Chapter 6: Tell the Truth Part 2

| Part 1: My Analogy | Part 2: My Reality |

Yin and Yang

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“Some things that are true are not very useful.” – Boyd K. Packer
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Now here’s the part where I get a bit philosophical, though I’m admittedly just winging it with this discussion. Public speakers and writers are encouraged to state their authority right from the start in order to gain their audience’s confidence; well in my case, I’ll have to either ignore that advice or shut up, since I’ve never had a single philosophy course, and I’ve never even read a single philosophy book. Since I can’t cough up a single qualification that entitles me to speak on the topic of philosophy, feel free to ignore everything that follows here while I take some time to catch up and use these ramblings to sort out my own philosophy of life.

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The concept of Yin and Yang has a Mormonspeak counterpart in the phrase opposition in all things.

A simplified taijitu for yin and yang represents the duality of good and bad, black and white, positive and negative, warm and cold, and other interconnected opposites:

Sometimes it’s simplest to think of the world in these sorts of absolutes. Let’s start with the idea of fact and fiction, for example, and simplify it into true versus false. I’ll call the black “yin” portion of the symbol false and the white “yang” portion true. The choice of shades is absolutely arbitrary, which shouldn’t need to be said, but perhaps warrants a mention given the very real and disturbingly literal associative references to skin color that have unfortunately pervaded in Mormon doctrine and literature. That said, here’s the symbol with binary labels that might give us a false sense of security, as if our daily data intake could ever be neatly classified as one or the other:

Mormons are prone to repeat the phrase, “The Church is True,” for example, as if an organization could be categorized in that manner and assigned a single label. If I’m stuck with just two options, an organization would become “untrue” the instant I accept any official information as false; in reality, the dichotomy of true and false demands a deeper dive.

In conceptualizing the notion of truth and its polar opposite – since this is a philosophical discussion – I feel obliged to quote at least one philosopher. How about Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher who did his philosophizing during the Age of Enlightenment? Now as a further disclaimer, the last time I heard Kant’s name mentioned was in a college German class many decades ago. Overloaded with technical assignments, I saw philosophical discussions as rhetorical time devourers prone to spinning in infinite loops without resolution. As an engineering student, I was wired to identify a problem and work out its solution; the instant one of my liberal arts professors would invoke Kant’s name during a humanities lecture, my brain involuntarily went into an emergency shutdown mode. So I’m not entirely comfortable quoting Kant, but I’ll give it a try here with a translation from his Lectures on Logic:

“Many things can be true and yet still harmful to man. Not all truth is useful.”

What he doesn’t say, at least not quite as concisely, is what to do with the “useless” truth. Based on the lengthy dissertations that follow this tweetable snippet, the implication is that the harmful portions of the truth should be omitted, ignored, discarded, or selectively suppressed.

We might altruistically claim that all truth should be told, but I think everyone would have to agree that there are times and situations in which Kant’s statement is…well, true. On the battlefield, for example, your own side’s troop movements may be true, but disclosing them publicly for your enemy’s perusal would not be very useful. In another setting, some intimate details between a couple may be true, but posting them on social media for the world to see may not be very useful for your relationship. We all use discretion in our daily dealings (though it seems some might benefit from a higher dose of it!)

To break this down further, we’ll need to set some bounds on the concepts of truth and usefulness. Some see truth as an absolute, while others view it more arbitrarily; more on that below. The term useful, on the other hand, cannot stand on its own as it is obviously subjective, by necessity having an implied association with an ultimate goal. Anything that might be useful for one purpose may at the same time be useless for another purpose, after all. So you can’t call something useful without the assumed or stated context of its purpose. A useful piece of information would be considered beneficial to that given cause. Kant calls out its opposite as “harmful,” which likewise implies that there is a given cause being harmed. Something that is labeled harmful would be detrimental to that goal.

Let’s take the mission of the LDS Church as one example of an ultimate goal. In addressing Church educators in 1981, Boyd K. Packer substituted his own paraphrase of Kant’s statement:

“Some things that are true are not very useful.”

