"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/bad-black-people-why-bill-oreilly-is.html

***

Ferguson case raises question: Where's the data on officer-involved killings?

• No national database exists on police killings and whether officers are charged
• A 1994 federal law called for the creation of annual database on excessive use of force
• A pilot study found that creating a U.S. database would take a decade and cost $1 billion
• Nonetheless, researchers and activists are calling for database on police force

(CNN) -- As a Missouri grand jury nears a decision on whether to indict Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson, some people seethe with suspicion that, in the end, nothing will happen.

On the street where Wilson killed teenager Michael Brown and in surrounding neighborhoods, many say the officer won't be indicted because, they contend, cops rarely are.

"After what I witnessed from the 40 years I've been in St Louis, I would say I don't think there will be an indictment," protester Larry Miller said. "I consider the killing of Michael Brown a modern-day lynching."

Photos: Emotions run high in Ferguson

New media flourishes in Ferguson protests

Mom: Cops killed mentally ill son

Ferguson residents are on edge

Ferguson fights media over public records

Conventional wisdom says it's unusual for an officer to be charged in a suspect's killing. In reality, it's hard to get to the bottom of the issue because no official survey tracks officer-involved killings and why an officer is or isn't charged in the aftermath.

"Nobody has that data," said criminologist Philip Stinson of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who studies allegations of crimes by police. "It's not on any form that's required."

Information on how frequently a department uses force -- deadly or otherwise -- is deemed by experts as key in building public trust, and such data could help defuse suspicions seen in communities such as Ferguson.

The tensions in that city are heightened by the fact that Wilson, who is white, shot an unarmed black teen, Brown. Wilson's defenders say he acted in self-defense. They wear the legend "I am Darren Wilson" on T-shirts and wristbands.

Brown's backers cite witness accounts contending Brown had his hands up when the fatal bullets hit him. "The whole damn system is guilty as hell!" protesters chanted in a recent faceoff with shield-toting officers.

Missing check box

Cold, hard stats will hardly assuage the pain of families whose loved ones were killed when police used force.

Whatever the total number may be, just one killing can devastate a community and its police force, as in Ferguson.

At its core, the issue highlights the most powerful act that an officer, or anyone else, can do: To end someone's life.

From the officer's side of the gun, numbers may not paint the complete picture of how cops put themselves in harm's way daily on behalf of the public. They, too, get killed in the line of duty.

Some police departments do provide figures on the use of force, but the sample does not constitute a national portrait, experts say.

The problem begins with police reports: They don't contain a check box to indicate whether someone who has been arrested is an officer, for example.

"There's nothing in any of those systems where you would put down that a cop got arrested," Stinson said.

This void exists despite the federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. It requires the government to keep "data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers" and "an annual summary of the data."

If you send a survey to a police department, we're not sure they're going to tell the truth.
Criminologist Philip Stinson

Federal study: No excessive force in 99.6% of calls

Such a database was deemed unfeasible, according to researchers of a pilot study that the federal government funded after the law's passage.

The pilot study also found that police rarely used excessive force between 1991 and 2000, despite the severe 1991 beating by Los Angeles police of Rodney King, which was captured on video and played and replayed on television screens across the United States.

Unlike the teen in the Ferguson case, King recovered from his injuries. The grand jury in King's case indicted four officers in the beating, but three were acquitted and the fourth officer's case ended in mistrial in 1992 -- which incited riots in Los Angeles far more severe than Ferguson's violent protests. The riots left more than 50 people dead.

Now the nation wonders whether Ferguson will erupt in chaos, too, if the Missouri grand jury doesn't indict Wilson. As it turned out in the King case, the four officers were later indicted again, on alleged federal civil rights violations. Two were convicted, and the other two were acquitted. No public disturbances followed that verdict. In the Ferguson case, a federal civil rights inquiry also is under way.

For all the attention Rodney King's beating received, however, the federal pilot study, published in 2001, found that "excessive force was not used in 99.583% of all reported cases."

Police firing more than 40 bullets

Sen.: Agitators not welcome in Ferguson

Gray: Zero tolerance for police too

Grand jury hears key Ferguson testimony

When civilians die or become injured at the hands of police, controversy arises, even in cases where charges did result.

For example, in 1999, four plainclothes New York officersfired 41 shots at unarmed Guinea immigrant Amadou Diallo, 22.

