Living Not By Lies, Dying to Know Truth

Spending holidays with family is good way to know what ground you stand on. Sometimes it feels a tad shaky, but when you hear something that doesn't sit well with Reality you can find yourself standing up straight pretty quickly. I suppose that's what gets us closer to Truth, as it only happens some of us when we get a whiff of lies. Apparently, that's how it happened to Chesterton when he met someone with nihilistic tendencies he coined as the Diabolist. If we met this guy today, he'd probably be too commonplace to notice, and yet Chesterton was shocked enough by him that it propelled him to know its opposite—the Good and the True.

Chesterton was also astute to fact that the Good and True needed to be recognized through the veneer of cultural ideas of moral superiority: “We are altering, not the evils, but the standard of good which is the only standard by which any evil can be detected and defined.” Today's woke progressives adhere to the idea the good is redeemed by acknowledging privilege and demanding normalization and redemption to the marginalized. The evil is baked in the half-truths to the notion that justice can only be served to those victimized in group identities over the individual and universal. Therefore the system must be in control to serve justice—since nothing else can be: not I, not God. 

How does this differ from Chesterton's standard of Truth: which is always consistent, changeless, distinctive, whole, and of course, good!? Well for one thing, his version of Truth is so much more freeing! Yes, we know the Truth will set us free; however, the inverse is almost more important, in that in order to find Truth, we must be free to begin with. Sadly, the soft totalitarianism of cancel culture does not permit this to be the case. Since the system is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and fill in your favorite marginalized group phobia here, you are not allowed speak out of line with the tolerant (ironically intolerant) woke that knows best. (I suppose if your foundational pillars are fragile, then best to rule out disagreeing voices that may blow them over.)

Chesterton distilled some other essentials about Truth: that it is fun to put those ideas to the test and “that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy” (when does this ever happen with the left?). 

As such, it would seem to me the Truth should be on the short list of things worth preserving in this world. So that takes us to Rod Dreher, whose book Live Not By Lies takes on this very topic. Once we know Truth, we need to protect it, or conserve it (hence, the political movement known as conservatism). But it appears this is the least of our worries since we now don't understand ourselves “to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who travelled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness as the ultimate goal.” Hence, our values have become more therapeutically driven, and therefore very few are prepared to suffer for what matters.

Dreher notes, “We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and political liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.” This is the nature of soft totalitarianism—it does not terrorize us into surrendering our wills to the state like its harder form does—instead it lures us in with the therapeutic promises that will permit one a shallow happiness.

But real happiness requires more. We must love (and want to redeem) our neighbor, but as they are in the likeness of God. Unlike the woke social justice of today that divides LGBTQ+, BIPOC, women, and white European males, “Christian social justice sought to create conditions of unity that enabled all people—rich and poor alike—to live in solidarity and mutual charity as pilgrims on the road to unity with Christ.” 

The answer to this problem is a spiritual one: it starts with acknowledging the sin in each of us, the gift of suffering, and the gratitude for existence. Once we know this, we can die for it.