Elder Packer replaces Kant’s “harmful” with the more benign “not very useful,” which could essentially be rephrased as useless, irrelevant, non-applicable, or another neutral term. Useful could be the opposite of any of these terms, but if we’re going to say that useful is something positive, its opposite wouldn’t just be neutral, i.e. not useful; the opposite would be something negative – something harmful as Kant stated. If we start with Elder Packer’s quote and insert that substitution with an underlying condition of a purpose and an assumed action, we’re left with:

“Some things that are true are not very useful [harmful to our cause…and should be omitted.]”

We could flip this one around to test the inverse conclusion:

“Some things that are not true are very beneficial to our cause…and should be promoted.”

Now the first statement may seem palatable in some circumstances, but implementing the second statement may at first glance seem counter to our own moral fiber. By definition, things that aren’t true are lies. Can we allow ourselves to condone outright lies? Before we dismiss the inverse argument as a breach of one of the ten commandments, let’s check its validity in a few applications. In family life, from a knee-jerk denial of attraction to someone outside a marriage, to a made-up story that serves as a smoke screen for a surprise birthday party, to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, there are plenty of everyday rationalizations for a whole range of untruths. Even life-and-death untruths may be warranted if we put ourselves in a wartime context. Not only can we justify hiding the truth, a whole series of outright lies may be sown as ends-justifying means. Take, for instance, the deliberate diversions, phony messages, intricate cover-ups, or other covertly overt tactics that might precede a surprise attack.

Before we get into the question of whether we are at war today, let’s back up to the definitions and associations around truth and usefulness. If we can simplify a given statement as being either true or false, let’s classify its effect as either 1) that which is positively useful in benefitting your chosen cause or 2) that which is negatively harmful or detrimental to your cause. If we put the dichotomous concepts into the positive and negative zones of the taijitu and then try to combine those two sets of opposites without any rotation of the circle, it might give the impression that if you have a good cause, all that is true will support that cause, and all that is false will undermine it:

Of course I would like to advance my cause or make my case with any truth that I have at my disposal. And of course I would refute any lies that harm or undermine my cause. That is the foregone, obvious conclusion highlighted as the black and white zones above:

The white zone shows things that are true and that promote our cause. We seek after these things!
The black zone shows things that are false and undermine our cause. We disavow these things!

There’s no need to cover those black and white areas in any further detail; if life were that simple, we could just end the discussion right here. The dilemma, of course, is that this binary notion is a complete myth. The problem – and the beauty of it all – is reflected in the fact that the real taijitu is not that simple. Here is the more typical representation showing embedded opposites:

In other words, you have good within bad and bad within good and so forth. So in relation to our example above, some things that are true might be harmful to your cause, no matter how noble that cause might be. And some things that are false might be useful to your cause – quite substantially in some cases! Here’s the more realistic taijitu with the grey areas labeled:

To make sense of this for myself, I need to back up and try imagining the symbol another way. I’ll try to simplify the concept with squares or diamonds like the DOT hazmat placards on the back of a truck. Let’s take a straight-forward, yes-or-no question like True or False and make it half and half. Let’s do the same for useful vs. harmful:

Now let’s try combining them, moving them together until they completely overlap and combining the appropriate labels:

Wouldn’t it be nice if life worked out like this and we could just slide these opposites together, keeping everything uncomplicated and cleanly binary? Well, it’s fun to pretend that things are that simple; but that’s simply not real life! To capture real life, we’re going to have to turn these emblems on their side to show all four combinations like in the more intricate taijitu, including falsehoods that benefit your cause and truth that harms it. Once we rotate them opposite each other and then slide them together to combine them into a single composite figure, we find ourselves with the grey areas that I’d like to explore further:

What makes life interesting – and challenging – is how we navigate through the grey areas. Those two grey areas look equally grey, and perhaps equally legitimate. But the two grey zones reflect two completely different questions. Would you rather harm your cause with truth or promote your cause with lies? In other words, if you had to choose between the two:

Will you accept and promote what’s true, regardless of whether it is beneficial or harmful to your cause?
Or will you accept and promote what benefits your cause, regardless of its truth?