The officers in the special street crimes unit thought Diallo was reaching for a gun when it was really his wallet. They were charged but later acquitted of murder, and the U.S. Justice Department concluded it didn't have enoughevidence to prosecute the officers.

Diallo's family later settled a wrongful death suit against the city for $3 million.

In 2012, police in Saginaw, Michigan, fired 46 bullets at a knife-wielding homeless man, Milton Hall, 49, in a parking lot next to a shuttered Chinese restaurant, in full view of passing motorists. A video of the incident was obtained by CNN weeks later, and a controversy arose over why officers fired so many shots at Hall, who was just a few yards away.

None of the officers was charged, and the U.S. Justice Department decided against pursuing federal criminal civil rights charges.

"It's a tough job"

When a police officer does come under scrutiny after using force, a variety of factors can make prosecution unlikely.

For one thing, indicting an officer is difficult because the law lets police use increasing levels of force to protect his or her life and that of the public, legal experts say.

Prosecutors also may be keenly aware that jurors --and potential jurors -- may likely trust an officer's version of events, said criminal defense attorney Page Pate of Atlanta, who has represented several officers in excessive force cases.

"They know it's a tough job," Pate said. "And they put themselves in the shoes of the officer, and they say, 'Look, I don't want to be in that position. We trust you to do the right thing.'

"Once the jurors hear from the officer, and if they believe that officer, and if his explanation makes sense, they're going to defer to him," he said.

Elected prosecutors must walk a line when investigating a cop. On one hand, they have a close relationship with police. On the other hand, they must be responsive to constituents, and sometimes those constituents want an officer to be arrested after a suspect's death.

"The prosecutor can be impartial, but in the real world, it can be difficult at times," said Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations.

Police agencies, meanwhile, investigate thoroughly any time an officer uses force that hurts or kills a civilian, they say.

Also, in 49 of 50 states, a licensing commission regulates police officers' credentials. Those commissions can and do review officer conduct, Johnson said.

"Every cop out there has to assume they are being watched or recorded, and there are dozens of iPhones available on any city block," Johnson said. "I don't think it's fair for critics to say that officers are trying to hide stuff. That belief went out with Rodney King that force is not going to be noticed."

Biggest study drew responses from a fraction of agencies

The 1991-2000 pilot study was the "most significant use-of-force study ever done," said John Firman, director of research for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which authored the report.

Only a fraction of the nation's law agencies participated, however.

In all, it reviewed 45 million police calls and 177,000 use-of-force incidents; it found that police used force at a rate of 3.61 times per 10,000 calls for service.

Six officers, all men, died in using firearms between 1995 and 2000, the study found.

During the same period, 17 suspects died when police used physical force or firearms, the study said.

The report cost $2.5 million and took three years to complete. Even then, the study secured responses from only 564 of the nation's 18,000 law agencies, Firman said.

To continue for all law agencies "would have taken a decade and cost a billion dollars," Firman said.

The numbers

The FBI says there were an average of about 400 "justifiable homicides" a year by law officers in the line of duty between 2008 and 2012.

In his own research, Bowling Green State University's Stinson has documented 31 cases where a state and local officer was arrested for an on-duty, gun-related murder or non-negligent manslaughter from 2005 to 2011. He found 10 other cases in that time where an officer was arrested for negligent manslaughter in a gun-related incident that happened while the officer was on duty.

His analysis relies on news accounts and court records -- not formal federal statistics.

Overall, Stinson said, he identified 5,545 officers as being arrested on a variety of charges. Roughly 765,000 sworn officers work for state and local police forces in the United States.

"So it's a small number," Stinson said. "I think these arrests are a very small fraction of the firearm shooting cases by police officer of citizens."

One attempt for a public database

The website Fatal Encounters was created by a Nevada journalist devoted to crowd-sourced "data about people killed by police" since 2000.

So far, the website has collected 2,476 confirmed instances of officer-involved killings deemed justified or suspicious, but even those statistics are "barely scratching the surface," said D. Brian Burghart, the website's founder and editor of the weekly newspaper Reno News and Review.

"It only gets talked about when there's a street riot or when somebody brings it to the media's attention," Burghart said of officer-involved killings. "Due to things like social media, I think the public is much more aware that this (shortage of data) is an issue."

