This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
The Failure to Stand Up to Evil Leads to Insanity, Poverty and the Loss of All Our Rights
Preface: I am using the word
"evil" in its secular sense in this essay, as in a horrible, destructive
act ... religion is beyond the scope of this essay.
When someone fails to stand up to a heinous act, that leads to a whole chain of events.
It Enables More Destructive Acts
Initially, by failing to stand up to the bad act, we are enabling the person who committed it to do bigger and worse things in the future.
Army psychiatrist and Christian philosopher M. Scott Peck wrote extensively on evil in People of the Lie
(since Peck was a psychiatrist and an empirical researcher, his
investigation of the dynamics of those who commit heinous acts and the
subsequent attempts to cover them up is very interesting, even for
atheists who will disregard all religious overtones). As Peck wrote:
It
is necessary that we first draw the distinction between evil and
ordinary sin. It is not their sins per se that characterize evil
people...The central defect of the evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it.
And a longer passage:
We
lie only when we are attempting to cover up something we know to be
illicit. Some rudimentary form of conscience must precede the act of
lying. There is no need to hide unless we first feel that something
needs to be hidden. We come now to a sort of paradox. Evil people feel
themselves to be perfect. At the same time, however, they have an
unacknowledged sense of their own evil nature. Indeed, it is this very
sense from which they are frantically trying to flee. The essential
component of evil is not the absence of a sense of sin or imperfection
but the unwillingness to tolerate that sense. At once and the same time,
the evil are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the
awareness. Rather than blissfully lacking a sense of morality like the
psychopath, they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of
their evil under the rug of their own consciousness (or attempting to
redefine their evil as good). The
problem is not a defect of conscience, but the effort to deny the
conscience its due. We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves.
The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as
a part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the
absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it. Since they will do
almost anything to avoid the particular pain that comes from
self-examination, under ordinary circumstances, the evil are the last
people who would ever come to psychotherapy. The evil hate the light –
the light of goodness that shows them up, the light of scrutiny that
exposes them, the light of the truth that penetrates their deception. P
So when people fail to stand up to the heinous acts of a bad person, they are empowering that person's cover up.
It Destroys Our Ability to Think Rationally
Moreover, failure to stand up to the bad act requires people to rationalize their failure to act, which in turn ends up literally warping their thinking process.
As I've repeatedly pointed out, people will go to extreme lengths to rationalize their failure to recognize bad actions by those in power:
Sociologists
from four major research institutions investigated why so many
Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, years after it
became obvious that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.The researchers found, as described in an article in the journal Sociological Inquiry (and re-printed by Newsweek):
- Many Americans felt an urgent need to seek justification for a war already in progress
- Rather
than search rationally for information that either confirms or
disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information
that confirms what they already believe.
- "For the most part people completely ignore contrary information."
- "The study demonstrates voters' ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information"
- People
get deeply attached to their beliefs, and form emotional attachments
that get wrapped up in their personal identity and sense of morality,
irrespective of the facts of the matter.
- "We
refer to this as 'inferred justification, because for these voters,
the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search
for a justification for that war.
- "People were basically making up justifications for the fact that we were at war"
- "They
wanted to believe in the link [between 9/11 and Iraq] because it
helped them make sense of a current reality. So voters' ability to
develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information, whether
we think that is good or bad for democratic practice, does at least
demonstrate an impressive form of creativity.An article
... in Alternet discussing the Sociological Inquiry article helps us
to understand that the key to people's active participation in
searching for excuses for actions by the big boys is fear:
Subjects
were presented during one-on-one interviews with a newspaper clip of
this Bush quote: "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks
were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda."
The Sept. 11 Commission, too, found no such link, the subjects were told.
"Well,
I bet they say that the commission didn't have any proof of it," one
subject responded, "but I guess we still can have our opinions and
feel that way even though they say that."
Reasoned another: "Saddam, I can't judge if he did what he's being accused of, but if Bush thinks he did it, then he did it."
Others declined to engage the information at all. Most
curious to the researchers were the respondents who reasoned that
Saddam must have been connected to Sept. 11, because why else would the
Bush Administration have gone to war in Iraq?