Where do you stand when faced with these choices at home, at work, at church, at school, in politics, or in any other area of your life?

Deciding not to promote something that would harm your cause – a sin of omission – is perhaps more excusable than the commission of outright lies that provide some form of an advantage. We tend to live quite comfortably in the omissive grey area without giving it much thought. Have you ever watched the special features of a movie, for example, where they go through the casting and they say, “This film was an absolute disaster? We never should have made this movie! I wish we had cast Brad Pitt instead of Sean Penn.” No? Maybe that’s the producer’s real, honest opinion, and you might hear that criticism through other channels, but you’ll rarely find defamatory statements right there on the special features of the product being sold. When there’s money at stake, you’re unlikely to get the balanced story. Perhaps the statements that have actually been included on the DVD are true in nature, but the selective omission of harmful (or “useless”) truths is a plain fact of life that is inherent in every relationship and runs through all lines of communication. The question is whether we trust the information at face value, or whether can we see it for what it is by considering its defining context.

I’ll try to map these two choices out by taking the same graphic and rotating it in two differing directions to put the selected grey area on top:

At the left we have the truth coming out on top, ignoring its impact to the cause. On the right we have the cause as the overarching factor, overriding truth itself when the truth harms the cause.

So which one do we choose? I tend to lean to the left with my current inclinations, but it has not always been so. Let’s tie these charts into Mormonism, which represents the part of my life during which I leaned the other way: promoting the cause above all else. What is a Mormon’s cause? As a standard Sunday School answer, we might define the cause as the advancement of the Gospel or the Kingdom of God, which is in fact prayed for in meeting after meeting in Mormon chapels and temples around the world. If the Kingdom of God is equated to the LDS Church, then “useful” in the charts above means that which benefits or promotes Mormonism, and “harmful” means that which is detrimental to Mormonism or undermines its message.

The danger with Mormonism or any agenda that seeks to promote what is viewed as its own, higher cause is that the truth or falsehood around any given issue becomes irrelevant; what matters most is whether the organization itself is promoted. The message of justifying selective truth and blatant lies to advance a cause seems to bear increasing relevance to U.S. politics, where both Republicans and Democrats promote whatever story advances their party’s agenda as the higher cause, regardless of its truth.

The lyrics of an LDS hymn state that the truth that “reflects upon our senses” will reveal the “Gospel light.” Others state that “truth shall triumph as the light chases far the misty night” and that truth will outstand “the wreck of the fell tyrant’s hopes.” [Well, one of the hopes of early church leaders was to cleanse the membership of mixed-race babies. So I guess I would agree with the claims in the lyrics, since I do hope that the real truth will withstand the tyrannical, “rude blast” that is referenced in the hymnal.]

There is a flip side to the assumption voiced in the lyrics of the LDS hymns and scriptural works that all truth will promote the Kingdom of God. The equivalent, reverse argument, also echoed in a number of official addresses, is that that anything that harms that cause must therefore be false.

At first glance Mormons might agree with both of those statements, assuming that everything that is true will be pro-Mormon (if understood in its proper context and perspective) and everything that is anti-Mormon is false. But, of course, there are plenty of examples showing how some truths harm the Church’s cause. Likewise some falsehoods have proven to advance the cause of the Church, at least temporarily.

As for myself, whether it’s beneficial or not, I seek the truth, and that can quite readily take me into the grey zone. From where I stand, the impact on the Church’s reputation is irrelevant. What matters is what actually happened.

The Church seems to take the opposite view: Church leaders – or at least the public affairs officials, magazine editors, and marketing directors they appoint – seem to seek that which is beneficial to the cause of advancing the Kingdom, whether or not it is true.