"The new civil right"

On behalf of many individuals killed by police, Pamela Meanes leads the National Bar Association's "War on Police Brutality" and is targeting 25 cities and 25 states with open records requests -- seeking the number of unarmed individuals who have been killed or injured by police or while in custody.

She calls her efforts "the new civil right."

"I think there's a (data) gap because people don't recognize that this is an epidemic in the country," said Meanes, who heads the nation's oldest and largest group of African-American lawyers. "It"s not a black and white issue. It's a blue issue."

Meanes contends that charges against an officer are rare because of what she calls "vague" standards on justifiable and excessive force.

"The law says that an officer has the authority to elevate that level of force to protect his life, and that is arbitrary and capricious," Meanes said.

Her group is pushing federal legislation to define better the acceptable and excessive use of police force.

"Every officer is not bad," she said. "This is not a war on police departments. This is an effort to get rid of bad police officers -- just like we want to get rid of bad lawyers."

Complete coverage on Ferguson

"238 Presidential Historians Rank Obama Near Top; Dubyah Near Bottom"

You Americans Have No Idea Just How Good You Have It With Obama

Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections. Consider, right now in America, corporate profits are at record highs, the country's adding 200,000 jobs per month, unemployment is below 6%, U.S. gross national product growth is the best of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The dollar is at its strongest levels in years, the stock market is near record highs, gasoline prices are falling, there's no inflation, interest rates are the lowest in 30 years, U.S. oil imports are declining, U.S. oil production is rapidly increasing, the deficit is rapidly declining, and the wealthy are still making astonishing amounts of money.

America is leading the world once again and respected internationally — in sharp contrast to the Bush years. Obama brought soldiers home from Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden.

So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason.

When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?

Richard Brunt

Victoria, British Columbia

attribution: None Specified

How is it that 6 years of opposing everything isn't "poisoning the well"?

If President Obama doesn't move on immigration, they are going to oppose everything he does.

Republicans are going to oppose everything President Obama does and accuse him of not working with them no matter what.

I'm not sure what part of this story you don't get. As reporters in the media, you would think you would notice this trend.

Why would anyone who's watched Republicans over the last 6 years think anything different?

Yet you keep highlighting the same ridiculous stories over and over again. Even whenRepublicans tell you that they're going to do nothing but oppose President Obama, you keep insisting that maybe, just maybe, there's something President Obama could do to change this.

Why do reporters so rarely ask Republicans what a compromise might look like?

See? When it happens, Republicans admit that the only way to work with Republicans is to do what Republicans want.

The corporate media then refers to this intransigence as "principled". If you had to work with people whose definition of compromise is getting everything they want, you would probably refer to these people as "assholes".  

We know exactly what Republicans are going to do. Especially after winning an election. They're going to start more fires. They're going to poison anything that's left in the well. And the bull(shit) is already flying.

If I were President Obama, I would actually find this freeing because you know exactly what the Republican Party is going to do for the next two years. Negotiation attempts are going to be met with obstruction, blame, and finger pointing. If you're going to get the blame anyways, why not do what's right?  

It is amazing though that the media buys this "bull" shit that Republicans want to work together. If the media would ask what Republicans are willing to compromise on or call out Republicans for their strategy of stop, drop and rage, maybe government wouldn't be such a mess.

There's two reasons our government is f*cked up. Many people think these two reasons are Republicans and Democrats. People think this because this is the story that corporate media runs: gridlock. Evil Democrats and principled Republicans locking horns in a battle for America.

The real story looks like this. Democrats look for areas of common ground. Moderate Republicans are able to find some areas of common ground. Ted Cruz (or some other extremist) runs to the media and calls anyone who wants to compromise a communist and proposes destroying the government instead. The media runs with it.

All the politicians in the middle cower in fear of the whipped up fervor of the self-righteous right. Nothing gets done. Republicans blame it on Obama not being willing to compromise.

Our country is f*cked up because of extremist Republicans like Ted Cruz and a cowardly corporate media too afraid to run a story that might somehow offend the delicate sensibilities of a certain segment of their audience.

I guess it's easier to keep running the same story that maybe this time the moderates are in charge. Maybe this time Lucy won't pull the football away.

---

David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.