The desire to believe this was more powerful, according to the researchers, than any active campaign to plant the idea.
Such a campaign did exist in the run-up to the war...
He won't credit [politicians spouting misinformation] alone for the phenomenon, though.
"That
kind of puts the idea out there, but what people then do with the
idea ... " he said. "Our argument is that people aren't just empty
vessels. You don't just sort of open up their brains and dump false
information in and they regurgitate it. They're actually active
processing cognitive agents"...
The alternate explanation raises queasy questions for the rest of society.
"I
think we'd all like to believe that when people come across
disconfirming evidence, what they tend to do is to update their
opinions," said Andrew Perrin, an associate professor at UNC and another author of the study...
"The
implications for how democracy works are quite profound, there's no
question in my mind about that," Perrin said. "What it means is that we
have to think about the emotional states in which citizens find
themselves that then lead them to reason and deliberate in particular
ways."
Evidence suggests people are more likely to pay attention to facts within certain emotional states and social situations. Some may never change their minds. For others, policy-makers could better identify those states, for example minimizing the fear that often clouds a person's ability to assess facts ...
The Alternet article links to a must-read interview with psychology professor Sheldon Solomon, who explains:
A
large body of evidence shows that momentarily [raising fear of
death], typically by asking people to think about themselves dying,
intensifies people's strivings to protect and bolster aspects of their
worldviews, and to bolster their self-esteem. The most common finding
is that [fear of death] increases positive reactions to those who
share cherished aspects of one's cultural worldview, and negative
reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are
merely different.
***
Investors - as with politicians or
Americans in general - believe that "when [they] come across
disconfirming evidence . . . . they tend to ... update their
opinions", but in reality, they cling to the beliefs they formed
during certain heightened emotional states, such as fear.
And
once people form a belief, it can be almost impossible to get them to
change their beliefs ... even if confronted with contradictory
information.As NPR noted last July:
New
research suggests that misinformed people rarely change their minds
when presented with the facts — and often become even more attached to
their beliefs.***
A new body of research out of the
University of Michigan suggests ... that we base our opinions on
beliefs and when presented with contradictory facts, we adhere to our
original belief even more strongly.The
phenomenon is called backfire, and it plays an especially important
role in how we shape and solidify our beliefs on immigration, the
president's place of birth, welfare and other highly partisan issues.
***
It's
threatening to us to admit that things we believe are wrong. And all
of us, liberals and conservatives, you know, have some beliefs that
aren't true, and when we find that out, you know, it's threatening to
our beliefs and ourselves.
***
This isn't a question
of education, necessarily, or sophistication. It's really about, it's
really about preserving that belief that we initially held.
Torture as a Quintessential Evil of the Last Decade
A good example of this dynamic is with torture.
Americans
were first told by our government that we were not torturing anyone.
Then, the government admitted it did a little waterboarding, but said
that's not torture, and that it was necessary to prevent more Al Qaeda
attacks.
The truth, however, is that top experts in interrogation say that:
- Torture actually reduces our national security and creates new terrorists
- Most of those tortured were innocent
- Torture has been used throughout history - not to gain information - but as a form of intimidation, to terrorize people into obedience. In other words, at its core, torture is a form of terrorism.
More importantly, the specific type of torture which was used the the U.S. in Iraq and Guantanamo was tailor-made to extract false confessions.
As I previously pointed out:
Senator Levin revealed that the the U.S. used torture techniques aimed at extracting false confessions.
McClatchy subsequently filled in some of the details:
Former
senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation
issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq
collaboration...
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld,
especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida
and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had
told them were there."
It was during this period that CIA
interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees
repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid
Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released
Justice Department document...
When people kept coming up empty,
they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he
continued."Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA .
. . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that
pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A
former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army
investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties
between al Qaida and Iraq.
"While we were there a large part of
the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida
and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al
Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The
more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . .
. there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might
produce more immediate results.""
I think it's obvious that the
administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link
(between al Qaida and Iraq)," [Senator] Levin said in a conference call
with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."
Levin
recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer
had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech
Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
In
other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied
about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they
pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed
at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false
linkage. See also this and this.Paul Krugman eloquently summarized the truth about the type of torture used:
Let’s
say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a
pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So
it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team
which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign
governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle
on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.
