The Tortoise

“A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.”  - Charles Spurgeon

"Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”  - Jonathan Swift

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A recent MIT study found that false stories on Twitter spread six times faster than true stories. And it wasn't because of bots, it was us.

The appeal of lies has perhaps never been more obvious in America than it is now. The firehose approach to false information was adopted as presidential policy for four years. A pants-on-fire lie was fanned until it swept over our Capitol.

Few of us claim that a lie is never justified. Rahab lies to protect spies hidden on her roof. Corrie ten Boom lies to protect Jewish refugees hiding in her attic. In both of these cases the lies have immediate protective effect. But to extend the justification for lying to a "pursuit of liberty," for example, is questionable at best. Especially when liberty and its pursuit are defined only by the ones making the justification. The higher-cause rationale is the only reason I can think of for religious leaders who venerate truth repeating and defending foundation-free nonsense.

It would be a mistake to think that the lies come from one person or one group of people. Many of us jump to affirm a story that we want to be true before we confirm that it is. We spin a story to emphasize the point we hope to make. Only some of us are willing to set the record straight when we learn our story was wrong (if we bother to find out) and few of us do it regularly.

We are all wrong some of the time. That's not to say that we invent lies; more likely we spread a story that we believe or hope is true. Lies spread mostly through people who aren't really lying.

And the odds are discouraging: six times faster! A tortoise racing a hare or a toddler competing with an Olympic sprinter has no hope. Why bother? Hopelessness is the goal of the firehose strategy. It multiplies the natural speed of the lie by the number of lies told. It's impossible to keep up.

So we resign ourselves to losing races. Especially the short ones. But truth, they say, is eternal. We are in this for the long haul. In Aesop's fable, the hare disappears over the horizon. This is not a 50-yard dash.

It's tempting to look at each battle, each race, as the only one. It never is. There is always another and another. And when truth does eventually win, I believe it has more staying power. I say this cautiously, because examples to the contrary seem common. But slowly and with frequent setbacks, history makes a sporadic curve toward truth as well as justice.

In every interaction truthfulness is important, but when confronted with falsehood I can't always respond quickly. It's tempting to make up a few facts or embellishments of my own. And soon I am caught in my own stories, which in the pursuit of truth I must retract, thereby admitting another defeat.

Truth requires humility and honesty and hard work. It requires questions and research and doubting yourself yet speaking up. Truth takes time. For quick results, especially emotional ones, the lie too often wins.

But that's the wrong race.