"The Psychiatric Diagnosis Of American Conservatives: Folie à Plusieurs"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-psychiatric-diagnosis-of-american.html

"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/arrested-development-american.htm

"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice.  The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization.  We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal.  Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good.  The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”  

"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton

"Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/07/conservatives-scare-more-easily-than.html

"Are Republicans Insane?"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/10/are-republicans-insane.html

"The Republican Party Is A Satanic Cult"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-republican-party-is-satanic-cult.html

Jindal Criticizes The Stupid Party: "Simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/11/bobby-jindal-criticizes-party-that.html

"Bank On It: The South Is Always Wrong"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/bank-on-it-south-is-always-wrong.html

Bill Maher: The Zombie Life Cycle Of Republican Lies. They Never - Ever - Die

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/bill-maher-zombie-life-cycle-of.html

George McGovern: "The Case For Liberalism, A Defense Of The Future Against The Past"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/01/george-mcgovern-case-for-liberalism.html

Pico Iyer on What Leonard Cohen Teaches Us about Presence and the Art of Stillness

“Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments,” Alan Lightman wrote in his sublime meditation on science and spirituality, “and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.” In his conversation with E.O. Wilson, the poet Robert Hass described beauty as a “paradox of stillness and motion.” But in our Productivity Age of perpetual motion, it’s increasingly hard — yet increasingly imperative — to honor stillness, to build pockets of it into our lives, so that our faith in beauty doesn’t become half-hearted, lopsided, crippled. The delicate bridling of that paradox is what novelist and essayist Pico Iyer explores in The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (public library | IndieBound) — a beautifully argued case for the unexpected pleasures of “sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it,” revealed through one man’s sincere record of learning to “take care of his loved ones, do his job, and hold on to some direction in a madly accelerating world.”

I’d come up here in order to write about my host’s near-silent, anonymous life on the mountain, but for the moment I lost all sense of where I was. I could hardly believe that this rabbinical-seeming gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses and wool cap was in truth the singer and poet who’d been renowned for thirty years as an international heartthrob, a constant traveler, and an Armani-clad man of the world.

Leonard Cohen had come to this Old World redoubt to make a life — an art — out of stillness. And he was working on simplifying himself as fiercely as he might on the verses of one of his songs, which he spends more than ten years polishing to perfection. The week I was visiting, he was essentially spending seven days and nights in a bare meditation hall, sitting stock-still. His name in the monastery, Jikan, referred to the silence between two thoughts.

[...]

One evening — four in the morning, the end of December — Cohen took time out from his meditations to walk down to my cabin and try to explain what he was doing here.

Sitting still, he said with unexpected passion, was “the real deep entertainment” he had found in his sixty-one years on the planet. “Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available within this activity.”

Was he kidding? Cohen is famous for his mischief and ironies.

He wasn’t, I realized as he went on. “What else would I be doing?” he asked. “Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.”

Typically lofty and pitiless words; living on such close terms with silence clearly hadn’t diminished his gift for golden sentences. But the words carried weight when coming from one who seemed to have tasted all the pleasures that the world has to offer.

Sitting still with his aged Japanese friend, sipping Courvoisier, and listening to the crickets deep into the night, was the closest he’d come to finding lasting happiness, the kind that doesn’t change even when life throws up one of its regular challenges and disruptions.

“Nothing touches it,” Cohen said, as the light came into the cabin, of sitting still… Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.

We’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off — our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.

Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources — it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere, as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one’s senses.

Going nowhere … isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

It’s only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. And it’s only by going nowhere — by sitting still or letting my mind relax — that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that’s necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut.

The Mirror and the Meme: A 600-Year History of the Selfie

In 1977, long before the social web as we know it existed, Susan Sontag foresaw a new dawn of “aesthetic consumerism” sparked by photography’s social aspect. Today, nowhere is this phenomenon more glaring than in the ubiquitous selfie. But how did we end up with this peculiar Möbius strip of self-image, turning our gaze inward and outward at the same time?

Glass supports this entire network: we take pictures through glass lenses, store and manipulate them on circuit boards made of fiberglass, transmit them around the world via glass cables, and enjoy them on screens made of glass. It’s silicon dioxide all the way down the chain.

For the first time, mirrors became part of the fabric of everyday life. This was a revelation on the most intimate of levels: before mirrors came along, the average person went through life without ever seeing a truly accurate representation of his or her face, just fragmentary, distorted glances in pools of water or polished metals.

