrong dominates.
But it is this scarcity and poverty of truth on which miseries and suffering feed when politicians make promises that they will never fulfil, when clergymen promise church members an entrance into an heavenly reward that they cannot guarantee for themselves, or when a trusting consumer is given a six for a nine by business practitioners who view consumers just as stairways to higher ground.
Truth evidently involves facts, but it also involves moral culpability since to deceive a man requires the purposeful avoidance or distortion of real facts. The domino effects are currently what obtains in matrimonial homes and relationships that fall through a lack of trust.
Therefore, for us to take comfort in the posture that there is no such thing as truth or that it is too nebulous to worry about is still to suffer and live within our own truth that there is no such thing as truth, which is a contradiction.
Yet, as Jesus says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Such freedom is possible it seems when truth becomes the searching light and torch and not the hazy comfort zone of stoic indifference.

Homer Sylvester
New York
h2sylvester@gmail.com

Is the truth becoming obsolete?