Post #147: Live Not by Lies

4 Oct. 2024

“Our way must be: never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let each man choose: will he remain a witting servant of the lies, or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live Not by Lies” (1974)

     The call to stop living by lies is scarcely of a kind that would meet with much opposition, at least in principle. What ethical system has ever permitted the telling of lies, or even condoned them tacitly? The commandments, precepts, and exhortations of mankind have uniformly demanded the opposite from us: a much more rigorous commitment to truth. It would take no insisting upon—as in making truthfulness one of the ten excellences (paramis) of a Buddhist life—if it came easily to us.

     When Solzhenitsyn issued his spirited, admirably courageous outcry (though also a little preachy and melodramatic, let it be said), he was dealing with a society so moribund, and so riddled with falsehoods from top to bottom, that he described it in terms of “the flaking scales of its ideology, its crumbling hopes, its decomposing garb.” Given the rallying cry that he meant to sound, it made sense to denounce the Soviet Union (and its various imitates elsewhere) as a system of shameless lies that needed to be shaken off, not merely untruths to be corrected. Yet even then the situation was a little more complicated, since it was not lying in the strict sense that was at issue. Why not? Because no one (or at least almost no one) was deceived, and that is a necessary condition of lying proper.

     The Soviet state propaganda, at this late stage of its wretched existence anyway, did not fool many. Abroad there were some dupes, granted, but Soviet citizens understood very well what a smokescreen they were being shown for a defunct regime and its privileged strata (there the word applies properly for once!). A few members of the apparatchik class may have believed some of the patent falsehoods they were proclaiming, because the alternative, to admit that they were not only materially but morally bankrupt, was unthinkable. For the mass of the population, however, the question was not so much how to be undeceived and find a more truthful orientation, but rather what price anyone was willing to pay for saying out loud what almost everyone knew, though almost no one was willing to admit it publicly for fear of the repercussions.

     I remember having a conversation, a few months back, with a very dear friend who grew up in Poland, and for whom the Solzhenitsynian stance is second nature, as it were. He was telling me how much of what he has been seeing in Canada in recent years (we know each other from Toronto) reminded him of the bad old days, and that we are, once again, surrounded by shameless lies and illegitimacy on all sides. No matter how dismayed I too may be with how little ostensibly “liberal” governments have in common with how I would understand the term (hardly a new issue: #68), I could not help demurring. It made me uneasy to hear a duly elected prime misters, in a system with active courts and a free press, for all their faults, treated as if we were dealing with a tin-pot dictatorship.* Even leaving that aside, it seemed to me that the charge of rampant lying did not quite fit the troubles of the past decade, deplorable as they are, and not just in Canada either. What looked more salient to me was a different kind of temptation to untruth—less blatant, but also more insidious and intractable.

     A certain background noise of less than perfectly honest dealing, with others or with oneself, is probably intrinsic to human societies East of Eden, or to the human condition in general. The question we must all face in our different situations is how much of this to tolerate and go along with, as the cost of doing the ordinary business of mankind, and when to draw the line—where to locate the edge, as Solzhenitsyn put it, and what price to pay for refusing to go beyond it. A tough question even under relatively benign social conditions; who would not rather be spared? Usually we are lucky and it does not arise too pressingly, or with stakes that aren’t too forbiddingly high. Other times, and not only in dictatorships either, we can evade the question only at the cost of jeopardizing our souls, and all the drama of the Solzhenitsynian posture may be quite justified. In the end, one may even come to thank the Gulag, if one feels that it was doing the right thing that got one there (#109).

     We who are not made of either saintly or heroic stuff cannot hope to be perfectly truthful in this life. At least active participation in outright lies, however, we should be able to avoid. As Solzhenitsyn put it in his piece, “We are not called to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think: but let us at least refuse to say what we do not think.” Alas, there is much more to being truthful, starting with the ability to discern anything resembling the truth in the first place. In this we may well fail, even with the best intentions and a genuine effort, and no one could blame us unduly for our frailty.