As Truth Out reported yesterday:
Jessen's notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a "master" SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).
Kearns
and his boss, Roger Aldrich, the head of the Air Force Intelligence's
Special Survial Training Program (SSTP), based out of Fairchild Air
Force Base in Spokane, Washington, hired Jessen in May 1989. Kearns,
who was head of operations at SSTP and trained thousands of service
members, said Jessen was brought into the program due to an increase in
the number of new SERE courses being taught and "the fact that it
required psychological expertise on hand in a full-time basis."
Jessen,
then the chief of Psychology Service at the US Air Force Survival
School, immediately started to work directly with Kearns on "a new
course for special mission units (SMUs), which had as its goal
individual resistance to terrorist exploitation."
The
course, known as SV-91, was developed for the Survival Evasion
Resistance Escape (SERE) branch of the US Air Force Intelligence
Agency, which acted as the Executive Agent Action Office for the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. Jessen's notes formed the basis for one part of SV-91,
"Psychological Aspects of Detention."
***
Kearns
was one of only two officers within DoD qualified to teach all three
SERE-related courses within SSTP on a worldwide basis, according to a
copy of a 1989 letter written Aldrich, who nominated him officer of the year.
***
The
Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being
reverse-engineered - not just 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' but
an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a
central pillar," he said. "What I think is important to note, as an
ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen's
instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation. And
this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to 'reverse-engineer' a
course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan
to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD
torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist
organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE
courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the
prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda,
or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of
informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program
have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the
American press."
***
Jessen wrote that
cooperation is the "end goal" of the detainer, who wants the detainee
"to see that [the detainer] has 'total' control of you because you are
completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes.
Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him
in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.)."
***
Kearns
said, based on what he has read in declassified government documents
and news reports about the role SERE played in the Bush
administration's torture program, Jessen clearly "reverse-engineered" his lesson plan and used resistance methods to abuse "war on terror" detainees.
So we have the two main Air Force insiders concerning
the genesis of the torture program confirming - with original notes -
that the whole purpose of the torture program was to extract false
confessions.
They Got the False Confessions They Wanted
And false confessions were, in fact, extracted:
The Miami Herald ran a story entitled "Alleged 9/11 mastermind: `I make up stories'", noting:
Accused al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed complained that interrogators tortured lies out of him...
''I make up stories,'' Mohammed said ...
In broken English, he described an interrogation in which he was asked the location of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
''Where is he? I don't know,'' Mohammed said. 'Then he torture me.
Then I said, 'Yes, he is in this area or this is al Qaeda which I don't
know him.' I said no, they torture me.''This is not new. It has already been documented that Mohammed confessed to crimes which he could not have committed, and that he said that he gave the interrogators a lot of false information - telling them what he thought they wanted to hear - in an attempt to stop the torture.
Indeed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told the Red Cross:
During
the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false
information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished
to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told the
interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm
sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to
make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to
several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.And see this Washington Post report.
***
Dick Cheney claimed that waterboarding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed stopped a terror attack on L.A., but as the Chicago Tribune notes:
The
Bush administration claimed that the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed helped foil a planned 2002 attack on Los Angeles --
forgetting that he wasn't captured until 2003.(see this confirmation from the BBC: "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ... was captured in Pakistan in 2003").
And as I pointed out last year:
[A]ccording to NBC news:
- Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured
- At
least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11
Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information
as a way to stop being "tortured."
- One of the Commission's main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ
- The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves
***
Remember, as discussed above, the torture techniques used by the Bush administration to try to link Iraq and 9/11 were specifically geared towards creating false confessions (they were techniques created by the communists to be used in show trials).
***
The above-linked NBC news report quotes a couple of legal experts to this effect:
Michael
Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says he is
"shocked" that the Commission never asked about extreme interrogation
measures."If you’re sitting at the 9/11 Commission, with all the
high-powered lawyers on the Commission and on the staff, first you ask
what happened rather than guess," said Ratner, whose center represents
detainees at Guantanamo. "Most people look at the 9/11 Commission
Report as a trusted historical document. If their conclusions were supported by information gained from torture, therefore their conclusions are suspect."...Karen
Greenberg, director of the Center for Law and Security at New York
University’s School of Law, put it this way: "[I]t should have relied on
sources not tainted. It calls into question how we were willing to use
these interrogations to construct the narrative."