I’ll try listing a few examples that fit into each of the four categories in the charts above for some context:

True and useful. Here’s a true statement: “Violent crime is less common among Mormons than in the general population.” That claim can be backed up with repeatable surveys. A lower prevalence of violent crime, which is undeniably true, can make a beneficially “useful” case for the cause of Mormonism.
True and harmful. Here’s a true statement: “LDS Church officials operated a brothel to blackmail non-Mormon politicians.” Running houses of ill repute is not necessarily a good look for the church, but that claim can be backed up with historical records, including my own family history. I’d call this one detrimental or “harmful” to the cause, which probably explains why it has been repeatedly denied and omitted from pioneer histories. It is “not very useful” to use Elder Packer’s jargon.
False and harmful. The Salamander letter was a made-up forgery. Its contents would appear to be harmful to the Church’s claims, but they are demonstrably false. You might question why the Church wanted to suppress it while they thought it was true, but once exposed as false, anyone who references its forged contents to combat the mission of the Church could rightly be refuted.
False and useful: The dozens of archeological photographs in my 1980s Book of Mormon lesson manuals are presumably intended to add context but they are absolutely irrelevant to the lesson materials despite their misleading captions. The accompanying videos that I was supposed to show investigators containing so-called archeological proof of the Book of Mormon include blatant falsehoods. Despite containing false statements, the videos and manuals are beneficial or “useful” in dispelling questions and fortifying the faith of the readers, and – by all internal measures and appearances – strengthening the Kingdom of God.

So which of these four examples should be promoted, and which should be dismissed? I’d have no problem with #1 if someone wanted to promote it. As for #2, I feel it ought to be told, which is why I’ve included it in the next chapter. #3 makes for some bizarre reading, but shouldn’t be promoted as truth. As for #4, once effectively debunked, I don’t think the false theories should ever have seen the light of day again, at least not in an attempt to bolster the message.

These four cases seem obvious to me, but let’s step outside the LDS Church with a case study showing that it’s not always such a simple choice:

HMHS Britannic, the sister ship of the RMS Titanic, was converted to a hospital ship during the First World War. When an explosion ripped a hole in the hull, the captain radioed to the rest of the fleet that they had been struck by a German torpedo. Many of the crew who witnessed the explosion realized that the ship had actually run into a mine, but this information was never relayed to the other ships as part of the distress calls. When the “fake news” hit the press that the Germans had torpedoed a hospital ship, breaking all rules of engagement, the anger that galvanized in response helped to turn the tide of the war.

Sinking of HMHS Britannic © Ken Marschall

So if you were the First Mate, knowing that false information had been disseminated to your countrymen, would you bother to issue a correction and tell the truth? Or would you let the falsehood stand, knowing that it supports your cause?

Well, if this lie indeed helped end the war, so be it! Let the lie stand! Wouldn’t you agree? The truth in this case might have prolonged the deadliest conflict the planet had ever seen, potentially resulting in the alternate reality of an Allied defeat. Besides, all sorts of espionage was actively underway at the time, and neither side presumed to hold transparency as an underlying motive. If any nation’s spy agencies divulged all that is true, there would be nothing left for them to try to protect. Wasn’t a bit of negative PR aimed at the Kaiser worth the cost of a little lie to the British government?

Taking it back to Mormonism, my LDS family and friends have all gradually been made aware of some of the lies that have been disseminated by the Church over the last few decades. So what’s the difference here? Why do they let the lies stand while I claim that the truth should be told? How can they send their children around the world to disseminate a book claiming that Hor is Abraham, when he’s clearly not?

I believe the question comes down to whether we are at war. I believe my Mormon friends and family would say yes. If that is indeed the case, truth becomes irrelevant, and the effect of any piece of information on the war’s outcome – being either beneficial or detrimental to it – becomes the key consideration. If we are engaged in a raging battle with evil forces, wouldn’t that require clandestine operations, covert tactics, undercover espionage, and sly subterfuge? Or how about stratagem, to use a Mormon term that the good guys sometimes have to revert to in times of war?

War justifies subversive tactics because war just isn’t fair. So go ahead and trick your enemy; lie to them if needed. It’s all part of the game, after all; in Moroni’s words, it is “no sin.” I can certainly understand the motives of those who fight for a religious cause, including, for example, those on both sides during the crusades. Both sides believed they were trying to save heathens and infidels from hell, after all. Do I understand the motives? Yes. Condone the actions? Hell no!