     Even Socrates, by his own profession, remained doubtful whether his modest wisdom, such as it was, could reach beyond the recognition of how little he really knew and understood. What we can, and should do, however, is at least to keep trying—to make the orientation towards truth, so far as we can discover it, a guiding principle in life. And there we may notice, with chagrin, that not only others, but we ourselves, too, are not always prepared to make the requisite commitments. Not, for one, when we put comfort and the avoidance of confusion—cognitive dissonance, as it has been called—before the integrity of our inquiries, as we are all bound to do sometimes; and not when we go along with systems of thought that deny the possibility of truth altogether, or with bullshitters who disdain (in their actions if not their words) the very project of putting truth first.

     At a glance and in terms of how we usually speak, it may seem obvious that lying presents the greatest threat to truthfulness: for are not lies the very opposite, the negation even, of the truth? Yes and no. The liar certainly hopes to get away with deliberate untruth, thereby overcoming and defeating what is true, in a sense; but in so doing he must still show the truth some indirect, perhaps inadvertent, respect, namely by scrupulously avoiding all appearance of untruthfulness, even as he engages in it. (Witness Machiavelli’s infamous chapter 18 of The Prince.) Thus the liar (nothing new under the sun) may turn out to be not quite as inveterate an enemy of the truth as he may appear: though he plays on the other side, so to speak, he is at least in the same game as the truth-teller. Not so the bullshitter, as Harry Frankfurt pointed out in his classic essay on the theme:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he is saying. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly; he just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purposes.**

The greatest and most insidious threat to truthfulness may come, then, not from the sly violations of the liar (though highly injurious and baneful by the trust they betray***), but from those who would erode the very foundations of truth, either by their carelessness and lack of concern (“This indifference to how things really are is the essence of bullshit,” Frankfurt concludes, p. 90) or else from behind the blinders of their ideological zeal.†

     To see clearly when we are ourselves succumbing to lies (or less than the truth anyway) we would need to possess that self-knowledge which we sometimes take for granted, as if we understood ourselves and the reasons for our thoughts and doings as a matter of course. If it were so, there would have been little need for the Greeks to enshrine their γνῶθι σεαυτόν in such a prominent place, at the very entrance to Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, right beside what they took to be the navel of the world. They knew what we moderns needed to be reminded of by the Viennese fathers of psychology—that we are more habitually dishonest and confused than properly truthful with ourselves, that is to say, habitually unwilling to face bitter truths even when we can see them clearly enough, which is more the exception than the rule. (Few things more bitter, to most human beings, than truly adverse self-judgment; it is no wonder that we avoid it so much, truth be damned.) Indeed so well do we know at least this much about ourselves that we speak quite naturally of “lying to ourselves,” even though it cannot technically be done: for as it is not lying when nobody is deceived, so we are not lying to ourselves when we choose to look away from what we nonetheless know, at some reluctant but deep level, to be inescapably true.

     It is along similar lines that one might find, perhaps, a small silver lining that makes the bullshitter appear in a somewhat less damning light. What if nobody is really fooled? Soviet propaganda, as I said, was partly a pretense, partly a bluff; what it certainly did not do was hold sway because so many were taken in by it. The propaganda was merely window dressing; the system operated not so much by deceiving its people effectively as by keeping them cowed by a totalitarian coercive apparatus that meted out drastic sanctions for stepping out of line. It was outward compliance that was at issue, not whether anyone really believed what they were told to pay their obeisance to, or else…

     More contemporary forms of high-profile bullshitting, in freer and more open societies, raise a related question: is anyone really fooled by the buffoonery, or does it amount to mere theatrics, transparent to everyone concerned and therefore more amusing than appalling, possibly even poignant in a parodic kind of way? Or, to take the question a step further, is the show even meant to be taken seriously in the first place, or is it an exercise in shadow boxing whose deeper messages and meanings are quite different from what is manifest? If so, is it an appropriate mode in which to address matters of grave and urgent public concern—or is the message perhaps that such matters are, after all, not so very serious after all, but just another public spectacle for the masses, even against the backdrop of a military establishment of two million and with the nuclear button in view? (“Bullshit!” you may think: “It sounds like you are hinting at someone I know and like, and I resent that!” Very well, we all tend to feel that way about members of our own team; but truth does not ask what we like, only whether someone or something is described accurately or not. Maybe the shoe fits, maybe not; but whether it pinches, or whether you are pleased with the look, is neither here nor there.)

