Tribes

If we practiced more charity toward each other, we as a nation would be stronger. I mean "charity" in the sense of forbearance from judging others.


1. Trouble in town.Because we don’t forbear from judging others; we aren’t charitable toward each other. Instead, we've become tribal. There’s a "conservative" tribe. There’s a "liberal" tribe. And among tribes, it’s us-versus-them. We live in mutual hostility.

We’re like an unhappy couple that can’t divorce. And everything the other does is interpreted in the most dismal light.

So, we don’t have policy disagreements. Instead, our president is a "socialist". Or a "communist". Or a "Muslim". We learn from Glenn Beck that he "has a deep-seated hatred of White people." The left’s bogeymen of the right, like the Koch brothers, are seen as evil incarnate, persons bent on tearing down government so that there is no rival to the power of the rich. It’s not policy, it’s personal.

When policy is discussed, it’s discussed un-charitably. Leaders who know better speak of "death panels" in the Affordable Care Act ("ObamaCare" to its detractors). There were no "death panels". They were invented to make Democrats who sought to save lives look like villains who sought to end lives.

Then the world turned. Recently, Republicans proposed Medicare reform. Good or bad, their proposal should have been debated. But, stung, Democrats gladly sawed the branch off behind the Republicans. Republicans fell to earth, to the glee of the Democrats.

Now nobody dares make risky proposals in response to an in-rushing crises. Politically, we're more paralyzed for that.

Hatred percolates and boils over. I’ve read internet discussion-threads between liberals and conservatives that are vicious slanders of each other’s motives, honor, and intelligence. If these conversations had taken place in person, the parties would have to be physically separated.

We aren’t "Americans" any more. We’re tribes of a fractured polis.

Media companies manipulate our weakness in charity. There must be a tribal element to our brains that glories in this us-versus-them mentality, that make these tribal appeals so successful. These media companies bind their followers by engaging the worse, tribal angels of our natures.

There is little reaching across. Action heroes aren’t like Atticus Finch. They don’t persuade. They vanquish. Politically, we don’t want to be Atticus Finches; we want to be action heroes. Political rights are at risk; what is wanted is not a fair election, but elections in which our side wins, by any means necessary. Even by voter intimidation. Even by dis-enfranchisement. Un-charity body-checks democracy.

We aren’t "Americans" any more. We cooperate less; we play political king-of-the-hill more.

Un-charity colors debate. We don’t see the long-term unemployed as victims of hard economic times. They’re freeloaders who would rather do nothing than work. So tax breaks for the wealthy who don’t need more money are preferred to the extension of unemployment benefits to people who do. On the other side of things, people are labeled "war-mongers" for supporting military action.


2. Charity is not naive.For all this, we don’t see ourselves as un-charitable. We see ourselves as pragmatic, realistic. We say to ourselves that it is naive to see somebody or some group as good, if they are evil. And we are convinced of their evil.

But charity doesn’t call us to see our adversaries as good. It calls us to see them as complex. They are not action-adventure movie villains who are evil and only evil. They are flesh-and-blood human beings, like us, good and bad, who, like us, maybe never did anything in their lives with a pure motive; and that would include doing nothing with a purely bad motive.

If we see our fellow human beings as complex, we don’t have to worry about being naive. Seeing complexity in others is the opposite of naivete.


3. What keeps us from charity.Mind-forged manacles bind us away from charity.

One manacle is pride. Charity requires humility. Pride scorns and judges. Charity compels us to think that we don’t have all the answers; that we aren’t always right; that we might be wrong; that somebody we disagree with might have a point. Pride places us, in our minds, above our adversaries. It draws us away from charity.

Another manacle is love of certainty. While we practice un-charity, the world is simple and clear. We and our tribe are good; they and their tribe are bad. We sleep with a peaceful conscience, even if it is peaceful because it’s un-examined. To practice charity is to leave behind comforting certainties. That takes courage.

Another manacle is habit. We have a habit of judging. Charity comes when we have a new habit of humility; a new habit of suspending judgment; a new habit of seeing complexity.