Mirrors appeared so magical that they were quickly integrated into somewhat bizarre sacred rituals: During holy pilgrimages, it became common practice for well-off pilgrims to take a mirror with them. When visiting sacred relics, they would position themselves so that they could catch sight of the bones in the mirror’s reflection. Back home, they would then show off these mirrors to friends and relatives, boasting that they had brought back physical evidence of the relic by capturing the reflection of the sacred scene. Before turning to the printing press, Gutenberg had the start-up idea of manufacturing and selling small mirrors for departing pilgrims.

Filippo Brunelleschi employed a mirror to invent linear perspective in painting, by drawing a reflection of the Florence Baptistry instead of his direct perception of it. The art of the late Renaissance is heavily populated by mirrors lurking inside paintings, most famously in Diego Velázquez’s inverted masterpiece, Las Meninas, which shows the artist (and the extended royal family) in the middle of painting King Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain. The entire image is captured from the point of view of two royal subjects sitting for their portrait; it is, in a very literal sense, a painting about the act of painting. The king and queen are visible only in one small fragment of the canvas, just to the right of Velázquez himself: two small, blurry images reflected back in a mirror. As a tool, the mirror became an invaluable asset to painters who could now capture the world around them in a far more realistic fashion, including the detailed features of their own faces.

'Las Meninas' by Diego Velázquez, 1656

When you wish to see whether the general effect of your picture corresponds with that of the object represented after nature, take a mirror and set it so that it reflects the actual thing, and then compare the reflection with your picture, and consider carefully whether the subject of the two images is in conformity with both, studying especially the mirror. The mirror ought to be taken as a guide.

At the exact moment that the glass lens was allowing us to extend our vision to the stars or microscopic cells, glass mirrors were allowing us to see ourselves for the first time. It set in motion a reorientation of society that was more subtle, but no less transformative, than the reorientation of our place in the universe that the telescope engendered.

[...]

The mirror played a direct role in allowing artists to paint themselves and invent perspective as a formal device; and shortly thereafter a fundamental shift occurred in the consciousness of Europeans that oriented them around the self in a new way, a shift that would ripple across the world (and that is still rippling).

The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles Palace

The self-centered world played well with the early forms of modern capitalism that were thriving in places like Venice and Holland (home to those masters of painterly introspection, Dürer and Rembrandt). Likely, these various forces complemented each other: glass mirrors were among the first high-tech furnishings for the home, and once we began gazing into those mirrors, we began to see ourselves differently, in ways that encouraged the market systems that would then happily sell us more mirrors…

The mirror doesn’t “force” the Renaissance to happen; it “allows” it to happen.

[...]

Without a technology that enabled humans to see a clear reflection of reality, including their own faces, the particular constellation of ideas in art and philosophy and politics that we call the Renaissance would have had a much more difficult time coming into being.

The mirror helped invent the modern self, in some real but unquantifiable way. That much we should agree on. Whether that was a good thing in the end is a separate question, one that may never be settled conclusively.

The Day Dostoyevsky Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Dream

One November night in the 1870s, legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky(November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) discovered the meaning of life in a dream — or, at least, the protagonist in his final short story did. The piece, which first appeared in the altogether revelatory A Writer’s Diary(public library) under the title “The Dream of a Queer Fellow” and was later published separately as The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, explores themes similar to those in Dostoyevsky’s 1864 novel Notes from the Underground, considered the first true existential novel. True to Stephen King’s assertion that “good fiction is the truth inside the lie,” the story sheds light on Dostoyevsky’s personal spiritual and philosophical bents with extraordinary clarity — perhaps more so than any of his other published works. The contemplation at its heart falls somewhere between Tolstoy’s tussle with the meaning of life and Philip K. Dick’s hallucinatory exegesis.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871

I knew for certain that I would shoot myself that night, but how long I would sit by the table — that I did not know. I should certainly have shot myself, but for that little girl.