     A bullshitter, we should recognize, may not be reliably deceptive enough to qualify as a full-on liar—and this, to complicate matter, even by design in some cases, as if winking at the audience when serving up his whoppers. Or, more complicated still, a bullshitter may come to believe in his own tall tales to such a degree that he cannot even be called dishonest in the ordinary sense, though not therefore any less deluded. Granting this much, however, our verdict need not be any less severe. Lying or not, if there is one thing that the normally contrary Platonic and Aristotelian temperaments can agree on—and not only they, but practically all classical and traditional schools of philosophy and ethics—it is that the deliberate erosion of seriousness in politics, in the priceless res publica, is perhaps the most irresponsible thing a citizen can be guilty of, as not only putting the common interest at grave practical risk, but also vitiating all manner of lines that are indispensable for holding collective reality together and making sense of our public affairs.

     Much depends, any credible philosophy will insist, on truth being kept apart from fiction, the serious from the silly and banal, our efforts at accurately describing reality (so far as we are capable) from the blatant distortions and gross misrepresentations of political adventurers or clowns. (Liars too may cross these lines occasionally, as I have discussed; but their challenge to the truth is still only partial, not systematic, and even in success their hypocrisy, until they are unmasked, amounts to the tribute that vice pays to virtue.) What is more, while lying is notoriously habit-forming as well, it probably does not unfit someone for telling the truth the way continual bullshitting will (Frankfurt, p. 98). Truthfulness is not a given; it is a virtue that needs to be cultivated, a muscle that needs to be strengthened; and nothing runs more counter to it than habitually refusing to pay attention to anything except what suits one’s purposes.

   “But it’s done in the right cause!” you may cry. Is it really? The bullshitter, if he really is that, doesn’t have causes; he adopts them as he goes along, for his convenience. Take a look at where the suspect stood in the past on issues he now defines himself by. You will discover a continuity of style, not substance, a characteristic mode of operation, not consistent ends and principles. Proclaiming one’s own greatness or that of one’s nation (betrayed by traitors: the oldest trick on the books, left or right, with some of the nastiest historical antecedents possible), or the virtues and wisdom of one’s admirers and followers (so long as they keep fawning on their hero) is not a program so much as an exercise in vainglory and flattery of the crowd—an illusionist’s smoke and mirrors on the political stage. It works (at a steep price) and even the performer may be taken in to the point where he begins to believe in his own magical powers. That doesn’t make them any more real. Even if it were otherwise and the cause were more substantial and commendable, the bullshitting mode would do great damage by undermining the structural soundness of what one is purporting to build. A Germanic extraction is not enough, alas, to make anyone solide (#144).

     That all said, the expert bullshitter who has made a long and successful career of it does not have to be the devious, malevolent manipulator that his detractors and enemies see in him; if he were, he would presumably not be trusted by his friends either.†† Unlike the expert liar, the bullshitter does not have to maintain a faultless façade to protect himself; he can get away with hiding in the open, so to speak. No one may know what he is really like, but it hardly matters, since the show is everything, and nothing else counts—for that is the crux of the bullshitter’s creed. The measure of all things is not what things are really like, but what one can get away with, either because others want to believe what one is telling them, or because they enjoy the show too much to bother themselves with whether it is true to the facts, or only entertaining, or reassuring, or whatever else the demands of the day may be. The lines get blurred beyond recognition; that’s just the point.

     That the world may be too much for us is a central contention in the work of psychologists like Daniel Kahneman or behavioral economists like Richard Thaler. So overwhelmingly complex are even the routine problems that we are presented with every day (to say nothing of the truly formidable ones) that we would get paralyzed by them if we tried to answer them by accurate calculation. What we do instead, what we must do even to complete so basic a task as picking up groceries without spending hours racking our brains before the various shelves (trying to find the optimal detergent for our purposes, in the optimal shape and size, at the optimal price, etc.) is to substitute shortcuts that yield good enough answers most of the time. A fine solution in many cases, as when it leads to buying the same kind of detergent for twenty years, not because it is strictly the best for one’s purposes (though it may be), but because it is good enough and not worth the effort of optimizing more. Unfortunately the dynamic is not always so benign, since these substitutions work by replacing the questions we are actually facing with much simpler ones that usually allow us to get by at the expense of always considerable, sometimes grievous distortions of what is really going on. And that is only speaking of our practical problems, to say nothing of those presented by our wider human, let alone our metaphysical condition.

