Lies My Father Told Me

I remember watching the film entitled Lies My Father Told Me by the Canadian director Ted Allan. It is the story of David Herman, a seven-year old boy growing up in a Canadian neighborhood in the 1920s. His father is ill-tempered due to his many failed attempts at inventing odd products like creaseless pants. Because of the poor return on investment of his experiments, he had to depend on almost interest-free and pay-when-able loan schemes from his father-in-law Tevyalike. To protect David from such harsh realities, he tells him “lies”, believing that his son is not yet ready for the truth. Meanwhile, Tevyalike takes David on his junk shopping spree every Sunday. During these trips, the grandfather shares his deep faith and belief in timeless religious tenets through tall tales and fables in which the young David takes intense interest.

We all have significant experiences with authority figures like that of David with Tevyalike. Because we look up to them as authority, we assimilate their views of man, life, and the world almost without judgment. We then go through life with these constructs not knowing that there will be experiences that will put these beliefs and constructs into question. We sometimes even discover these to be lies for they fail to provide a reasonable explanation for our experiences.

This series of essays is an attempt to explore the rationality of such experiences in the hope of understanding how we move to the truth from the lies we unwittingly live by. The thesis of this paper is that each conscious being struggles to build and protect a worldview that is inevitably shaken by his universe to bring him closer to the truth.

Before we actually delve into the matter, I would first like to define the concepts involved here. A young child needs handles that will help him differentiate reality from illusion. Hence, he has to adopt some form of worldview, imperfect as it may be, through which he will examine and involve himself in his world. The worldview adopted comes from a pool of possibilities presented to him by his “fathers” – parents and other parental figures at home, teachers in school, and other significant figures in his environment.

The lies referred to are not simple false statements that an exact science can easily rectify. We once must have heard, for example, that the moon is made of cheese or that our parents would trade us with an old woman for fish paste if we do not behave. These are easily verifiable by science or sociology. Neither do I refer to erroneous statements involving statistics, formulas nor some other measurable quantities that mathematics can correct. What I do refer to are views about what the world and life is all about and who man really is which normally come in the form of parental advice very much like what Polonius shares with his son Laertes before he “sails off into the world.” At the port, Polonius reminds his son about precepts on personal conduct and relations with others by which he wants his son to live.[i]

And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Such maxims may not be outright lies but they are definitely untested and unconfirmed by Laertes’s personal experience.

Lies may also take the form of misleading statements. In the novel Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, the leading character, Holden, is very much concerned with protecting the young and the innocent from the corrupting influence of phony adults. His heart goes out to the helpless that he even wonders about what happens to the ducks and fish that dwell in the Central Park pond during winter. Most adults dismiss his question as trivial for they are not able to respond to it. One cab driver hazards an explanation and tells him that they freeze underwater and are preserved until spring comes around. Such un-reflected responses do enter into the pool of lies that flows through our minds.

Second, I would like to use Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to describe the journey from lies to truth. The story is about a group of men who are chained to their seats with their faces fixed to the wall in front of them. Behind them is an elevated fire in front of which people walk with dummies made of rocks and other materials. The fire projects the shadows of these dummies on the wall. Because the prisoners are exposed to nothing but these shadows, they “remain in the dark” as to what the world really is like for the world of shadows is the only thing real to them. The journey from truth to lies thus begins.

[i] Cf. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Folger Library General Reader’s Shakespeare, ed. Louis B. Wright (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1958), 1.3.62-84.