Lies, Damned Lies and the Right Side of History

When I was a member of that cultish Trotskyist organization, I learned to differentiate between two distinct, sharply opposed forms of truth. I thought of these, not quite consciously, as the truth-truth and the higher truth. My party embodied all that was righteous and true, which meant it was inconceivable for us to lie. If a political enemy caught us saying something flatly untrue, and the evidence was undeniable, we had two options. One was to acknowledge that we’d lied, but not only was this intellectually untenable — because we were righteous and true — but it might lead us to wonder how much else the party had lied, or at least been wrong, about. We might then discover that much of our worldview was based on untruths, and a tedious, nagging feeling would take hold: that if we wanted to figure out what was true, we would have to look for it outside our cozy circle — abandoning comradeship, certainty, a sense of meaning. Which would be existential suicide.

So we turned to the second option, a mental maneuver deploying the agility of an Olympic gymnast. Our cause was good; therefore, whatever we proclaimed to be true was good. Our truth was the higher truth, the version of truth that served the interests of the oppressed. Our enemy might be expressing the literal truth, or the truth-truth, but they were bad people working for evil. This sleight-of-hand allowed us to double down on our lies, while believing, with spine-tingling conviction, in our own irreproachable integrity.

Now 10 years out of that cult, I find that my comrades’ and my curiously elastic attitude toward truth is everywhere. One question alone matters: Does this truth strengthen my tribe, or is it bad for it? If bad, it must be suppressed, denied, explained away. The higher truth is the narrative that serves the cause, the quest of the righteous and true.

This not-quite-conscious mental ploy exists across the political spectrum, but I will limit myself here to the left. I do this for two reasons. One is that I’m a product of the left. However estranged I am from it these days, what you might call its ideals still run in my veins. My feelings of disappointment, injury and betrayal by my former tribe are personal, making its actions sting more. While the right also suppresses inconvenient facts, or more, tells whoppers — and must be held accountable for this — I’m not provoked by the same sense of hypocrisy. Both sides may lie, but only one does so in the name of righteousness.

The second reason is that it’s the left dominating our leading institutions: the media consumed by educated, right-thinking people, legacy NGOs, public schools and universities, medical and professional associations, Hollywood. Their glitterati dictate what attitude to take on every matter of public interest, and declare critics not only wrong, but dangerous to humanity. The tribe, including as it does figures like Arundhati Roy and Javier Bardem, is endlessly seductive. And it relies on the same epistemological device I turned to in my far-left Marxist party.

Hamas carried out Nazi-like atrocities on Oct. 7, and terrorizes its own people, but loyal leftists will, at most, only briefly and tetchily acknowledge this. They know it is the truth-truth, but far more importantly, it is devastating for their side. It’s the Zionists who dwell on it, and Zionism is the enemy of humanity. They possess the higher truth, the truth that serves the victimized and benighted, and according to which Hamas are freedom-fighters. That these heroes of the oppressed hurl gay Palestinians off rooftops (never mind what they do to Jews)arouses a dim suspicion that they themselves have taken a wrong turn somewhere. This knowledge gnaws at their brains like a flesh-eating worm. So they pile on lies against Israel — ever more crazy, lurid lies, hoping to kill that worm — in the name of truth and justice.

Hamas carried out Nazi-like atrocities on October 7, and terrorizes its own people, but loyal leftists will, at most, only briefly and tetchily acknowledge this. They know it is the truth-truth, but far more importantly, it is devastating for their side.

“Trans women are women” may not be the truth-truth, but decent people must subscribe to it anyway, as the higher truth. In Australia recently, an appeals court upheld a ruling in favor of a trans woman called Roxanne Tickle, who sued a social media app created for girls and women. No one with eyes actually thinks that “Tickle” is a woman, but only a right-wing transphobe would say so. So Australian girls and women lose a place to gather away from predatory men, and their peers around the world continue losing opportunities, privacy and safety in sports, prisons and other spaces.

The person who murdered one and injured dozens of others at a Berlin Pride parade last month was apparently an Islamist, but only an Islamophobe would comment on this truth-truth, or recognize it at all. “I had hoped that the attacker was not a foreigner, but a white Christian person,” one LGBTQ+ activist commented at a vigil the next day. The higher truth is that Muslims, as victims of imperialism and racism, are allies of gay, queer and trans people. Anyone who suggests otherwise — or anyone concerned about the uptick in terrorism, antisemitism and erosion of women’s rights and safety — is a bigot.

And now we have the liberal rallying around Anthony Fauci. He was closely linked to the Wuhan lab where leading scientists immediately suspected COVID originated, but anyone who so much as breathed the words “lab leak” was silenced as a conspiracy theorist. Fauci (with then-President Trump) oversaw our country’s dystopian pandemic response: the closures of elementary schools, businesses, churches, sporting events; the mandatory masking; the weddings broken up by police; the arrests for gathering, even outside. People committed suicide. Careers were destroyed. Old women died alone in nursing home rooms, their families forced to say goodbye over iPads. Meanwhile Fauci was writing, in his now-revealed diary, that he knew the virus wasn’t that lethal. These facts, these truth-truths, deserve to be recognized. But according to Fauci’s defenders, only obsessed, vindictive, rightwing crackpots invoke them.

Somewhere along the line, as a society we apparently stopped believing that such a thing as truth exists, or that it matters. All we have are narratives — competing stories to choose from based on taste and mood, like titles on a bookshelf. Some of these books contain an announcement on the cover: New York Times bestseller, Oprah Book Club, Booker Prize finalist. These tell us in advance the stories must be good.

Somewhere along the line, as a society we apparently stopped believing that such a thing as truth exists, or that it matters. All we have are narratives—competing stories to choose from based on taste and mood, like titles on a bookshelf.

We all want a good story. A good story removes us from our humdrum, maybe too-comfortable, boring lives. It stirs our imaginations, leading us to empathize with other people in their distant struggles. It gives us heroes and villains; delicious prose; joy, grief, romance, humor and heartbreak; and typically the comfort of seeing virtue triumph at the end. Harping on the supremacy of truth over narrative is something like telling people to put down a juicy novel and plow through an encyclopedia.

I find that I cannot eloquently explain why truth matters; I only know that it does. There is no such thing as “higher truth” — a version of truth that it is right to spin in the name of some greater good. Only one truth exists. No person may ever hope to know it in full, but to the extent it can be known, honorable people must strive for one thing: to live by it.

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”