                   4. Speaking of myself.

I judge a lot. I spent some of yesterday practicing not judging, practicing thinking better of people than is my habit, practicing seeing people as three-dimensional instead of as cartoons. I was happier for it. I was better for it.

When I practice charity, I don’t ignore that there is error in the world, and evil. Not all answers are equal, nor all solutions to the problems we face. But charity requires me not to choose condemnation of my adversaries as my first response to controversy.


5. Conclusion.We can become a nation again. We can become less tribal and more American.

Sleepless

This is the story about why I use medical marijuana.

1. The former solution: a narcotic sleep-aid.

My doctor used to prescribe a narcotic sleep-aid. He warned me that it was slightly addictive. That concerned me, but it was a (slight) risk that I was willing to take. Because otherwise I would wake up at about 2:30 in the morning and lie awake until I gave up on slipping back into sleep. Then I would open a book or surf the internet until I became tired enough to close my eyes a couple of hours or less before the alarm went off.

I tried alternatives to the narcotic. I invented strategies. For example, I learned to read books before sleeping instead of watching television. Books put me to sleep; television made me awake. And if I woke in the early morning, sometimes I could coax myself back to sleep by recalling what I had read; television lacked that power. But books didn’t always work.

I had a lifestyle that should have favored uninterrupted sleep. I exercised regularly. An exercise regimen is well known to favor rest. Maybe it helped. Just not enough.

I went months without the narcotic. But work projects would become oppressive in size and in too-soon deadlines. And then, when I most needed a good night’s rest, I wouldn’t get it. Then it was back to the doctor, with a few more sleep-deprived nights while I waited for the appointment.

2. The problem with the narcotic.

And the narcotic was no perfect solution. When I took it, I would feel leaden in the morning. If I closed my eyes after the alarm sounded, I wouldn’t open them again for at least 45 minutes. And if I had not predicted interrupted sleep, and then my sleep was interrupted that night, the narcotic would be useless. I couldn’t take it if I woke up in the early-morning hours, because I needed to take it at least eight hours before waking; otherwise, waking on time would be difficult. So the first sleep-deprived night always came without relief.

3. Medical-marijuana seems appealing.

A few months ago, I had a sleep-deprived night and called my doctor the next day. I left a message that asked for a phone renewal of my prescription. It seemed worth asking for an instant prescription for help right away.

A nurse returned the call and said that the doctor didn’t want to renew the prescription over the phone. The doctor had speculated that I might have sleep apnea, and he wanted to run some tests. In the meantime, the nurse recommended an over-the-counter sleep-aid and suggested that I make a medical appointment. I tried the over-the-counter sleep-aid. It worked for a couple of nights, then it didn’t. I never made the medical appointment, because I had something else in mind.

What I had in mind was medical marijuana. I had researched it and discovered that it was recommended for sleep problems. Feeling a little felonious, I called to make an appointment with a Saturday-only clinic that issued medical marijuana certificates.

4. Getting a medical-marijuana prescription.

When I called the clinic, the person on the phone asked whether I was under a doctor’s care. And she required me to bring to the Saturday appointment a copy of my sleep-prescription. This impressed me with the seriousness of the medical investigation that the doctor proposed to conduct before permitting me to access medical marijuana. I went by Kaiser and got a copy of my old prescription.

But when I got to the clinic, they seemed unaware that I had an appointment. I got in line behind the walk-ins, which was everybody but me. They were a healthy-looking bunch. (In fairness, so was I.) Nobody asked to see my prescription, even though I had it in my hand expecting someone to ask to see it. It was as if the telephone requirements were just for show, in case I was a law-enforcement officer doing a lazy telephone-trawl, looking for lax practices among medical-marijuana doctors.

The doctor called me in. I expected him to inquire about some of the contra-indications to medical marijuana on the form that I filled out. But he didn’t. He spent most of our time cautioning me about how not to run into trouble with the police with my medical marijuana. He recommended that I carry my medical marijuana in my car trunk, not on the front seat next to me, in case I was stopped by police for any reason.