     If finding your way through life pragmatically can be difficult enough, the challenges of getting things right may be such that perhaps we must accept the fundamental hopelessness of ever truly attaining to it. Such was the conclusion that Pyrrho reached, for example, and I am quite sympathetic, as was my friend Montaigne (see my article on “Pyrrho’s Path,” available through my Academia link). It is crucial for the Pyrrhonian way of life, however, that although the answers to life’s bigger questions must be expected to turn out inconclusive, we should never give up the search. Socrates too, in the journey of inquiry that so alienated him from the contemporaries he embarrassed with his public questioning, may not have made much definite progress. That he ever arrived at substantial wisdom, he strenuously denied (Apology 23ab). What the oracle probably meant when the priestess answered that no one was wiser, Socrates concluded, was simply that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, as if to say, “This man among you mortals is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.” Yet he never gave up on asking his questions, for the rest of his days, and thereby arrived at what human wisdom is surely accessible to us all: the realization how little we know, and the due caution and justified aversion to intellectual complacency that it should engender in us. Wisdom begins in perplexity; where it ends, who knows…

     Let us admit freely, then, that we often do not have the wherewithal—or sometimes even the incentive—to figure things out properly (some things really do not matter enough to be worth the effort of thinking them through too carefully). Other times, when we agree that it would be important to give the best answer we can, we twist and turn, and endlessly massage, not only what we believe, but even what we see and hear, until it fits our needs of the moment. No doubt we all, sometimes at least, get caught up in wishful thinking, or darker delusions, and this can get to the point where the fantasies become more real to us than anything else. There need not be any lying going on: all these confused, disturbed, or even deranged ideas may be so sincerely held that there may be nothing dishonest about them, hence no question of anyone being a liar or hypocrite. It is not always bad faith that misleads us, or the lack of goodness: often we are simply not clear-headed enough to do better, or perhaps not determined enough in our difficult relationship with truthfulness.

     More malign misrepresentations also exist, to be sure—not only fairy tales, but dark tales of horror, nightmares told for all the wrong reasons. But for the most part, the picture is not quite so bleak, and our subsiding sense of the real and the factual has another, more forgivable cause: it is simply self-serving and self-protecting (not ultimately, if one believes in the liberating power of truth,‡ but seemingly so), a kind of Jamesian pragmatism gone wrong. As James argued in his 1895 lecture at Harvard on whether life is worth living (#71), we have a right to believe what is in the line of our needs, particularly when it is a matter of giving or restoring to us a feeling that life is worth living. So far so good: I have myself warned how wary we should be of taking from anyone such life-sustaining beliefs, dubious as they may be, when it is not clear that one has anything better to put in their place (#95). Life comes first.

     Alas, from this concession to the practical demands of our condition, it is but a small step to something much more radical and pernicious: the supposed right to believe whatever one wishes and have it regarded as truth—your truth or my truth, as we have come to say, usually without inviting the derision it deserves. To speak of your and my angle on the truth would be quite acceptable and may sound almost the same. Not so: it is far from the same, since it leaves room for a truth much bigger than you or me, which our alleged personal truths do not. On this seemingly innocent but deeply misguided turn of mind, the most apt voice may be that of the Patrick Moynihan, who used to warn that while we are surely entitled to our own opinions and beliefs, we do not and cannot have a right to our own facts. Truth is not a perception or conviction but the real thing, how things are, not how we would like them to be (yatha-bhuta once more). Meanwhile the turn towards private “truths,” in part to avoid friction and contention, in part out of deeper confusions, threatens to make short shrift not only of our capacity for factfulness, but of our ability to sort out anything at all in anything resembling a binding manner.‡‡ That, perhaps, is just the point: to protect individual freedom from any and all interference. Well-intentioned, perhaps, but wrongheaded nevertheless: none of us can claim a right to be right, only to persist, if we so choose, in our erroneous and wayward thinking.