Mormons live with the expectation that we’ll find out the rest of the story in the next life, proving that as long as we followed the direction of Church leaders, we will find ourselves having been in the right all along, even if we had to suppress the temporal truth in mortality. Just like the hindsight with which we can justify the propagation of misinformation about the Britannic, the ultimate explanation originating from an eternal perspective will absolve any deceit wrapped up in “lying for the Lord.” And boy will the doubters and haters be sorry at that point!

Fast forward to the 1980s, and we have two Cold War-era civilian airliners that were mistakenly shot out of the sky by paranoid military forces. The Korean Airlines flight that was shot down by the Soviets in 1983 and the Iranian passenger plane that was downed by the U.S. in 1988 share some striking similarities. The initial reactions by both of the guilty superpowers was identical: Deny, divert, blatantly lie! Preserve your own ideology’s reputation above all else!

Both incidents were utter tragedies for all of the innocent victims and their families. But looking back on it from today’s vantage point, it is not the outright lying and deceit that bothers me most about the aftermath. In fact, that reaction is to be expected given the hostility between nations at the time. What bothers me personally is my own inability to recognize the dichotomy at the time. When the Soviets were caught in their lie, I thought to myself, “what an evil regime,” and I hoped the truth would be proclaimed from the rooftops. When the U.S. was caught in its own lie, on the other hand, I thought, “of course we needed to preserve the Navy’s good name, let’s hope this goes away quickly,” since publicity around the tragedy would arm our enemies with anti-American sentiment. Why the differing reaction? The hypocrisy is obvious to me now, but only in hindsight: Propaganda and territorialism masked as patriotism!

Mass funerals in Iran for victims of Iran Air Flight 655

The missteps of those who prematurely pulled the triggers in these events might be blamed on the perceived state of emergency at the time. States of emergency warrant the adoption of martial law, under which truth no longer matters. Victory is the overarching cause, and truth is irrelevant until victory is attained.

Unfortunately, most religious zealots live in a state of perpetual martial law where victory trumps the truth on a daily basis. In that state, common folk implementing the will of their commanding officers are left having to assume that those issuing the orders have access to higher intelligence and will act in the best interest of their constituents; after all, you can’t blame the messenger!

If we have actually been embroiled in an unseen, all-out war, I guess I’ve been fighting on the wrong side all along. If this really is wartime, perhaps I ought to switch sides now and encourage subversion through clandestine, subversive tactics, trying to topple the LDS regime from the inside. I could pretend to be on board with the program, for example, while underhandedly attempting to dismantle it. Well, I have no desire to be that guy, but I understand that real wartime scenarios generate a demand for those sorts of characters. In that respect, I understand those who do take that approach with religion as well, secretly recording meeting minutes and temple ceremonies, for example, by lying their way through interviews to get their fake ID in the form of a recommend. Those who engage in these sorts of practices may feel that the rules of engagement no longer apply because there has been a declaration of war.

My preference, on the other hand, is to be honest about my concerns and to encourage change through mutually consensual progress – in the form of agreements and transparency between the leadership and the lay members.

I just can’t bring myself to adopt the notion that we are all foot soldiers in a timeless, global battle that warrants distorting or purposefully omitting the truth related to one selected religious body while exposing the dark secrets of all the others; but I admit I might be wrong about my assessment of the current state of war, or the lack thereof. I’m not blessed – or cursed as the case may be – with the ability to perceive anything in the supernatural spectrum that others in my life claim to possess. So I’m in no real position to comment on the matter, but if there is indeed an underlying, unseen war going on, I would have to believe that the battle is for kindness and perspective and standing up against malice and narrow-mindedness, not against verifiably legitimate documents that need to be manipulated, sanitized, and regurgitated in alternate form to protect reputations and avoid raising questions about the past. I just can’t convince myself that there could be a bona fide battle focused on getting souls to swallow reprocessed, bite-size portions and pass through gateways that are blocked by so much historical baggage that free-thinking people have to deprive themselves of all sensibilities to take each successive, requisite step. Sorry, but when you add the bigger picture in which even that arbitrarily absurd choice is only available to the smallest fraction of humanity, in my view that just can’t be the battle!