5. Going to a medical-marijuana dispensary.

Then it was off to the medical marijuana dispensary. In the dispensary I went to, I encountered a big but pleasant man who guarded an inside door. He looked me over and asked me some questions. Learning that I was a first-timer, he gave me a form to fill out. Then he invited me to go inside.

Inside, the receptionist made a copy of my driver’s license and my medical-marijuana certificate. Then she called my prescriber’s office to ensure that I had not given her a forgery. After that, I was buzzed through a third door into the small, neat room where they sold the marijuana, the paraphernalia for smoking marijuana, and edible marijuana products.

I had researched medical marijuana, so I knew the difference between strains of marijuana. Sativa is the strain for people who enjoy a stimulating buzz. It’s the good-time stuff. Sativa and Sativa-mixes are most of what the dispensary had in their glass jars in their glass cases in their inside room. Indica is the strain that has the most medical benefits, including help with sleep. I bought the Indica. (Since then, sometimes I have also bought Sativa.)

6. Marijuana gets the job done.

The Indica works well. When I take it, I sleep soundly. And I need less sleep to wake refreshed. Usually, after smoking Indica, I wake up a little before the alarm goes off. And if I don’t smoke before I sleep, and I wake in the early-morning hours, I can smoke a small amount, and it puts me back to sleep. An early-morning smoke doesn’t keep me from waking on-time and refreshed.

I was worried that I might have the same problem with marijuana that I had with alcohol. When I drank, I would start when I got home from work, and I would continue drinking until I fell asleep. And one or another reason would induce me to get in my car and drive when I shouldn’t – for example, if I ran out of alcohol. If I had been sober, I would have known not to drive while intoxicated, but I wasn’t sober when I made that decision. That was a big reason why I quit. It’s easier for me not to drink than it is for me to drink and not to drive.

Marijuana isn’t like that. I rarely smoke before 9:00 p.m., and usually not until 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. or later. And a pipe-bowl or half of a pipe-bowl of marijuana costs next-to-nothing, especially compared to the fifth of scotch-or-gin-or-vodka-or-tequila that I used to drink each night after work. I never drive after smoking marijuana. Also, because I take only small amounts of marijuana, compared to the amounts of alcohol that I used to drink, it doesn’t endanger my health like the alcohol did.

7. Coming out.

My medical-marijuana use isn’t something that I’ve talked a lot about before now. My brother Peter knows, and my house-mates know. I myself felt slightly felonious when I first sought out a prescription, and I wonder if some people who read this will look past the prescription and past the need, and judge me a pot-head. What I do is legal, but some people consider it only "legal" – in quotation marks. But I am who I am.

And a good night’s sleep is priceless.

"What is truth?"

A California state seal adorns a wall of every California state courtroom that I can remember. It has a bear, it has a ship, it has a harbor, and it has grapes. It has Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. It has the word "Eureka". That means "I have found it."

But what if instead of "Eureka", it said "What is truth?"

You wouldn’t feel confident that justice will take place in that courtroom, would you? Finding truth is the first step to justice.

So I want to know, why are judges so bad at finding the truth, particularly when a police officer testifies?

Case in point. I had a motion to exclude evidence at trial, today, based on unlawful actions by a police officer. Now, the cross-examination went better than I could hope. When it was important for a particular gasoline spill to be large, the officer testified that it was large. When it was important for it to be small, he testified that it was smaller.

When a witness plainly changes his testimony to suit the momentary need of his side, and when that witness contradicts himself, it’s pretty clear that he’s drawing on a mental manure pile, not on his memory. And when he contradicts his own police report, and then gives implausible meanings to his own plain words in that report to try to explain away the contradiction, that, for me, erases all doubt.

But the judge found the officer believable. She accepted his testimony as true, and she ruled against my client.

The liars won today.

They do, more and more.

There is no outrage about lying in our times. There’s no penalty for lying, if you're a police officer or a lawyer. Judges accept the testimony of lying officers. This habit of judges is so widely known that criminal-defense attorneys have a rueful saying: "That’s a lie only a judge would believe."