You see: though it was all the same to me, I felt pain, for instance. If any one were to strike me, I should feel pain. Exactly the same in the moral sense: if anything very pitiful happened, I would feel pity, just as I did before everything in life became all the same to me. I had felt pity just before: surely, I would have helped a child without fail. Why did I not help the little girl, then? It was because of an idea that came into my mind then. When she was pulling at me and calling to me, suddenly a question arose before me, which I could not answer. The question was an idle one; but it made me angry. I was angry because of my conclusion, that if I had already made up my mind that I would put an end to myself to-night, then now more than ever before everything in the world should be all the same to me. Why was it that I felt it was not all the same to me, and pitied the little girl? I remember I pitied her very much: so much that I felt a pain that was even strange and incredible in my situation…

It seemed clear that if I was a man and not a cipher yet, and until I was changed into a cipher, then I was alive and therefore could suffer, be angry and feel shame for my actions. Very well. But if I were to kill myself, for instance, in two hours from now, what is the girl to me, and what have I to do with shame or with anything on earth? I am going to be a cipher, an absolute zero. Could my consciousness that I would soon absolutely cease to exist, and that therefore nothing would exist, have not the least influence on my feeling of pity for the girl or on my sense of shame for the vileness I had committed?

It became clear to me that life and the world, as it were, depended upon me. I might even say that the world had existed for me alone. I should shoot myself, and then there would be no world at all, for me at least. Not to mention that perhaps there will really be nothing for any one after me, and the whole world, as soon as my consciousness is extinguished, will also be extinguished like a phantom, as part of my consciousness only, and be utterly abolished, since perhaps all this world and all these men are myself alone.

One strange consideration suddenly presented itself to me. If I had previously lived on the moon or in Mars, and I had there been dishonored and disgraced so utterly that one can only imagine it sometimes in a dream or a nightmare, and if I afterwards found myself on earth and still preserved a consciousness of what I had done on the other planet, and if I knew besides that I would never by any chance return, then, if I were to look at the moon from the earth — would it be all the same to me or not? Would I feel any shame for my action or not? The questions were idle and useless, for the revolver was already lying before me, and I knew with all my being that this thing would happen for certain: but the questions excited me to rage. I could not die now, without having solved this first. In a word, that little girl saved me, for my questions made me postpone pulling the trigger.

Dreams are extraordinarily strange. One thing appears with terrifying clarity, with the details finely set like jewels, while you leap over another, as though you did not notice it at all — space and time, for instance. It seems that dreams are the work not of mind but of desire, not of the head but of the heart… In a dream things quite incomprehensible come to pass. For instance, my brother died five years ago. Sometimes I see him in a dream: he takes part in my affairs, and we are very excited, while I, all the time my dream goes on, know and remember perfectly that my brother is dead and buried. Why am I not surprised that he, though dead, is still near me and busied about me? Why does my mind allow all that?

I felt no pain, but it seemed to me that with the report, everything in me was convulsed, and everything suddenly extinguished. It was terribly black all about me. I became as though blind and numb, and I lay on my back on something hard. I could see nothing, neither could I make any sound. People were walking and making a noise about me: the captain’s bass voice, the landlady’s screams… Suddenly there was a break. I am being carried in a closed coffin. I feel the coffin swinging and I think about that, and suddenly for the first time the idea strikes me that I am dead, quite dead. I know it and do not doubt it; I cannot see nor move, yet at the same time I feel and think. But I am soon reconciled to that, and as usual in a dream I accept the reality without a question.

Now I am being buried in the earth. Every one leaves me and I am alone, quite alone. I do not stir… I lay there and — strange to say — I expected nothing, accepting without question that a dead man has nothing to expect. But it was damp. I do not know how long passed — an hour, a few days, or many days. Suddenly, on my left eye which was closed, a drop of water fell, which had leaked through the top of the grave. In a minute fell another, then a third, and so on, every minute. Suddenly, deep indignation kindled in my heart and suddenly in my heart I felt physical pain. ‘It’s my wound,’ I thought. ‘It’s where I shot myself. The bullet is there.’ And all the while the water dripped straight on to my closed eye. Suddenly, I cried out, not with a voice, for I was motionless, but with all my being, to the arbiter of all that was being done to me.

“Whosoever thou art, if thou art, and if there exists a purpose more intelligent than the things which are now taking place, let it be present here also. But if thou dost take vengeance upon me for my foolish suicide, then know, by the indecency and absurdity of further existence, that no torture whatever that may befall me, can ever be compared to the contempt which I will silently feel, even through millions of years of martyrdom.”

I cried out and was silent. Deep silence lasted a whole minute. One more drop even fell. But I knew and believed, infinitely and steadfastly, that in a moment everything would infallibly change. Suddenly, my grave opened. I do not know whether it had been uncovered and opened, but I was taken by some dark being unknown to me, and we found ourselves in space. Suddenly, I saw. It was deep night; never, never had such darkness been! We were borne through space and were already far from the earth. I asked nothing of him who led me. I was proud and waited. I assured myself that I was not afraid, and my heart melted with rapture at the thought that I was not afraid. I do not remember how long we rushed through space, and I cannot imagine it. It happened as always in a dream when you leap over space and time and the laws of life and mind, and you stop only there where your heart delights.