As difficult as I find it to accept that notion, I do accept and understand that many Mormons view the world through the lens of tactical binoculars. And I understand the inclination to sacrifice individual inclinations for what is seen as the greater good. This applies to many facets of life outside of religion. Let’s fast forward again and have a look at Clinton’s impeachment, for example. To me the case, although reprehensibly unfortunate, eventually provided a positive impact on the world as far as helping to give women a needed voice and showing that an intern can confront the President himself and be believed in the end. Billions upon billions of dollars were lost when the market reacted to the news of Clinton’s indiscretions, and the U.S. reputation in the world dropped considerably with each of the humiliating revelations surrounding the case. Was it worth it?

It seems like a noble cause to choose an individual over the system; in the movies that always seems to be the right thing to do. Maybe Clinton’s actions warranted taking down even the highest office of the nation; maybe the truth was more important than the economic and political consequences. But if you were a deeply patriotic victim yourself, knowing the effect that the revelation would have on the country, would you sacrifice yourself and stay silent to keep that system running? Those with much to lose did their utmost to silence the matter by confronting the accusers with these global consequences, trying to convince them to take the hit for the National team with their silence. Although that was a popular viewpoint at the time, nowadays there aren’t many voices of support for Clinton’s lies.

Taking the question from patriotism back to religion, if your belief system is perceived as an exclusive, universal truth, perhaps you would opt for taking the hit to keep that system intact. If someone really believes in an end-all system, it is perhaps understandable that they would give up their own life, their integrity, or their reputation to preserve that system. But sad experience has shown that people are – less understandably – willing to throw their own children under the bus if news of their abuse would shake the diocese, for example. Or as I have seen in my own Mormon circles, send their daughter away to avoid the bad reputation a Mormon family would get if they happen to acknowledge her pregnancy, ignore her wishes, and force an adoption through the repetition of prophetic mandates. Or tell their gay son to get with the program and find a good Mormon girl to cure his disease. Or disown their daughter for marrying a black man. Or send their gun-crazy kid to lessons where he learns that shedding blood is good if it saves a Godly nation. I have to admit that I share in the collective guilt of having participated in a program that promoted these things and more. These are real people that I really took the sacrament with in real chapels. Real people who really sacrificed those they claimed to love to avoid harming the reputation of an institution they loved even more…or perhaps better said, their own reputations within that institution.

When there is a failure within a religious institution or among any individuals who make up the religious body, there is an understandable tendency to cover it up. But in the bigger picture, those failures can be vital to progress and to the prevention of future shortcomings. The truth can be useful, even if it hurts. It may appear harmful in the short term, but in the end, it will benefit everything that really matters. Unless, of course, you’re under the paranoid delusion that everyone is out to get you and the devil needs propaganda to fuel the fire that he has raging against you. Then by all means, try to keep any ammunition out of his hands! God help us if that’s the case!

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

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I’m a big fan of allowing prospective missionaries to learn the full story before going out into the “field” trying to promote one doctored version of it. I’ve spoken to friends who have taken the deep dive into Mormon history themselves, and claim to be able to see things from both sides, but they wouldn’t dare share the things they find with their kids who are contemplating missionary service. It would be like feeding them indigestible meat too soon, as if they would get sick and keel over by learning the facts too early, while the slowly inoculating version, on the other hand, would digest quite comfortably.

To me, it’s like a delusional product salesman who is so sure the hawked product is awesome that he deletes the negative reviews as his customers are considering their own purchase. I’m not talking about fake, mud-slinging reviews, I’m talking about real situations that happened to real people who found out that the real product they purchased really didn’t do what the ads said they did, and weren’t even sourced from the materials claimed in the customs forms.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit dangerous?” I asked one of my friends recently, explaining that his son would be confronted with facts about Joseph Smith’s philandering and mistranslations – facts that nobody bothered to tell him about – before offering up a few years of his life?