     It is here that the focus on lying (as against other forms of untruthfulness) becomes so problematic, since it shifts the emphasis from a responsibility for reducing our own reliance on false beliefs to a concern about the ill doings of others—the specks in their eyes that we would so much rather think about than the beams in our own. In the same lecture I just mentioned, William James observes that evil at large is none of my business until the accounts of my private evils has been fully cleared and settled up. One might say the same about the untruths of others (unless they involve us immediately and we admit to having been fooled): we have no business with them before we have dealt with how readily we each allow ourselves to be governed by emotional comfort and cognitive convenience, by avoiding dissonances, inconvenient facts, and the risk of disconcerting discoveries by simply not looking very closely, or even actively looking away. What does not suit me cannot be true, we instinctively believe, and what disturbs and offends me must be false. It is only human to think along such lines, but that is no reason to encourage anyone in it, unless we want our wishes to become the measure of the world in an infantile regression to the pleasure principle (#106) that looks to me a much more characteristic failing in our times than mere dishonesty, the bane of all ages.

     Liars there will always be, but most of us, most of the time, play a much more confused and underhanded game. Nor should we expect intelligence to save us, since all-too often it makes us more adept at justifying what we have come to believe for other reasons altogether—assuming that our collective cognitive capacities are not in fact declining, and that our mental cultivation will not increasingly take a back seat to the dawning regime of the robots, to whom we may defer with ever fewer scruples, because it seems so much easier, and because we come to doubt, every day a little more, the need for making the crucially important but unpleasant effort to think for ourselves.

     Enlightenment begins, according to Immanuel Kant writing in 1784, not with a flash of illumination, but with daring to think for oneself (sapere aude). It ends in the 2020s not with a bang, but with a click of the mouse. It should not reassure us much that bots are constitutionally incapable of lying, since they have no intentions or independent purposes (yet). It only means that they can churn out nonsense and other untruths with a perfectly clear conscience, even if it is also conceivable that they may, one day, come to our rescue as umpires of sorts when all other dams have broken.

     (Another one for V, on his birthday.)

Postscript (20 Feb. 2025): Power corrupts, it has been rightly said, and great power greatly, not only by its many temptations, but also by how it goes to the head, especially in someone already disposed to delusions of grandeur. When the bullshitting mindset meets with an incipient Napoleon complex (a coarse plebeian who crowned himself emperor), things are liable to get erratic and bizarre. In what world, this side of the sanity-line, is the condemnation of congestion pricing (a textbook favorite of tweedy economics professors!), after endless consultations and compromises in a traffic-plagued metropolis, a fitting occasion for pronouncing yourself a secular savior and wishing yourself a long life as king?

     Even in jest it is not particularly funny coming from someone who has indeed been carrying on more like an unaccountable potentate than a president under the constraints of law and limited government. (“Mad” King George, much maligned in the Declaration of Independence, was a model of sobriety and good sense by comparison.) Nor can such weird posturing be laughed off as a joke when it carries menacing hints of a political trial balloon (Caesar experimented with the like in another old republic: it cost him his life and Rome a decade of civil war); or when it offers a window on the troubled psyche of someone who, we know, was told far too often, in his early years, that to become anyone he needed to be king (or even “a killer”).

     When such a character is unfortunate enough, and we with him, to rise to the vertiginous heights of political power, he may sense a crown on his own head when another in his place would feel mostly the burdens of responsibility and conscience that come with the robes of high office. Even if the buffoon before us should not be mistaken for a second Hitler (not nearly as much war in his bones or murderous hatred on his mind), it is nonetheless unsettling to notice the parallels: to recall, for example, how fond the fiend was of hearing himself called King of Munich in the earlier years of his rise, or to discover in both men much the same prideful contempt for inconvenient realities, in their shared tendency to put wild and inchoate fancies above all else, then lose track of the difference. (On how Hitler handled collisions between the facts and his visions, see Joachim Fest, Hitler: eine Biographie (Ullstein 2002), esp. 274, 281, 290–91, 298.)

     As for the messianic features that quite a few of Mr. Trump’s followers appear to see in him, these may fit with the divine right of kings, but they go equally well with con men and cult leaders. Once again, it is disquieting to realize that the Führer appeared to many of his followers in a similar light, though there we also reach the definite limit of such comparisons, and their resounding refutation: for the generally joyful, boisterously life-affirming mood at the crazy carnival that Prince Trump is presiding over (by German tradition carnivals must have merry princes and princesses, not dour kings and queens) could hardly be more contrary to the dreary 19th-century death cult, weaponized by the First World War, that Hitler carried, as was his wont, to the most dire extremes (#171). Despite all there is to object to, it is still the spirit of levity and irresponsibility that speaks to us from the trumped-up Time cover, not that of presumed regal dignity or of stomping storm troopers in the background.