Today, the judge looked past what was obvious. She didn’t use logic or common sense. She looked at the officer’s uniform and his badge, and at that point she knew which way the motion would go.

It takes so little to make people lie. Why did this officer lie? For the same reason that sportsmen cheat. He wanted to win. And while he was fouling on the "field", the "referee" was picking her nose. That’s crude, but I’m angry.

And judges don’t penalize lawyers who tell transparent lies. Sometimes they rule in their favor.

Sometimes I feel that the force and power of lies are an irresistible tsunami. Sometimes I feel that the force and power of my opposition is always a little behind the audacity of the next lie.

"What is truth?"

Pontius Pilate said that before he told those who were agitating for Jesus’s death that he found no fault with Jesus. He had Jesus flogged, but that didn’t satisfy the fury of Jesus’s enemies.  So Pilate gave over to torture and death the most loving man who ever lived, the man who was his king.

Jesus told Pilate that all who were on the side of truth listened to him. "What is truth?" was Pilate’s retort. Clearly you cannot be on the side of something that you cannot recognize.

We make choices: we are with Pilate, or we are on the side of truth. We humble ourselves before the truth, or, in our pride, we believe that our right to get what we want is more important than the truth.

My client is accused of receiving stolen property – a motorcycle. He had the motorcycle on his property. He had taken it from a woman, to fix it for her. She was going to pay him when she sold it. The officer asked him where he got the motorcycle from, and he told him. But when the officers called the woman up, she saw that the shit had hit the fan (crude, still angry) and she denied knowing my client, and she denied handing the motorcycle over to him. The officers assumed that she was telling the truth, and that my client was lying. They concluded therefore that he knew the motorcycle was stolen. The woman was probably in cahoots with her jailbird son, who likely stole the motorcyle to begin with.

After today’s hearing was over, I took my motorcycle helmet and walked to the courtroom door. A cop was sitting by the door. Seeing my helmet, he said, "You’d better keep your motorcycle away from your client!"

I replied, "My client is fucking innocent, and I have absolutely no sense of humor about that!" I didn't call him a moron, but only because that didn't immediately come to my mind.

I fervently hope that the jurors, unlike the judge, aren’t flummoxed by truth.

Punctuation with Personality!

It’s no surprise that people say that if they died and came back as punctuation, they’d want to be an exclamation point. That’s because exclamation points have the most fun!

An exclamation point changes a sentence that might be mildly threatening into a happy sentence. Take this sentence: "You have to tell me your secrets." Slightly overbearing, right? But: "You have to tell me your secrets!" Completely different!

But punctuation anxiety has invaded the world of these happy exclamation points. This is true because their domain is being invaded by emoticons. Where once exclamation points reigned alone, now you often see :). "You have to tell me your secrets. :)."

At first, exclamation points didn’t worry. They thought their long-time dominance couldn’t be threatened by this upstart. They still chatter about the last line of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem God’s Grandeur, even though it was written in 1918:

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Exclamation points cluck their tongues and ask, "What poem has an emoticon ever appeared in?"

But emoticons have had surprising staying power. So, now, some exclamation points are talking compromise, talking about joining forces with emoticons. Like this: "You have to tell me your secrets! :)"

But emoticons aren't interested in joining forces with a punctuation that they see as past its prime. So dark rumors float around the world of punctuation that exclamation points have contracted a hit on emoticons. But emoticons aren't laying down. And exclamation points might yet regret waging war against :).

Sure, exclamation points still reign over – literally – exclamatory sentences. But who wants all that adrenaline all the time? "Go to hell!" say exclamation points.

Periods are the prima donnas of the punctuation population. They think they’re really, really important because they tell one thought to stop and signal another to start. And when a writer thinks that a sentence has gone on too long and drops a period into the middle of it, periods almost burst with their sense of their own importance. They’re like the traffic cop who thinks that traffic exists to be directed by him.

Commas, in contrast, are professorial. Like, they announce nuances in sentences. They say, "You might pay attention – this is a parenthetical phrase."