His answer was that his children don’t need to hear the evidence for and against, because those who bring up the evidence against the Church are not the kind of people missionaries should be dealing with.

What? People who weigh things out reasonably don’t have any part in the Mormon village? Missionaries should only engage those with open hearts, I was told. As for the rest of the population who have Google at their disposal to fact-check the contents of the discussions after the missionaries leave, the message is clear: “Keep walking, there’s nothing for you here.”

The underlying message is that we want only people who act on emotion and ignore facts. True truth-seekers are out. People with a propensity for internet surfing shouldn’t be allowed in. People who think they deserve answers to their questions shouldn’t be engaged. Instead, we want to attract kids who want to learn English or who like to play baseball or soccer with missionaries but don’t give a damn about religion. They probably won’t bring up evidence against the Church, so they can be fed one side of the story and “protected” from anything negative. So that’s who we should be baptising? Crazy as it sounds, if you look at the statistics, apparently that has been the overwhelming consensus in many parts of the world.

I am guilty of having employed these tactics myself, not just in religion but in my professional life as well. In my former roles as a consultant, I have written up business plans that then came back to me with the red-lined instruction to remove the negative bits. I have complied with those requests out of my own self-interest. If I didn’t do it, somebody else surely would. There are people who produce these documents full time and make their money by selecting which bits to remove; it’s simply part of their daily routine. Much like Wolfgang, I complied, promoted the party line, and covered up the uncomfortable parts, feeling that it wasn’t my role to bring them up. I sure wasn’t comfortable with it the first time it happened. But then it got easier with each page, and I gradually got used to it. And the next year I didn’t bother to mention the risks at all. But in the end, when those redacted risks all came true, and I found myself with my butt on the line, I couldn’t say, “I told you so!” because I had no documentation to back it up.

Am I so unique after all? Every time I attend an industry conference I receive an e-mail upon its conclusion about how it was a great success. Well, I expect nothing less. I wouldn’t think the organizers would dive into any technical glitches, sub-par presentations, or upside-down finances, even if those had been true elements of the conference. So when I hear positive, glossy statement about conferences or other events, it doesn’t shock me. The purpose of the conference wrap-up is to get attendees to come back again next year. The whole truth might not be “useful” in serving that purpose and is understandably suppressed the same way Wolfgang knew he couldn’t include all of the internal risks in the public shareholder report.

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Binarity

I’m not putting easy, obvious, yes-or-no answers out there. If it were that easy, I could have quickly reached my conclusions without having to first walk myself through each of the hypothetical analogies like Wolfgang’s to determine out where I stand and how to navigate the grey areas. Back to the elusive taijitu that used to reflect my view of the world:

I now reject the pervading all-or-nothing mentality within Mormonism whereby anything can be simply classified as all true or all false. To keep up that façade within the Church, we have to suppress some truths while distorting, denying, or redefining others. The many scriptural quotes that are used to support that binary thought process can lead to the following, mutually exclusive, conflicting statements:

If any of it is true, all of it is true.
If any of it is false, all of it is false.

Let’s take speculation out of the verdict, ignoring feelings or internal beliefs. You’ll never conclusively be able to prove what someone says they saw or heard or felt. But if we limit the discussion around truth to just plain, event-based history, we can be more definitive. “Were you there?” That is an absolutely unarbitrary question. These atoms, molecules, and cells were either present at the reported time or they were not. They either moved in this direction or they did not. Some incidents can be classified in such a binary format: Was this piece of papyrus in Abraham’s possession? Was this thigh bone on a Lamanite battlefield? Was this rock on Adam’s altar? Either these things did occur, or they did not. Yes or no. Fact or fiction. True or false.

As far as the Mormon incarnation of the Gospel itself being true versus false, why should the question be limited to those two possibilities? Isn’t it entirely possible for someone to be inspired to do something and then let their own ego or ignorance get in the way? Sure, but if you take that view, can you claim that the whole Church is true? The more I look into it, the less realistic an “all-true” conclusion appears. I reject that reality!

