And here, in wise words from half a century ago, is what is wrong with our politics and the rise of opinionated inerrancy.
"We are living under a tyranny of untruth which confirms itself in power and establishes more and more total control over people in proportion as they convince themselves they are resisting error.
Our submission to plausible and useful lies involves us in greater and more obvious contradictions, and to hide these from ourselves we need greater and ever less plausible lies.
The basic falsehood is the lie that we are totally dedicated to the truth, and that we can remain dedicated to the truth in a manner that is at the same time honest and exclusive: that we have the monopoly of all truth, just as our adversary of the moment has the monopoly of all error." (Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 56)
Leave a Reply