Commas could have outsized egos like periods. Because unlike periods, which have basically two uses, commas have basically nine, making commas the punctuation used in "the greatest variety of circumstances." (Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage.)  But even though they have great utility and importance, commas are the "least emphatic" of punctuation marks. (Garner)

Also, like a good yogi, commas tell you to slow down.

Other punctuation marks whisper that question marks are "confused". But questions marks consider themselves "mysterious".

Semicolons are the wine-bar snobs of the punctuation world. They boast that Garner calls them a "supercomma". They sniff that few people know how or when to use them. They regard themselves as too refined for the everyday world. They look down on the other punctuation marks.

There are many more punctuation marks, each with their own typical personality. But this gives you an introduction to their quirky world.

Mentally-Ill, Sexually-Violent Prisoners, the Constitution, and Health-Care Reform.

Do you object if mentally-ill, sexually-violent federal prisoners are confined beyond the end of their sentences? If they are kept locked up until they are well – so that they aren’t a danger when they’re released? Does anybody object to this?

Mentally-ill, sexually-violent prisoners object, and their lawyers. And they discovered that they had judicial allies: trial judges and justices of Court of Appeal. Some of these judges and justices ruled that Congress had exceeded its authority by passing the law that kept these prisoners confined.

                 1. The prisoner’s argument: the enumerated powers of Congress.

 The prisoners' argument was simple: the law was unconstitutional. Congress can’t pass laws that the Constitution doesn’t authorize. Art. I, sec. 8 of the Constitution describes the kinds of laws that Congress can pass. Think of Art. I, sec. 8 as a basket of congressional powers in the Constitution.

And none of the powers in that basket specifically authorizes Congress to pass laws to confine mentally-ill, sexually-violent prisoners. Ergo: the law crashes against the Constitution and sinks below the waves. So the argument went.


2. The Supreme Court disagrees.The Supreme Court disagreed. To reach this conclusion, the Supreme Court called upon the so-called "Necessary and Proper clause". That clause comes at the end of Art. I, sec. 8. It says:

The Congress shall have Power - To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

                   3. The Supreme Court’s reasons.

Now, in this basket of Congressional authority, there is no authority to punish or imprison. That authority is nowhere expressed. But there is other authority. And the Supreme Court has said that the power to punish and imprison is "necessary and proper for carrying into Execution" that other authority.

In other words, the power to punish and the power to imprison is necessary and proper to carry out other authority given to Congress by the Constitution, even though the power to punish and imprison is not expressed in the Constitution.

So: Art. I, sec. 8 (the "enumerated powers" of Congress) authorizes Congress to enact laws "[t]o establish Post Offices and post Roads . . .." Because Congress has the power to establish post offices, Congress has "necessary and proper" power to pass laws to punish persons who steal mail. And because it has the power to punish persons who steal mail, Congress has "necessary and proper" power to enact laws to build prisons to house persons convicted of stealing mail.

Other examples abound. Congress can punish and imprison for civil-rights violations and voting-rights violations because of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. It can punish and imprison for embezzlement of federal funds because of the Spending Clause. Congress can punish and imprison for perjury under its authority to create federal courts. The list goes on.

And the Supreme Court said that the power to civilly commit mentally-ill, sexually violent prisoners derives from its power to imprison, which derives from its power to punish, which derives from its power to regulate under specified authority in its basket of powers.

                    4. United States v. Comstock: the case that I’ve been talking about.

The case that discusses all of this is United States v. Comstock. It was decided in May of 2010. Five of the nine justices joined the majority opinion that upheld the civil-commitment law. Two justices concurred; that means that they agreed with the conclusion of the majority opinion, but not necessarily the reasoning. Two justices thought the decision should have gone the other way. Justice Elena Kagan did not vote in the case. That was because, as Solicitor General, she argued the case in the Supreme Court before President Obama made her a Justice.


5. Alright.I, for one, am glad that mentally-ill, sexually violent prisoners can be civilly-committed until they are well enough so that they no longer pose a danger.