So back to the two grey areas:

There are things that are true that undermine our cause. Mormons sweep these things under the carpet but perhaps shouldn’t.
There are things that are false that promote our cause. Mormons keep using these but perhaps shouldn’t.

Say you have always stood for a cause that benefits many, many people, devoting your whole life it, but a personal indiscretion is going to destroy it all. This was Jean Valjean’s dilemma. Of course, he’s the protagonist hero, so he stays true to his convictions; readers assume his self-sacrifice was the right answer in the end. But I don’t think that choice would be that clear to the common man, myself included. If I was absolutely convinced that no one would ever find out about a poor choice that I made, and if I could be confident that no harm would be done, would I bring the truth to light if the question were asked – just for truth’s sake? And if only one soul would suffer under a criminal cover-up, but many would benefit from it, shouldn’t that crime be committed? Isn’t that what Nephi himself proclaimed about Laban?

Now let’s apply the same question to a personal mission statement. If I had to choose some cause that I would wish to promote during the years I have left, something I hope would outlive me that I could pass along from my death bed, what would it be? I guess today my answer would be that I hope to have contributed something that helps people to care about each other, the planet, and themselves. To enjoy life, be good to others, and so on. Pretty ordinary stuff, I guess.

So when those I leave behind start sifting through my possessions, what if there is a box that contains a record of things I have done that run counter to that vision? You don’t want your enemies to latch onto every negative piece of information and destroy you with it – not if you believe your cause to be just! If you believe whole-heartedly in your cause, and if it trumps everything else, why would you ever expose those things that hurt your reputation? Should I burn that box now in anticipation of that day?

If you consider your reputation, your image, and your legacy to be as critical to your cause as VW’s branding is to its own standing, are you going to issue one whitewashed document with a public cover and another, separate volume with internal warnings to your own posterity?

If you’ve ever made a mistake – as of course we all have – your past can come back to haunt you, even long after you are gone. Enough legacies have been posthumously destroyed by scandals to make that point a thousand times over. My mistakes form part of my own history. Some of them undermine the causes I want to promote. Or do they? When I have done things contradict the cause I wish to promote, would the knowledge of my activities convince others that those ideals are not worth chasing?

I would hope not. To me it seems the legacies that have been destroyed are generally due to the exposition of secrets and cover-ups. When someone of their own volition, without blackmail or coercion, owns their mistakes, a new, more realistic, more effective legacy can be forged.

When I voiced my own concerns about the Church to those in supposed authority over me, I was told that it’s ok to question these things for myself, as long as I keep quiet and don’t rock the boat. In their eyes, speaking up would not be “very useful” to the cause. The only option I was given was to bury my objections, stay silent for the next couple of decades, and comfortably leave this life without ever having referenced the voyage of discovery that toppled my former convictions.

I couldn’t do it. If you’re reading this today, it means I just couldn’t manage to keep my big mouth shut. Unfortunately, as I have seen, you instantly lose your validity when you become an outsider to Mormonism, but outside the bubble is the only place I can feel genuinely comfortable at the moment; so my voice may fall on deaf ears given my current state of disillusionment, but so be it. This is part of my story, and promoting the truth is part of my cause.

I hope you stand for your own cause, whatever it may be. It may differ from mine, but reaching our unique, individual conclusions and expressing the truth of our own pathways to each other is our right as fellow humans. When you write your own history, I would hope that you will want to advance your cause at whatever cost is required…except the truth. Yes, some things that are true are harmful to a cause, and the assumed advice behind Kant’s words – and Packer’s paraphrase – is that the truth should be selectively omitted when needed to avoid harming the cause. But if the cause comes at the price of truth, then we might counter those words with the personal view of J. Reuben Clark (who embarked on a similar journey as I have begun and yet still got a BYU building named after himself): “If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed.”

I’ll close with a brief public service announcement from Brother Will:

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[Next: Chapter 7: Character Witness ]