I also pointed out:
The official 9/11 Commission Report states:
Chapters
5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda
members. A number of these "detainees" have firsthand knowledge of the
9/11 plot. Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses-sworn
enemies of the United States-is challenging. Our access to them has been
limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications
received from the locations where the actual interrogations take place.
We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no
control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest
would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so
that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify
ambiguities in the reporting.In other words, the 9/11
Commissioners were not allowed to speak with the detainees, or even
their interrogators. Instead, they got their information third-hand.
The
Commission didn't really trust the interrogation testimony. For
example, one of the primary architects of the 9/11 Commission Report,
Ernest May, said in May 2005:We never had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources.
As I noted last May:
Newsweek is running an essay
by [New York Times investigative reporter] Philip Shenon saying [that
the 9/11 Commission Report was unreliable because most of the
information was based on the statements of tortured detainees]:The
commission appears to have ignored obvious clues throughout 2003 and
2004 that its account of the 9/11 plot and Al Qaeda's history relied
heavily on information obtained from detainees who had been subjected to
torture, or something not far from it.
The panel
raised no public protest over the CIA's interrogation methods, even
though news reports at the time suggested how brutal those methods were.
In fact, the commission demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of
interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions.
That
has troubling implications for the credibility of the commission's
final report. In intelligence circles, testimony obtained through
torture is typically discredited; research shows that people will say
anything under threat of intense physical pain.
And
yet it is a distinct possibility that Al Qaeda suspects who were the
exclusive source of information for long passages of the commission's
report may have been subjected to "enhanced" interrogation techniques,
or at least threatened with them, because of the 9/11 Commission....
Information
from CIA interrogations of two of the three—KSM and Abu Zubaydah—is
cited throughout two key chapters of the panel's report focusing on the
planning and execution of the attacks and on the history of Al Qaeda.
Footnotes
in the panel's report indicate when information was obtained from
detainees interrogated by the CIA. An analysis by NBC News found that
more than a quarter of the report's footnotes—441 of some 1,700—referred
to detainees who were subjected to the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation
program, including the trio who were waterboarded.
Commission
members note that they repeatedly pressed the Bush White House and CIA
for direct access to the detainees, but the administration refused. So
the commission forwarded questions to the CIA, whose interrogators
posed them on the panel's behalf.
The commission's
report gave no hint that harsh interrogation methods were used in
gathering information, stating that the panel had "no control" over how
the CIA did its job; the authors also said they had attempted to
corroborate the information "with documents and statements of others."
But
how could the commission corroborate information known only to a
handful of people in a shadowy terrorist network, most of whom were
either dead or still at large?
Former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a
Democrat on the commission, told me last year he had long feared that
the investigation depended too heavily on the accounts of Al Qaeda
detainees who were physically coerced into talking. ...
Kerrey said it might take "a permanent 9/11 commission" to end the remaining mysteries of September 11.
This essay will not go too far down the rabbit hole of 9/11.
The
point is that the government used a specific set of torture techniques
created to extract false confessions which would support a rationale for
the Iraq war and which would allow a superficial reading of September
11th itself.
If we fail to stand up to this act of evil - the use
of torture to obtain false confessions - we are not only complicit, but
we will also eventually drive ourselves crazy in trying to rationalize
what was done in our name.
It Disempowers Us and Leads to the Loss of All of Our Rights
As Yves Smith writes today about the Truth Out article:
This
revelation raises troubling questions about how programs like this
relate to the coarsening of American society. Some readers will not
doubt argue that trying to connect the dots between programs designed
for use in combat settings and broad social trends is overreaching. Yet
look at the themes Jessen stresses: control, dependency, compliance
and cooperation. To use one pet example, why are people so apathetic in
the wake of widespread abuses by banks, first the extortions that took
place during the bailouts, and now the continued flouting of the law
in mortgage servicing and foreclosures?