I’m glad, just like I’m glad that the Veterans Health Administration provides health care to veterans. Providing health care is not among the enumerated powers. But the power to "raise and support Armies" and to "provide and maintain a Navy" are. And the Veterans Health Administration, and the health care that it provides, are "necessary and proper" to carry out those enumerated powers. (To those who interpret the Constitution in a fundamentalist fashion: note the absence of authority to create and maintain the Air Force.)


6. What this means for the Affordable Care Act.The Necessary and Proper Clause will be important when the Supreme Court takes up the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare" to its detractors). The solid majority that upheld the highly-derivative civil-commitment statute in Comstock gives supporters of the Affordable Care Act reason to hope. That solid majority included conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. And conservative Justice Samuel Alito concurred with the majority opinion. Justice Kagan did not vote, but she certainly would support the Affordable Care Act.

United States v. Comstock suggests a broad interpretation of the Necessary and Proper Clause. That makes supporters of the Affordable Care Act optimistic because persons who look to the courts to undermine the law argue that Congress exceeded it's authority in passing it. A broad interpretation of the Necessary and Proper Clause could only make it easier for the Supreme Court to rule that Congress had the right to pass health-care reform.

That might mean that, after the Supreme Court rules on the Affordable Care Act, parents can get health insurance for their children who are born with birth defects; sick people won’t die because they’re too old to stay on their parent’s health-insurance policy; and insurance companies can’t drop you because you get sick.

Here's a link to the opinion in United States v. Comstock:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1224.pdf

What Gift Do I Have to Give My Wife?

What gift do I have to give my wife?
I’d love her, like she’d love me.
We wouldn't be lonely while the other lived.
And the breaking grief at the end of life
Would be prepaid hundredfold
By years of day-to-day joy before it.

Truth or Consequences

Would you take a drug if it helped you attain an immediate goal, but it also made you lose track of the frontier between reality and your imagination?

1. Reality impairment.As a lawyer, I encounter the (ahem) reality-impaired. I know a lawyer who described to a judge the contents of a document. But what he described was nowhere in the document. And I know that because he had given both the judge and me a copy of it.

He said that the document, a transcript of a meeting, showed my brother (my law partner) refusing to address the issues of the case, instead talking of nothing but the attorney’s fees he hoped to gain if we won. The lawyer meant to convince the judge that we were uninterested in justice and instead were motivated by greed and greed alone. But in reality, Peter discussed at length the issues of the case, and the subject of attorney’s fees never arose, not once. I know this because I read the transcript.

Another example. A lawyer described under oath his phone conversation with my brother. My brother hadn’t trusted him, so he had recorded his own side of the conversation. (You legally can do that without telling someone; but in California, you can’t secretly record both sides of a conversation). This lawyer made embarrassing accusations against my brother. But since Peter had recorded everything that he himself had said, he could supply to the judge, verbatim, his side of the conversation to refute the other lawyer.

I have known both of the lawyers from these examples for a while. One especially (he-who-said-that-my-brother-spoke-of-nothing-but-money) is a strategic liar. He says whatever wins. He’s untethered to the truth.

As years go by, more lawyers are like this.

2. The mind bent.I used to be amazed when someone stated facts that easily could be refuted. I used to believe that this showed audacity of deception.

But then I encountered the same phenomenon with a relative. In all sincerity, with nothing to gain by fooling me, this relative discussed fervently the contents of a document that simply were not there.

Like the two lawyers whom I have talked about, this relative uses falsehoods. If he is angry, he will lie to hurt someone. If someone has made a mistake, he might claim that apocalyptic consequences will flow from that mistake. ("Because of you, I’m going to lose $50,000!") He does this to burden his victim. His lies correctively.

Have lies dimmed the ability of my relative and these lawyers to know when they are telling the truth, and when their words only express what they wish were the truth? Does this happen when you use lies? When you use lies, do they make you blind?

3. The malleable mind.This conforms to what most people know about the mind.

For example, most people don’t remember their dreams. But if you want to remember your dreams, you should keep a pen and paper by your bed. When you wake up, immediately write down what you remember from your dreams. In time, you’ll remember your dreams without writing them down.

The act of writing down your dreams tells your mind that it’s important to remember them. Then your subconscious mind starts automatically to store them in a place that your conscious mind can reach.

Names are another example. If remembering names is important to you, you tend to remember names. I want to remember names. So over time I’ve taught myself to do so. I’m not great at it, but I’m better than I was. I’m better than most people who don’t care to remember the name of somebody they’ve just met.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is a book about memory. In one chapter, it talks about a memory experiment. For weeks, a test subject was tasked to remember random numbers. For weeks, his memory for randon numbers was ordinary. But then, he started to be really good at it. He became really good at it without training, just by constantly doing it.

The mind responds to demands put on it. It becomes stronger or weaker based on what it’s called to do over time.

Scrupulous truth-telling is like that. If you’re scrupulous about the truth, your mind responds by vividly delimiting reality. But when you wilfully choose falsehood, that tends to dilute the reality-delimiting power of the mind.

I hypothesize that scrupulousness about truth trains the mind to know reality. In contrast, a habit of lying instructs the mind that truth is unimportant. And it compromises the mind’s ability to know reality from imagination.

4. Proposed experiments.I wish psychologists or sociologists would put this to scientific proof. They could make test subjects do an exercise, success at which will earn the test subjects something that they value. Then the test subjects can be asked to self-report the outcome, not knowing that they had been watched. Then, they could be given a test to determine their ability to distinguish reality for un-reality. I’m supposing that the scrupulously honest ones will do better at this test than the others.

Or neurologists could study the brains of truthful persons, and compare them to those of known liars. ("Well, ladies and gentlemen, in 87% of liars, there was a 34%-or-more increase in the size of the mendacious-deludus portion of the brain.")

                    5. Doesn’t everybody?

Maybe a liar knows the line between truth and imagination, but not the difference between himself and someone who values truth. He himself little-values truth, so he assumes that everybody little-values truth.

So when he transparently lies, he knows that everyone will see through him. But he doesn’t care, because, in his mind, nobody cares about the truth. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth. It’s just the opposite: he can’t be bothered with it.

6. Truth or consequences.My personal observations drive these conjectures, and these conjectures have no better origin than that. But if I’m right, one day our society might not share the common ground of reality. Because as time passes, people become more and more untethered to the truth.

The habit of lying is like a potent drug that gives an immediate benefit, but it has terrible side-effects.

And over time, even the short-term gains will subside. Because in our time, people still tend to believe what they hear. A judge, for example, usually is slow to assume that the lawyer before him is lying. Because society is presently based, in large part, on trust. (Not too long ago, the term "liar" was a fighting word.)

But as liars multiply, trust diminishes. In time, credulity will wither. It will wither in law, in business, in journalism, in politics; then in teaching, then in church, then in family. And then we’re hammered. Truly, truly hammered.

Because a society that cannot share reality as common ground is a society of atomized reality. Atomized reality is chaos. A highly cooperative, integrated society such as ours cannot function in chaos.

                      7. A house divided.

 Lincoln knew that the nation could not survive half-slave and half-free. He sorrowfully but resolutely waged war that the nation would be all one or all the other.

So with truth-telling and lying. Truth-telling and lying don’t rule discourse and men’s minds and women’s minds equally like co-regents. One rises while the other falls. Society will move toward one or the other. There will be no stasis, no equilibrium. And to become a society of liars is dreadful to contemplate

                     8. Back from the brink.

 Most of us are limited in our influence. We have great control over ourselves; some influence over our loved ones and friends; and little influence beyond our immediate circle.

That doesn’t make us helpless. Our solution to the encroachment of falsehood lies in furrowing our souls in straight lines. Our solution is to be zealous in truth - fanatical, even. If we are zealous, we can often influences our circle of acquaintances by our example. If heaven blesses the effort, then the virtue of truth will ripple outward in circles of verity that spread wherever someone commits himself to truth.

It will take a movement like this to rescue ourselves from what we are becoming, because now all the expansion is in the other direction. Liars plant lies. They arrogate to themselves a God-like authority to invent a world to their liking with nothing more than will and words.

We must not as a nation swallow that poison.