     What messes our King Donald will leave behind for others to clean up, and which ones he will perhaps help clear up himself, remains to be seen. I have made a point of conceding the latter, insisting that some good may well come of it all, albeit at levels of risk that I would consider unjustifiable (see #156, especially the first note; also #122, #148, #157, #158, #160). We shall need at any rate to keep our seatbelts well-fastened, and our eyes on the road. It will be a rough ride these next four years, destination unknown, big crashes possible, all-out disaster not to be expected, but not to be ruled out either. Victor Davis Hanson, one of Trump’s earliest academic champions, has spoken of his second term as a necessary course of “chemotherapy” for the body politic (see also my note to #157). Quite apart from the highly problematic semantics of cancer-metaphors in public affairs, such desperate treatments, even if they do not kill you, may well leave you feeling so nauseous and miserable that you wish you were dead already.

*All societies struggle with untruth, liberal-democratic ones no less than the Soviet Union or North Korea, but surely it is a more hopeful affair where open dissent is possible. Which is not to say that pluralistic societies can be counted on to get things right any more than their rivals; more probably, the former will get things wrong in a wider variety of ways, and thus with more angles for eventual correction. It may be an article of liberal faith to believe this, and no guarantee of anything; but I am willing to take my stand on it, especially in the longer run.

**“On Bullshit,” Raritan Quarterly Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (Fall 1986), pp. 97–98.

***Montaigne was a skeptic about much, but not about this. “Lying is an accursed vice,” he wrote in his Essays (I.ix.28): “We are men, and hold together only by our word. If we recognized the horror of lying, we would persecute it with fire more justly than other crimes.” That said, truly hardened and expect liars are less common than we imagine them to be. Roy F. Baumeister has shown in his book on Evil (Holt 1999) how relatively rare it is, analogously, for people to do bad, even very bad things, in full awareness of doing something evil. Much more commonly they believe, in all sincerity, that they have good reasons for acting as they do. And so it is with lying: there are no doubt plenty of instances where blatant lying is indeed the problem, but more usually untruths have a more banal origin in our carelessness, or in the fundamental interestedness of our perspectives. The reason why liars and fiends nonetheless feature so prominently in our imagination (along with serial killers and other perpetrators of the most heinous crimes) is that they offer us more compelling culprits to point at when things go wrong—real fiends, not just the usual sufferers from moral confusion, indifference, and a taste for bullshitting themselves and others.

†The ideological subverters of “bourgeois” truths (especially the academic subset with comfy and prestigious university sinecures) are far from the vulgar bullshitters, and often their most mortal political enemies. Nor is the type likely to be markedly amoralist when it comes to personal relations. Radical only in their politics, subversives type are often, in private life, models of precisely those bourgeois decencies and proprieties (including tidy sums in accounts with suitably high returns and correspondingly lax investment policies) to which they stand in theory so irreconcilably opposed. To their belated credit, they are frequently surprised, even appalled, by the crude and ugly harvest of what they have themselves helped to sow. Contrast the Oakeshottian or the traditional libertine, types conservative only in respect of government, while otherwise adventurous and passionately unruly (as intimated in section IV of “On Being Conservative”). Compare also section III: “The man of a conservative disposition in politics understands it to be the business of government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation: to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down.”

††One would like to know a little more about these friends: not only what they have to say about our man, but also how close and true they really are, or were, to him. Subordinates, partners of convenience, and toadies do not count; nor do spouses or family relations. (Some of the worst beasts in history have been doting fathers and devoted husbands nonetheless.) It would also be topical how many former associates have disavowed the connection after having seen a little too much up close, and in what register.

‡”The truth shall set you free” (John 8:32) is not just a Christian commonplace, but a fundamental conviction common to many traditions, both secular and religious.

‡‡The late Hans Rosling, who died shortly before the publication of his book by that title in 2018, had a notable habit (no doubt irritating to many) of telling others that they were flat-out wrong about questions to which factual answers were possible. Irritating or not, he was surely right: either there are such ascertainable facts about the world or there are not. Despite all that must be said about the difficulty of discovering them, one can plainly get them wrong, and egregiously so.