Although there was no
single architect like Jessen for the various elements of our current
economic paradigm, they do seem to work to weaken, and perhaps in some
cases, to break the will of ordinary citizens to stand up to their
tormentors large and small. A policy preference for higher levels of
unemployment (to keep inflation down and workers in their place) have
reduced many if not most individuals’ sense of control of their own
destiny and increased their sense of dependence. When job tenures are
short and replacement work at the same level of pay can be hard to get,
that alone produces a good deal of the sough-after state, compliance.
Add
to that an information apparatus which allows employers to see minor
transgressions like late payment and misdemeanors such as getting
arrested at protests, and you have effective mechanisms for social
control. And there are those who look at the abuse of Bradley Manning,
which would have seemed inconceivable fifteen years ago, and wonder who
else might be deemed to be enough of a threat to merit similar
mistreatment.
In other words, the failure to
stand up to a heinous act not only destroys our ability to think, but
also makes it less likely we will stand up to future bad acts ... thus
disempowering us.
That is the road to poverty, and a complete loss of all of our rights ...
»
- advertisements -
How disheartening... nothing we can do then but take it up the wazoo hole or turn the channel back to American Idol.
How entirely defeatist. But I expect that was your intent wasn't it? :)
Since the end game is one of turning the USA... nay... the planet... into the United States of Mubarica I would suppose that the eventual outcome will be somewhat similar if not intensely messier.
Americans have guns.
They didn't think about that one did they. Just try to pry one out of someones hands as the Mubarakistani economy continues to descend into the shitter.
Good luck to TPTB... they'll need it to keep their heads attached to their thoraxes.
Just sayin'.
Lol, Mubarica...why does the ghost of Madeleine haunt you...like it haunted Kim Novak's second role in "Vertigo"? Mubarica has as much chance at succeeding America as Banco's ghost taking over from Macbeth... Look ahead... It's not the dregs of a civilization that died in 1700 which is going to take over from USA's current 'head in deep ass' act. It's somebody who has read Einstein and knows how to drink good wine. Our challenge now is getting out of the hyper-consumption model...rebuild the planet, cut back on population...some menu we're leaving the next generation!
cut back on population.
You first ... we'll take care of the rest when you're gone.
Still learning how to count I see...with or without stout in your mouth.
+1
Stellar retort!
You'd be surprised I'm very good... as Banco's ghost!
Sounds like the vacuous words of another useless English major to me.
Lawyer right?
Thought so.
read on, read on, Macduff and damned be he...
Out damn'd falak!... :)
Ultimately, memes must be policed from within or they will cease to exist.
This whole "narrative of democracy" idea for MENA is a prime example. You can't talk people into this or scare them or deceive them.
The meme genesis must come from within the population. It must be fortified, defined and actioned from within.
The absurd level of dissonance between action and words removes all question --the US is now impotent and each try just does more damage.
To swim against the rising tide of evil...like Horatio on the bridge...mighty Lars Porsena with Sextus by his side..remnants of the old order of Tarquin Rome...As Horatio threw himself into the Tiber, overcame the swell of raging river's ire and swam to Rome besieged but free. "By the nine Gods they had sworn that the great house of the Squid would suffer no more...By the nine Gods they swore, And named it a Trysting day, and bade their messengers ride forth, east and west and south and north, To summon their array"...
..."With weeping and with laughter still is the story told, How well Horatio kept the bridge in the brave days of old"...
so let's enumerate the seven lowlights from the current administration and see whether they fit:????
http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2010/01/19/seven_lowlights_fr...
go play
and GW, how is your response?
<<queue crickets; chirp, chirp ...>>
- Ned
Torture smorture. Three people, in total, were waterboarded(not tortured), and these were high value, well informed folks. KSM sang enthusiastically, giving courses on Al Quaeda, after he finally broke. It wouldn't hurt for GW to read a book once and a while.
Three people?
This is not a believable number. I'd say a more believable number is 10,716.
Conservative estimate.
Torture smorture...read a book once <in> a while...
"Do you refuse to speak to me? Don't you realize I have power to kill you or to release you?" (authority) "You would have no authority over me unless it was given to you from above". (detainee)
Later... "forgive them,they have no idea what they're doing". Broken body but unrepentant spirit. Incredible example.
"What is truth?"