The 1845 depiction of a galaxy that inspired Van Gogh’s 'The Starry Night,' from Michael Benson's 'Cosmigraphics.' Click image for more.

Suddenly a familiar yet most overwhelming emotion shook me through. I saw our sun. I knew that it could not be our sun, which had begotten our earth, and that we were an infinite distance away, but somehow all through me I recognized that it was exactly the same sun as ours, its copy and double. A sweet and moving delight echoed rapturously through my soul. The dear power of light, of that same light which had given me birth, touched my heart and revived it, and I felt life, the old life, for the first time since my death.

Oh, instantly, at the first glimpse of their faces I understood everything, everything!

Oh, now — life, life! I lifted my hands and called upon the eternal truth, not called, but wept. Rapture, ineffable rapture exalted all my being. Yes, to live…

All are tending to one and the same goal, at least all aspire to the same goal, from the wise man to the lowest murderer, but only by different ways. It is an old truth, but there is this new in it: I cannot go far astray. I saw the truth. I saw and know that men could be beautiful and happy, without losing the capacity to live upon the earth. I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men… I saw the truth, I did not invent it with my mind. I saw, saw, and her living image filled my soul for ever. I saw her in such consummate perfection that I cannot possibly believe that she was not among men. How can I then go astray? … The living image of what I saw will be with me always, and will correct and guide me always. Oh, I am strong and fresh, I can go on, go on, even for a thousand years.

[...]

And it is so simple… The one thing is — love thy neighbor as thyself — that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.

Adrienne Rich on Lying, What “Truth” Really Means, and the Alchemy of Human Possibility

Long before Sam Harris’s memorable assertion that lying is “both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood,” long before psychologists identified the four most reliable ways to spot a liar, Adrienne Richwrote beautifully about what is actually at stake when we lie and how lying in all of its permutations — especially those subtle everyday evasions and untruths we tend to attribute to circumstance or to the misguided mercy of sparing others pain — chips away at our basic humanity.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

The liar lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control.

The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

There is nothing simple or easy about this idea. There is no “the truth,” “a truth” — truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.

This is why the effort to speak honestly is so important. Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler — for the liar — than it really is, or ought to be.

In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives.

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.

[...]

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.

When relationships are determined by manipulation, by the need for control, they may possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but they cease to be interesting. They are repetitious; the shock of human possibilities has ceased to reverberate through them.

It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.

It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

The possibility of life between us.

We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: “In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville.” You tell me: “She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends.” You tell me: “It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining.” Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only by sight, this morning’s weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.

[...]

When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.

The lie is a short-cut through another’s personality.

Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze itself; it has to be created between people.

[...]

Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it’s a movement into evolution.

The Language of Lying: Animated Primer on How to Detect Deception

Our yearning to discern deception so that we can protect ourselves from abuse, is ancient and almost primal — a marketable commodity for mystics and media manipulators alike. In one of the best explorations of the subject, Sam Harris defined lying as “both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood.” Susan Sontag wrote in her diary that “ordinary language is an accretion of lies.” But language itself, it turns out, is a remarkable lie-detector — the closest we can get to peering into another’s mind to understand motive and recognize deception.

1. Liars reference themselves less when making deceptive statements. They write or talk more about others, often using the third person to distance and disassociate themselves from their life.
2. Liars tend to be more negative because, on a subconscious level, they feel guilty about lying.
3. Liars typically explain events in simple terms, since our brains struggle to build a complex lie. Judgment and evaluation are complex things for our brains to compute.
4. Even though liars keep descriptions simple, they tend to use longer and more convoluted sentence structure, inserting unnecessary words and irrelevant but factual-sounding details in order to pad the lie.

On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times.

[...]

Lying is complex. It’s woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We’re deeply ambivalent about the truth. We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don’t understand the gaps in our lives… We’re against lying, but we’re covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It’s as old as breathing. It’s part of our culture, it’s part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World.

[...]

When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, “Hey, my world, our world, it’s going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized.” And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit.