speaking truth essay

How I Learned to Speak My Truth at a Silent Meditation Retreat

O f course, there wasn’t a plunger. There’s never a plunger when you need one. But there’s always an audience: in this case, three women sitting on the other side of the thin bathroom door waiting for their turn to use a toilet which was now horribly, hopelessly clogged. I sweat over the lid trying to devise a solution but could barely hear myself think over the chorus to Leonard Cohen’s “Closing Time,” which played a relentless loop in my head, as it would every day of this retreat, at a perfect-acoustics, full-volume blare. I was three days into a 10-day, silent meditation, and absolutely at the end of my rope.

“Sorry to break the noble silence,” I finally told my fellow meditators. “But that toilet is clogged.” It was the first thing I’d said in three days. The words felt like poetry on my lips.

When I told friends my plan to attend the program, they were justifiably incredulous. “You can’t shut-up for 10 minutes, let alone 10 days!” they protested. (They were—and remain—correct.) But my then boyfriend was an avid meditator, and had raved about the program since we first met. Vipassana, a meditation practice originating in India over 2,500 years ago, had utterly changed his life, he told me. It made him calm, self-connected. I had just quit my day job to pursue writing full-time, and all I could sell was an article about how to make latkes. I had time to kill, is what I mean.

I said, “Ok!” to the 10-day Vipassana meditation for the same reason I said “Ok!” to moving to Chicago with him. Because I thought there was something wrong with me for instead thinking, “Run!” Love, I speculated, was the noble pursuit of making two people fit together. My pieces didn’t quite squeeze into the jigsaw puzzle of our relationship, but I thought this might sand down their edges. My boyfriend was so good, I thought (still think), and I desperately wanted to be good too.

Read More: How Listening to Silence Changes Our Brains

So off I went, first to Chicago, then the middle of seemingly nowhere, for the retreat. I signed away my wallet and cellphone; I listened to the rules: No speaking, no eye contact, no physical contact, no drugs or alcohol, no sex or masturbation, no technology, and (scariest to me) no writing. I felt like screaming, but I trusted my boyfriend more than my own instincts; if this was good for him, this will be good for me, I assured my racing heart.

Had I bothered researching Vipassana prior to attending one, I would have read plenty about the hours. We awoke at 4 a.m. each day to make it to our first meditation by 4:30 a.m. After two hours of that, we’d congregate for our 6:30 a.m. breakfast. Then a brief break. Then more meditation. Lunch. A break. More meditation. Tea. More meditation. Then a viewing of a taped lecture by an esteemed teacher of the practice. More meditation. Then bedtime to prepare to wake up and do it all again.

I had little experience with 4 a.m. prior, but it’s an eerie hour. The sky is ink-black and, in this far-flung Illinois town, littered with innumerable stars, seemingly close together but in reality, separated by vast gulfs of empty space. On our dark walks to the meditation hall, the morning chill sunk deep into my bones, and the silent stretch of land surrounding the site loomed menacing and black. “What the hell am I doing here,” I wondered. The question extended beyond the worn grass and murky pond of the campus.

In our nightly lectures, the teacher encouraged us not to think while meditating, and when a thought inevitably did cross our minds, to pass it aside without judgment. I floundered at this initially. Unintentionally, I’d screen entire films in my head (mostly M. Night Shyamalan, because even my subconscious has no taste), and analyze years-old interactions.

Constantly, helplessly, my mind kept replaying “Closing Time,” for which, unfortunately, I didn’t know all the lyrics. The result was a horrible mental performance in which Cohen would croon “And the bupbupbupbup dun-dun and the ladadadada and the Johnny Walker wisdom runnin’ high,” Plus, the campus’s picturesque geese were in the midst of mating season, so Cohen’s half-wrong lyrics were punctuated by the honking of fornicating waterfowl.

What I mean is meditating was difficult for me. But so was the time spent not meditating. Have you ever heard a cafeteria full of people eating in silence? An entire room echoing with the sound of conversation-less human mastication—all wet chewing and slippery gulps, suppressed belches and scraping silverware.

To my relief, meditating became easier, slowly, as the first days of the course passed. Whereas initially I couldn’t sit for five minutes without needing to shift my hips, I found myself still for longer and longer stretches of time. My hummingbird brain, too, slowed its vibrations; my thoughts still fluttered, but I could go stretches of time before they pulled me away. And yet, I still fantasized about leaving. Yes, I can sit here and not think, but what is the point, my mind demanded. “Run,” it urged. “Run!”

The toilet had by then resumed normal function, but I still felt stuck. In my head, I could hear all the voices pressuring me to stay, a chorus featuring my boyfriend, the gurus, every tight-bodied yoga-influencer on Instagram: “You left too soon, you didn’t take this seriously, you failed.” But faintly, I could also hear my own, equally disappointed in me, but for staying. “Run,” it whispered, tired now from repetition. “Run.” After a few days, I did. Leaving was harder than I had anticipated (leaving is always harder than we anticipate) but meditations are voluntary, even when you feel like they’re the only option.

When I reached Chicago, my boyfriend was both shocked and disappointed. (Always great when you can achieve both.) I cried a lot. I wondered if I’d ruined my chances of inner peace by leaving the meditation center. I wondered if I’d ruined our relationship by failing to appreciate his most cherished practice.

I considered leaving the life we’d built. But I didn’t. Not at first. I spent a few more months unhappy; I was sure, more so now than ever, that there had to be something wrong with me. I couldn’t meditate right. I couldn’t love right. Was there anything righ t about me?

Eventually, my fast-expanding misery burst like a balloon in my mouth. Pop! “This isn’t working.” The words felt like poetry on my lips. My boyfriend helped pack up my stuff and drove me to the airport. This lovely man, with real sheets on his bed and the generosity to schlep me all the way to O’Hare International Airport—I was leaving him? My intuition shouted to be heard over reason and though I thought it would break me, I hugged him goodbye and walked away. My legs nearly collapsed with relief on arrival. I was in the wrong place, with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, yes, but I wasn’t wrong. That toilet was probably busted before I ever used it.

I’d love to say I’ve followed my instincts since then, but trust is a muscle, like any other; it only grows with pain and repetition. So I kept writing, even though it seemed doomed. I moved to New York, then I moved to LA. I got rejected; I got published; usually I got ignored. I fell in love and fell out of love and fell in love all over again. I made a lot of mistakes, is what I mean. But they were my mistakes, at least; made from listening to my own inner voice, a voice which sometimes stuttered or misspoke or vocal-fried, but always rung true as my own. I made a lot of mistakes. But slowly, I started trusting that I could fix them. Even better, I could learn from them.

I didn’t finish the meditation course my ex-boyfriend recommended, but I sometimes still try to meditate. I’ll sit for 20 minutes and try to focus on my breath, on nothing else but just being, until my alarm goes off. I’m still not sure I’m doing it right. But I trust, now, that I don’t have to.

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The Importance of Speaking The Truth

by Natalie Edwards

As human beings, we are so bombarded by gossip, loud noise and messages about how we should be living our lives, it’s no wonder many of us become overwhelmed and get confused about what we really want to say to each other.

I was never a very good communicator when I was younger. I was a shy child and I remember feeling things more deeply than I remember being confident about what I was trying to articulate. I was much better at being expressive through music, dance or letting films transport me to another world. But talking? Saying what I really thought? That was never something that came easily for me. I would prefer to sit on the side-lines for fear of offending someone or looking stupid, but for the most part, I just didn’t think my opinion was valid.

Once I began to bring my awareness to the concept of speaking the truth to those around me, at first it was terrifying. Telling people what I really thought? Was that even allowed?

What does speaking our truth really mean?

Well for me, it means speaking mindfully, with authenticity, compassion, and speaking from our hearts, and pioneering yoga teacher Ana Forrest was the first person to introduce me to this way of communicating.

Ana taught me how to come back to a more truthful way of speaking and living. During her teacher trainings, she teaches students how to connect with their hearts and speak from that area of the body rather than from the head. During morning practices, she instructed us to place our hands on our hearts and breathe into them. It sounds like a simple exercise, but I’d never done this before and those first few moments of doing that were very emotional for me, since it brought my attention to just how much I’d ignored my heart and never really listened to what it had been trying to tell me. We also took part in soul-baring talking circles where we had to hold the end of a feathered stick against our hearts and then talk to the group. I could often feel my heart beating through the stick and in the first few days of our training, I was unable to connect to this practice because I was still feeling extremely fearful.

Something I’ve learnt is that there is no room for fear to be present when we are speaking the truth, whether we are speaking in public to a large group or to someone we love, because if we are fully present, giving and breathing deeply, our fear will melt away. If we’re still feeling nervous, anxious or afraid, it means we are still letting our heads do the talking, and more often than not, that voice is saying “I wonder what everyone is thinking of me right now, I wonder how they think I’m doing.”

Holding onto the fear of judgement means you are not fully participating in giving 100% of your authentic self to those listening, and you’re probably not speaking your absolute truth.

How can we begin to practice speaking mindfully and truthfully more often?

Because one way we can make sure we’re only saying what we need to say is by being quiet more often.

If we think before we speak and if we step back and give our words space to resonate, we create the safe space for others to be with us and open up more.

Although many of us are afraid of silence and have spent our lives thinking that we need to fill it with words, speaking less and therefore more authentically and honestly makes us better listeners. We have all been brought up with the concept of polite small talk, but a lot of the time, this way of communicating is meaningless and dull. It’s the interesting questions and conversations that connect with us on a deeper, more personal level that stick in our minds. For instance, how often have you caught yourself asking someone how they are doing in order to fill a silence in a conversational way, yet you know deep down you don’t really want to know the full story of how they are. When you find yourself asking a question because you feel you need to, stop and ponder whether anything needs to be said at all.

Another common scenario in the way we communicate with one another is to agree to things just to keep someone else happy, or hold space for a friend to moan when really what you’d like to tell them is the truth about how much their moaning or gossiping is affecting you. When we hold back from saying what we really want to say to another person, we let them take our energy and the relationship can begin to feel heavy and resentful. Expressing how you feel in an assertive and kind way is essential, and that person will respect you more for doing so.

The easy option in this world is to join in with the gossip, scandal, moaning and negativity, but the people who say what everyone else is thinking and cut through the noise in a direct but mindful way are the people that everyone listens to, that everyone respects, and are the shape-shifters for how we can develop our connection with each other in an ever-changing technological world.

When you go to speak, whether in reply to someone who is testing your patience or simply just to a friend who probably needs your help, take a moment to connect with your heart so your thoughts and words come from a more caring place, and then ask yourself these questions:

Is what I’m about to reply with kind?
Is what I’m about to say to this person necessary?
Is what I’m about to tell them going to help them?
Is it the truth?

We don’t have to perform in life, we just need to be ourselves, and speaking from the heart has power, so much so that I now believe it to be our most valuable and useful life tool.

I found learning to speak from my heart a difficult art to master, because there’s no doubt in this world that the truth can be scary and not everyone always wants to hear it, especially when it involves a painful conversation. However, when the alternative is to endure a situation you’re not happy with, speak from a place of fear, or lie, all of which will leave you mentally and emotionally exhausted, speaking from your place of truth suddenly seems a brighter option doesn’t it?

Your dreams, your heart’s desires, the truth of what you really want in life, and everything you are holding back from expressing to those around you, all needs to be realised. If it isn’t, your heart is going to break from regret and from the heaviness that comes from not speaking your truth, and that is a pain that none of us should have to bear. So I invite you to play with the practice of speaking the truth and notice how freeing it feels to communicate in an honest way. Notice how much less you dwell on situations because you know you’ve said what you needed to say. Learning to speak the truth in the present means regret won’t get a chance to be part of your future.

Natalie Edwards is a Life Coach & Freedom Expert – www.natedwards.co.uk

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Speaking Your Truth to Live a Life of Authenticity

August 27, 2021 21 Comments

Do you find it easier to talk about speaking your truth than actually doing it?

Speaking up and speaking your truth is an essential aspect of living a life of passion, fulfillment, and authenticity. However, we struggle to find ways to speak our truth for many of us, myself included.

Not too long ago, I was talking to a friend who told me a poignant and powerful story about speaking his truth. He was in a grocery store and saw a woman cruelly yelling at her kids.

He explained that he walked over to the woman and asked her to treat her children with kindness and love.

Bold, right?

The woman responded by telling him to stick it up his “you-know-what,” grabbed her kids, and rushed out of the store.

My friend explained that he didn’t know if he did the wrong thing. He was scared, upset, and emotional. But, he also said, “Mike, when I walked away, I noticed something interesting. I wasn’t blaming anyone. However, since I spoke up,

I was at peace and not wasting any time or energy blaming anyone. I have no idea if what I said impacted that woman, but I don’t have to live with her. I have to live with myself.”

By Speaking Your Truth, You Open the Door to Freedom

What if we dared to speak up like that in all areas of life – our work, our relationships, our family, with people in public, and in general?

Imagine the freedom and power we would possess! It’s not at all about getting in people’s faces and challenging them, although sometimes it might take that form.

An important distinction to remember is the difference between our “opinions” and our “truth.”

We all have opinions – but remember: our opinions are not facts.

Our opinions are filled with righteous judgment and an arrogant sense that we’re “right,” and those who disagree with us are “wrong.”

But our “truth” runs much deeper than any of our opinions.

Truth is About How We Feel

Truth is not about being right. Truth is about how we feel and what is real for us. It’s about expressing what we think and feel in an authentic, vulnerable, and transparent way.

We are all entitled to our own opinions.

For example, I might have an opinion that you are rude. I might even have evidence of things you did in the past that were rude. My truth about this, though, might be that I worry you will hurt my feelings, or I don’t like some of the things you do, which make me feel unsafe and uncomfortable around you.

When we let go of being “right” about our opinions and take responsibility for our experience, we can speak our truth from a much deeper and more authentic place.

Speaking this deeper truth will not only liberate us, but it has the potential to make a difference for others and bring us closer together with them.

How Do We Enhance and Deepen Our Capacity to Speak Our Truth With Kindness, Love, and Authenticity?

There are lots of things we can do to accomplish this – here are three to think about.

Stop Managing Other People’s Feelings

When we try to manage other people’s emotions, we use it as a cop-out not to speak our truth.

When we let go of taking care of others in a condescending way, it frees us and them up to have adult conversations, which sometimes can get a little sticky or tense when we’re speaking our truth.

Be Real, Not Right

I wrote a whole article about this – click here to read it.

When we focus on winning or being right, we no longer can access the deepest places within our hearts, which is where our real truth comes from.

When we let go of our attachment to the outcome of a conversation, what the other person thinks, and our erroneous obsession with always having to be right, we allow ourselves to get real.

Being vulnerable and transparent are the key elements of speaking your truth and not dominating the conversation and the person we’re talking to.

Like anything and everything else in life, the best way to get better, deepen our capacity, and grow is to practice.

Will you mess it up? Of course! Will you say the wrong things sometimes? Yes! Will people get upset, offended, or defensive at times? Absolutely. It is not about being perfect. It is about being yourself and speaking authentically.

Have empathy and compassion with yourself as you practice – this is not easy for most of us.

Remember that each situation is always new and different.

Speaking your truth is not always going to be easy – but it will be worth it.

Speaking up can be incredibly scary and challenging for us. Even if your legs shake, your voice quivers, or your heart races (all of which usually happen when we get real and vulnerable) – take a deep breath, dig down for the courage you have within you, and be willing to speak your truth.

When we do this, we can watch our relationships and lives literally transform.

Where in your life are you not speaking your truth, and what are you willing to do about that? Share your thoughts, action ideas, insights, and more on my blog below.

I have written five books about the importance of trust, authenticity, appreciation, and more. In addition, I deliver keynotes and seminars (both in-person and virtually) to empower people, leaders, and teams to grow, connect, and perform their best. Finally, as an expert in teamwork, leadership, and emotional intelligence, I teach techniques that allow people and organizations to be more authentic and effective. Find out more about how I can help you and your team achieve your goals today. You can also listen to my podcast here .

Liked this post? Here are three more!

How to Appreciate Your Body and Love Yourself

How to Embrace Disappointment and Learn From it

It’s Okay to Do It Wrong

This article was published on September 15, 2009, and has been updated for 2021.

It’s Okay to Do It Wrong
Let’s Tell the Truth about Lying
Speak Your Truth

Reader Interactions

September 16, 2009 at 8:22 am

This article resonates so much with me that I feel like it’s my own words.

My complex is that I feel it’s exactly right but I feel when I exude this type of assertiveness (I could be the guy in the grocery store telling the woman) that I get such back lash from other people. Why is that?

October 23, 2021 at 1:51 pm

Because everyone else is in a collective thought as it seems to my opinion. They have similar mind sets and belong to a group that share ideas, practices, and information.

September 17, 2009 at 10:02 am

I have been a big time offender of trying to manage other peoples feelings and letting their emotions affect my mood… etc. I have been doing 12 step work in Al-Anon to help me for over a year now and it has been awesome!! Still at times it can be hard to speak my truth (or even know it is there) when I am wrapped up in what other people think. Practice, practice, practice!

September 20, 2009 at 6:31 am

All you wrote in this featured article is profound. Very insightful; this one will be re-read quite a few times as I try to speak my truth but with kindness and empathy.

September 27, 2009 at 6:01 pm

Thanks for the article! I can’t agree more that choosing the path of compassion does not necessary make one appear nice and acceptable.

Most often, one needs to stand up against adversity for one’s deepest beliefs.

I would definitely be visiting your blog again. I found your article from Chopra website.

December 16, 2009 at 12:46 pm

Thank you for the story! Thank you for the tips! Thank you for your honesty 🙂

For a moment I wonder, why do we do this all? Why don’t we naturally speak our truth? But then again I think it doesn’t matter much why we don’t speak our truth, what matters is that we would all speak our truths 😀

Thank you for the insight! 🙂

October 18, 2015 at 11:12 pm

Thkining like that is really amazing

July 15, 2021 at 9:02 am

What is the difference between “my truth” which is really a manifestation of how I see and feels things, and “the truth” which is a verifyable fact that is not influenced by my feelings ?

July 17, 2021 at 7:54 am

Yes, these things are different. Our truth is based on how we feel, what we see, our opinion, and what is true for us. “The” truth is more about facts and data. In life and in our relationships, most of the issues we run into aren’t about facts and data, they are about how we see things and how we feel. Being able to express our truth and also listen to the truths of others is super important. And, as things have evolved politically and socially in recent years, especially with all of the misinformation out there, the lines between opinion and fact have been blurred in a dangerous way, so we have to be mindful of this.

October 6, 2022 at 8:07 am

This speak my truth stuff is the biggest pile of bull***t on the planet. It is for weak minded idiots who are self indulgent and childish. Oprah pushes this crap. Meghan Markle “spoke her truth” when she lied about Harry’s family and stabbed them in the back. This psychobabble gobbledegook allows one to lie, attack others, and not take responsibility for ones mistakes. It is ruining society. And only pussies do it.

August 31, 2021 at 1:11 pm

Some people physically feel fine, health, and fit. Sometimes these feelings are true. They really are physically fine, healthy, and fit. Sometimes their physical feelings about themselves is false. A lie. They reality is not how they feel, but how they truly are. They are truly dying from cancer, but don’t know it, and are feeling fine. Believing a lie can be costly.

September 1, 2021 at 12:11 pm

What about that mother’s truth? What might have gone differently if the “friend” had instead of judging the mother, asked her if she needed help, had listened with a compassionate ear towards her? I’m not saying it was right for her to yell but every parent has had that day when the kids have pushed them too far, and mothers get the brunt of public blame and shame when the kids act out of control in public, but also when they try too hard to keep them in line in public. But yes please, let’s take our self-righteousness out on some woman without knowing her circumstance or seeing where she is coming from. She’s just the cipher to justify this homily, so sure, speak your truth without any regard for the larger context or the other person’s perspective. I prefer to live by “Be kind to one another; you never know what someone else is going through.” His compassion might have done more to change that mother’s attitude than a judgmental word did, but he’ll never know because he didn’t take the time to know.

May 18, 2022 at 4:16 am

This was incredibly well written and inspiring. I have always had issues with speaking up in any kind of situation that’s going to make someone else uncomfortable, it’s one of my worst traits and it’s very hard to get over. It’s something I do wish to change. When I imagine who I the type of person I would like myself to be, it’s someone that is authentically themselves and I hate to say, I’m really not that person right now—but I’m working on it I worry too much about giving opinions but instead of that it’s Time to express my truth and how I feel

May 22, 2022 at 1:15 pm

The statement “Truth is About How We Feel” is problematic. Calling deeply-felt feelings “truth” is misleading and leads to conflation with measurable truth. I see no difference between a deeply-felt “truth” and a deeply-felt opinion. If “your truth” includes a deeply-felt desire to stab a Smurf crawling up my back, you better expect to get pounded when you approach me with your knife. I’m willing to listen to your deep thoughts all day, and you should be willing to listen to mine. Just don’t call them “your truth” because that’s deceptive. And don’t expect me to adopt your truth as my own. If personal truth is based on “how we feel, what we see, our opinion, and what is true for us,” all Robbins is essentially saying is that we should focus more on feelings and less on facts. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

December 1, 2022 at 10:12 am

“Truth is not about being right. Truth is about how we feel and what is real for us.”

This is one of the worst and most anti-science nonsense I have ever read. The world DEPENDS and PROVES to us that objective truth exists outside ourselves – or our trains won’t run, cooking can’t happen, government function, or the universe itself hold together. The world doesn’t magically change if I change my feelings about it.

This also flies in the face of decades of psychology and social science that proves there are objectively better and worse ways for we as individuals and society as a whole to act and behave. TED talks are based on the notion that we should understand causes of problems and then can make changes and know they will work. There are great and proven ways to handle conflict, disagreements, addiction, and all manner of interactions we have with each other.

Instead, you throw all that away and tell people to just trust their feeling. Feelings that change every hour like the tides and the wind. It denies that we can actually understand problems and then come up with ways to solve them. Even worse, you say that their feelings are the TRUTH about what’s going on – then admit they are probably wrong a great percentage of the time.

Instead, what you should say is that you can validate what you are feeling, but then need to take the next step to figure out what the right response should be. Our feelings are NOT truth. Our feelings are our impression of what’s going on.

If scientists just went with what they felt about rocket engines, power plants, or the safety of the cars they developed – we’d all be doomed.

January 3, 2023 at 10:56 am

Also, in many cases, the world actually does change according to our feelings. What we perceive is all we have. A collective perception doesn’t exist. And your own trust in the evidence based system you believe in, like I do as well, is still rooted in the circular rationale that is our own senses. Our own perception. Our own grasp of what “evidence” is. While many truths must logically be objective, we can only perceive them and the evidence supporting them subjectively.

January 3, 2023 at 11:01 am

Your hypothesis about What scientists, who are not a monolith, would do in the event they stopped using evidence is actually a guess. A counterfactual conditional, and as such, irrefutable and unprovable. You laid faith in evidence to avoid a possible future you have no proof would or could ever exist. You could have used evidence! The inconsistency is amusing.

January 3, 2023 at 10:52 am

I feel like the kindest, most aware option would have been to see that she was struggling and ask if he could help somehow. At minimum he might have asked if she was feeling stressed and remind her that she was probably doing better than she thought she was. Maybe offered to buy her a tea or a soda. But walking up to a stressed mother after deeming her cruel without any context and telling her how to behave or parent is not kind by any stretch of the imagination. Just a note. Have a nice day.

August 25, 2023 at 7:14 am

How do I speak the truth in the loss of my daughter

August 25, 2023 at 7:17 am

I am so sorry to hear about the loss of your daughter. As the father of two daughters myself, I cannot imagine the pain, sadness, and grief you must be experiencing. My heart is with you and your family. While I don’t know from personal experience of losing a child, having lost my sister, both of my parents, and some other people really close to me, there can be opportunities to speak up, share how we feel, and speak our truth in the midst of our grief journey.

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The Difference Between Speaking ‘Your Truth’ and ‘The Truth’

Oprah Winfrey’s hugely impressive rise illustrates the constructive possibilities of her mantra. Her biggest missteps reveal its limits.

On Monday, as Oprah Winfrey’s stirring acceptance speech at the Golden Globes secured a place in the national conversation, Byron Tau of The Wall Street Journal tweeted , “Oprah employed a phrase that I’ve noticed a lot of other celebrity using these days: ‘your truth’ instead of ‘the truth.’ Why that phrasing?” He fretted that “your truth” undermines the idea of shared common facts.

Well, Garance Franke-Ruta replied , “sometimes you know something is real and happened and is wrong, even if the world says it’s just the way things are. It’s a call to activism rooted in the individual story, grounded in personal experience.”

Another Twitter user chimed in to add that, “it’s also a well-known tactic in building leadership in community organizing that allows people who are rarely heard to tell their story, learn that they are, in fact, not alone, connects individual experiences to systemic issues, and helps develop powerful public speakers.”

And yet, others chimed in to ask: What about the people whose earnestly held “truth” is that immigrants are ruining America; or that the white race is inherently superior to all others; or that the rules set forth in Leviticus or the Koran are the only way to live; or that the latest Alex Jones conspiracy theory is correct; or that climate change is a hoax cooked up by liberals to gain control over all aspects of life in the United States?

It is fitting that Oprah would trigger a debate about the power and the perils of speaking “your truth,” for her tremendously impressive career illustrates both sides of the phenomenon.

Some years ago, marking the finale of The Oprah Winfrey Show , my colleague Caitlin Flanagan recounted Oprah’s poverty-stricken childhood, the physical beatings she took from her grandmother, her traumatic rape at the age of 9, and the early pregnancy that threatened to consign her to a life of deprivation—and persuasively argued that she was able to become one of the richest, most influential humans in large part because of an idea that she was “born for greatness.”

That was among her truths. And she clung to it and fought to manifest it—no matter that she grew up in a culture that told her black women were inferior, and was abused by people conveying the message that she personally deserved no better. Decades later, having become a billionaire celebrity as beloved as anyone in America by going to television each day to earnestly convey her beliefs and experiences—and to urge others to do the same—how could Oprah of all people fail to believe that “speaking your truth” is “the most powerful tool that we all have”?

And yet, “in her earnest spiritual seeking, Ms. Winfrey gave platforms to some rather questionable types,” Mark Oppenheimer observed in The New York Times , in another critical evaluation of The Oprah Winfrey Show published back in 2011 as it was ending:

She hosted the self-help author Louise Hay, who once said Holocaust victims may have been paying for sins in a previous life. She championed the “medical intuitive” Caroline Myss, who claims emotional distress causes cancer. She helped launch Rhonda Byrne, creator of the DVD and book The Secret , who teaches that just thinking about wealth can make you rich. She invited the “psychic medium” John Edward to help mourners in her audience talk to their dead relatives. The Oprah Winfrey Show made viewers feel that they constantly had to “sculpt their best lives,” Dr. Lofton writes. Yet in her religious exuberance Ms. Winfrey gave people some badly broken tools. Ms. Winfrey nodded along to the psychics and healers and intuitives. She rarely asked tough questions, and because she believed, millions of others did, too.

An overlapping indictment appeared in Newsweek a couple years before. One section recounted Oprah appearances by Suzanne Somers, who was advocating for a highly unusual approach to health and medicine to stave off aging:

“Many people write Suzanne off as a quackadoo,” Oprah said. “But she just might be a pioneer.” Oprah acknowledged that Somers’s claims “have been met with relentless criticism” from doctors. Several times during the show she gave physicians an opportunity to dispute what Somers was saying. But it wasn't quite a fair fight. The doctors who raised these concerns were seated down in the audience and had to wait to be called on. Somers sat onstage next to Oprah, who defended her from attack. “Suzanne swears by bioidenticals and refuses to keep quiet. She’ll take on anyone, including any doctor who questions her.”

Somers was speaking “her truth,” as was another celebrity guest, perhaps the most controversial to ever appear on Oprah Winfrey’s show. As Newsweek recounted:

In 2007, Oprah invited Jenny McCarthy, the Playboy model and actress, to describe her struggle to find help for her young son … “So what do you think triggered the autism?” Oprah asked McCarthy. “I know you have a theory.” McCarthy is certain that her son contracted autism from the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination he received as a baby. She told Oprah that the morning he went in for his checkup, her instincts told her not to allow the doctor to give him the vaccine. “I said to the doctor, I have a very bad feeling about this shot. This is the autism shot, isn’t it? And he said no, that is ridiculous; it is a mother’s desperate attempt to blame something on autism. And he swore at me.” The nurse gave Evan the shot. “And not soon thereafter,” McCarthy said, “boom, soul gone from his eyes.” … Yet researchers have not found a link between the vaccines and autism. Here is what we do know: before vaccinations, thousands of children died or got sick each year from measles, mumps, and rubella. But back on the Oprah show, McCarthy’s charges went virtually unchallenged. Oprah praised McCarthy’s bravery and plugged her book, but did not invite a physician or scientist to explain to her audience the many studies that contradict the vaccines-autism link. Instead, Oprah read a brief statement from the Centers for Disease Control saying there was no science to prove a connection and that the government was continuing to study the problem. But McCarthy got the last word. “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.”

McCarthy was sharing “her truth.” And doing so has undoubtedly been a powerful tool: There are enclaves where so many parents are declining to vaccinate their children that “herd immunity” against devastating diseases is at risk.

It could be that Oprah has learned something from those bygone controversies about a TV show that was, it’s worth noting, enormously constructive on the whole, with many more uplifting than destructive instances of speaking “one’s truth.”

In fact, Oprah’s speech at the Golden Globes actually used the word “truth” five times. First, she praised the press, observing that “it’s the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice.” Next, segueing to the #MeToo moments of recent months, she declared that “speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And I’m especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories.”

Those passages suggest a person who values seeking “the truth” as a vital project, even while maintaining that speaking “your truth” is indispensable, inspiring, and empowering. There is truth in both insights. If any observer of the #MeToo moment doubts the importance of believing in oneself—or the cost some abused men and women have paid for insufficient confidence in what they felt to be correct—Salma Hayek’s description of her years-long ordeal with Harvey Weinstein is as powerful an illustration of both points as I can imagine.

As for Oprah’s final three invocations of “truth” in her speech?

She told the story of Recy Taylor, “a young wife and mother walking home from a church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road.”

They threatened her with death if she told anyone about her crime.

But she wound up seeking justice with the help of Rosa Parks, then of the NAACP:

Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up. And I just hope—I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on. It was somewhere in Rosa Parks’s heart almost 11 years later, when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, and it's here with every woman who chooses to say, “Me too.” And every man—every man who chooses to listen.

On reflection, it seems to me that the speech’s take on “truth” would’ve been improved not by eliminating any notion of speaking “your truth,” which has its place, but by phrasing that final anecdote in a way that made one point more clear: that Recy Taylor wasn’t just speaking “her truth,” she was speaking “the truth” to power—and that her unpaid claim to justice is inseparable from that fact.

Rosa Parks didn’t take up her case to vindicate “her truth,” but on behalf of “the truth.” The Jim Crow elites who failed to prosecute her attackers may or may not have been living out “their truths,” but they were utterly at odds with “the truth.”

None of that is incompatible with the claim that “speaking your truth” is a powerful tool. But it makes clearer that powerful tools can be used for good and ill; that they can have ill effects even when used with the best of intentions; and that tools of great power confer great responsibility on all users.

Insofar as Oprah’s speech was aimed at young girls in abject poverty like that of her own youth, the failure to clarify that wrinkle is relatively unimportant; insofar as it was delivered to hundreds of powerful Hollywood celebrities now proclaiming themselves inspired by Oprah’s words, clarity on that point is essential. Going forward, Oprah would do well to assert her full, rightful claims to “the truth” when speaking it—as she often does insightfully—while eschewing untruths (even when they are “her truths,” or expressions that people she esteems earnestly regard as “their truths”) in recognition of the power she wields.

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Humanities Institute

The Future of Truth

Speaking Truth
What Is Truth?

To begin exploring some of the big questions raised by the Future of Truth, we have asked several scholars to offer their reflections on historical, current, and emerging conceptions of truth. These essays, collected below, provide several templates for understanding truth across different fields of intellectual inquiry and give scope to both the promises and the problems that we encounter in understanding and anticipating the future of truth.

Michael P. Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

“When it comes to values, or art, or politics, aiming at truth is as important as it is in science, even if it is messier, greyer, more confusing. But it is a mistake to think that our stories of values are wholly separate from what else we believe about the world.”

Read Michael P. Lynch’s full essay, “What Is Truth?”

This is a project about the future of truth. But what is truth, anyway?

That’s a question so philosophical as to seem rhetorical. But it is not rhetorical. As today’s dark political situation makes clear, it is an absolutely fundamental political question. Reflecting on this question—on what truth is, can help us see why truth still matters for democracy.

When we ask about the nature of truth, we are usually interested in what makes a belief or statement true (and others false). Unsurprisingly philosophers (being, you know, philosophers) have been divided. Historically speaking, two ideas, each organized around a central metaphor, stand out.

The first idea is that true statements are like maps. The roadmap Google pulls up on your phone is accurate when it represents the roads as they are, and inaccurate when it doesn’t. In the same way, the thought goes, a statement is true when it corresponds to the facts as they are. Truth is found; it is a matter of correspondence to the world.

The correspondence theory is an old idea, going back to Aristotle. But it is not without problems. The prevailing objection echoes Wilde: the theory seems to make truth too plain and simple. It may be plausible when we are talking about physical things in our immediate environment: roads and bridges, roses and bees. But most of the statements we make are riddled with value judgments, and it is harder to see statements about values as maps. That’s because statements like “deporting immigrants is morally wrong” aren’t empirically verifiable. You can’t verify it in a lab—which is precisely what makes some think that political or moral truth is a philosophers’ fantasy.

But such cynicism is unwarranted and dangerous. Give up on the thought that there is any truth in values or politics and you give up on both the idea that people can make moral and political progress and the idea that they can make moral and political mistakes. You can’t make sense of political progress without the idea of truth because to make such progress requires that a culture has improved in its political judgment. What was once thought true (racism) is now known to be false. We must appeal to truth to understand that we got it wrong, and to remind ourselves that we may still have it wrong.

This last point is doubtless what is most salient to us now. As George Orwell knew, without the idea of truth, we can no longer make sense of talking truth to power. Political criticism becomes just an expression of sentiment, not something that can be justified by, or defeated by, evidence.

So the correspondence theory of truth is promising, but it fails to explain political and moral truth. And that can, sadly, encourage people to be cynical about the possibility of such truth.

It has also encouraged other thinker to construe truth as something else entirely, to see it as a coherent story that we all agree on. According to this second view, true statements are those that fit into a workable narrative, one that we can use to explain things to ourselves and others. False statements are those that don’t fit, that we can’t use, which run up against the other things we believe. Call this the coherence theory of truth.

There is something right about the coherence theory. Not all statements are like little maps. Statements about art, values and politics are more like stories; very messy, disorderly stories with which we weave the fabric of much our lives.

But the mere coherence of a story can’t by itself make it true. That’s because you can make any story internally coherent as long as you are willing to say enough crazy stuff. Nonetheless, there has been a disturbing tendency in both the US and certain parts of Europe to mistake coherent narratives for truth. This is a tendency that has only been encouraged by social media – platforms that encourage coherence by wrapping our communications into tightly formed webs or “social networks” of like-thinking individuals. It is incredibly easy—too easy—to achieve coherence on platforms that, by their very design, encourage consensus. If we make our political claims only to our friends and fellow travelers, then it is no wonder we are lulled into thinking that their unchallenged internal coherence makes them true.

Mistaking mere internal coherence for truth is a grave mistake, just as it is a mistake to think that all truth must be a matter of correspondence with a physical world. The truth about political truth is that it is a combination of both.

To be true a political narrative has to more than internally coherent; it also must cohere with what else we know about the world. It has to be nailed down to the outside facts. White supremacists can (maybe) tell an internally coherent story about what they value; but their whole story isn’t true because it contains assumptions like “science tells us nonwhites aren’t as intelligent as whites”. And that sort of statement would have to correspond to certain measurable facts in the world were it to be true. (Newsflash: it doesn’t).

In short, we need both metaphors: stories and maps. Truth is not just about making up coherent stories, but it is not always about charting the world either. Truth can come in more than one form; but it is still real for all that.

There is an important lesson here. When it comes to values, or art, or politics, aiming at truth is as important as it is in science, even if it is messier, greyer, more confusing. But it is a mistake to think that our stories of values are wholly separate from what else we believe about the world. The coherent narratives we weave about justice and values can be true, as long as they also fit whatever evidence the world supplies. Of course, knowing when that happens is the hard part, especially—as is the case in our polarized, digital society—we don’t agree on what “evidence” is. But while that’s so, it doesn’t excuse us from taking truth and evidence seriously, and from holding others to account for not doing so.

Truth is a complicated and distant target; one that is difficult to know you’ve hit. But there is value in even aiming at it; and we must continue to do so, while there are still arrows left in our quiver.

A version of this essay first appeared in The Skeptical Razor, at Euromind .

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5 Reflections on Speaking Your Truth

Speaking your truth will surely piss some people off and that’s a good thing. It’s time now, in your boomer years, to live your life the way you want to – the way you feel – yet always, of course, with reason and kindness.

You’ve spent the better part of your life being honest, patient, compassionate and loving. And you will always be that person. On the other hand, holding back your truth when it’s necessary to speak is not going to be healthy for your personal growth and transformation.

The Power of Speaking Your Truth

At the moment you start speaking your truth, you become more powerful than you can possibly imagine because when you speak the truth you start believing in yourself. Of course, everyone thinks they believe in self.

Taught from a young age to be authentic – be you, believe in yourself – it is common to think that we, gosh darn, are a one woman/man powerhouse. Think deeper, clearer and more profoundly and ask yourself: Are you really free enough to piss people off?

Speaking your truth comes from knowing who you are, from self-knowledge, and knowing your purpose in life. Your purpose is something you do. It’s something you are called to become. And, as with many things in life, achieving your purpose can sometimes take a lifetime of practice.

The following are five reflections that might inspire you to practice speaking your truth.

You Are Not Responsible for Other People’s Feelings

Most of the time you will not speak your truth because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. That’s natural and oftentimes a good practice, depending on the time and circumstances of the dialogue. However, there are important and immediate situations in which you need to put forth your belief for clarification or conviction.

If you hurt a person’s feelings, please be patient until they figure out how to respond. I do this with my adult children from time to time, and even my daughters-in-law. Family truths are sometimes the most difficult of truths to speak.

By Speaking Your Truth, You Will Frequently Piss Someone Off

Please don’t take their attacks at you personally. It’s really not about you. It’s about them. In psychology, it is called transference. A person transfers their emotions to you, accusing you of possessing what they are feeling. Take a step back to assess and find your balance in mind, body and spirit. This is when I usually walk out of the room and pick up the conversation when everyone is less defensive.

Love and Trust People Enough to Let Them Learn Their Own Life’s Lessons

It is not necessary to push your truth onto someone else. And it’s not your job to fix anyone. However, it is your disposition to speak your truth when necessary to a person in conflict or to a person who plainly asks you what you think and how you feel.

Simple example: One of my daughters-in-law asked me what dining table I liked better. I selected the one I thought was more graceful and beautifully designed. Before she asked my opinion, she told me she had already ordered the other one. Within 10 minutes, she reviewed her decision and changed her order. I wasn’t concerned with hurting her feelings. She found her own truth and moved forward.

Intuition Is the Highest Form of Intelligence We Have

In yoga, intuition is called paying attention to your Third Eye – that space in the middle of your forehead between the brows that allows you to see the light , the truth in front of you more clearly. Your Third Eye keeps you conscious and allows you to move truthfully into situations that require your full honesty and integrity.

I sometimes see my sons in pain, or hurt, and I use my intuition (my truth) to ask important questions that may piss them off, yet, in the end, my truth helps them resolve their situation.

Never Give Your Power Away

Your truth is your power; so never give your power away to anyone else for any reason. Another way of framing this idea is that, to remain fully conscious in your life, it is important to speak your truth, which in turn, increases self-knowledge. Granted, sharing your truth takes a leap of faith; however, only then can you learn and know the doing of your purpose.

It’s Better to Live a Hard Truth than a Beautiful Lie

When you don’t tell the truth are you really lying? Yes and no. You may be teetering on the edge of proffering your hard truth and then covering it up with a beautiful lie because someone may be hurt.

This is the kind of indecisiveness that drives the universe crazy because the universe is constantly trying to guide you through signs, symbols and synchronicity. The universe gives you the energy to create thoughts and emotions that create your truth as well as a reality under your control and nobody else’s.

Follow this mantra and all will be well: Speak the truth and keep the peace with yourself and others.

Do you speak your truth? Or do you worry about what other will think? Do you feel that you know yourself better now as an older woman? How do you use your intuition in your relationships with others?

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I was trying to not piss my new acquaintance off and be agreeable, but they told me that if I failed their litmus test, then I was a Globalist Enabler, and other hurtful things, that aren’t true

However I also think at 60, Ive had to deal with standing up for myself more and have been shocked to realise how often i have put someone elses opinion above mine when it directly affected me and my life. So I’m really learning this now, with help from a counsellor. It’s all about boundaries and not allowing people to overstep mine. I have been too empathetic at times to my own detriment.

Wow v interesting article. No. As I get older, I hold my tongue more. I speak “my truth” less, out of concern for others. I tend to say to myself “that’s not my problem” rather than wade in with my opinion. I personally feel that this is more powerful. I try and avoid buying in. If my opinion cant change things and will be received negatively, better to keep my boundaries. Look at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle speaking “their truth”. It has brought so much pain and unhappiness to so many people.

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Joan Frances Moran

Joan Moran is a keynote speaker, commanding the stage with her delightful humor, raw energy, and wealth of life experiences. She is an expert on wellness and is passionate about addressing the problems of mental inertia. A yoga instructor, Joan is the author of her wise and funny memoir, "60, Sex, & Tango, Confessions of a Beatnik Boomer" and "I'm the Boss of Me! Stay Sexy, Smart & Strong At Any Age". Her latest book, a thriller titled “An Accidental Cuban” is now available on Amazon. Check out Joan's website http://www.joanfrancesmoran.com and follow on Twitter @joanfmoran.

The Benefits of Meditation for Women of All Ages – Susan Piver (Video)

Why Do We Criticize Others? The Answer May Surprise You!

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Speaking Truth to Power: A White Paper

Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
Focus Areas
Business Ethics
Business Ethics Resources

O'Toole, a research professor in the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, explores how to encourage candor within organizations.

Old Tales and New of Leadership, Organizational Culture, and Ethics

The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. --Herbert Agar, A Time for Greatness (1942)

Speaking truth to power is perhaps the oldest and, certainly, one of the most difficult of ethical challenges because to do so entails personal danger. From the day humans descended from our ape-like ancestors until only very recently, tribal leaders, clan elders, kings, and just plain bosses were men who ruled by force. To question their decisions was to risk death. A major theme running through Sophocles' fourth-century B.C. play Antigone is the perils of speaking truth to power. Indeed, the play is the source of the modern cliché, "shooting the messenger." Early in the action, straws are drawn among King Creon's guards to choose the unlucky one who must tell his majesty that his niece, and soon to be daughter-in-law, Antigone , not only has defied a recent edict he has proclaimed, but that the populace is rallying to her support. The losing guard swallows hard, recognizing that "nobody likes the bringer of bad news." Least of all Creon, who greets the news by first questioning the guard's loyalty and, then, in a terrifying display of what the Greeks called hubris (the arrogance of power), he proclaims that, because he's king, the god's are on his side. Creon refuses to listen t o A ntigone's reasons for defying his edict-she is a woman, after all, and that would be too much of a blow to his male ego-and he refuses to hear what his people have to say, believing that to listen to them would be taken as a sign of weakness and, hence, a threat to his power.

Finally, Creon's son, Haemon, musters the courage to tell his father that "Your presence frightens any common man from saying things you would not care to hear." Haemon tells the king: Then do not have one mind, and one alone that only your opinion can be right. Whoever thinks that he alone is wise, his eloquence, his mind, above the rest, come the unfolding, shows his emptiness. A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must unbend his mind. Have you not seen the trees beside the torrent, the ones that bend them saving every leaf, while the resistant perish root and branch? And so the ship that will not slacken sail, the sheet drawn tight, unyielding, overturns, She ends the voyage with her keel on top. No, yield your wrath, allow a change of stand. Young as I am, if I may give advice, I'd say it would be best if men were born perfect in wisdom, but failing this (which often fails) it can be no dishonor to learn from others when they speak good sense. But Creon stubbornly refuses to listen and, in the end, brings death to his family, ruin on himself, and destruction to his country. In the play, both the messenger and the king face tough ethical choices: the guard is likely to be killed if he speaks truth to power; and, as the king sees it, he must either execute his son's fiancé or undermine his authority to govern. Sophocles implies that the latter choice is both the harder and more morally significant. He puts one moral of the story in the mouth of the messenger: "To reject good counsel is a crime," and another is spoken by a blind "seer": "Stubbornness and stupidity are twins." The play thus is a reminder to leaders that their ethical duty is to create what, in a modern organizational context, Warren Bennis calls a "culture of candor." The ancient Greeks had a word for culture: ethos . Often translated as "character," significantly, it also is the root of the Modern English word "ethics." MODERN APPLICATIONS I first read Antigone in 1973 and, in the decade that followed, was amazed to find that the ethical issues raised by Sophocles in the context of an ancient monarchy were present in many of the modern corporations where I was doing research and consulting. Here are two contrasting examples of what I observed: In 1982, I was invited by the Cowles Media Corporation (owners of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune ) to meet with their top executives to discuss their corporate culture. I could see why they wanted help: After having lost the magazines Look in the 1960s and Harper's in the 1970s (the first went belly up, the second literally had to be given away), the down-in-the-dumps corporation subsequently had seen their net income fall from $12.2 to $0.7 million between 1979 and 1982. I started the process by asking the group for a few short, descriptive phrases that would best describe the culture of the company. Silence. I asked again. More silence. Finally, I was passed an unsigned note that read "Dummy, can't you see that we can't speak our minds? Ask for our input anonymously, in writing." I did so, and for the next two hours I would ask them a question about their culture, they would write down their answers; then I would collect them and read the responses back to the group. At the end of this wearying experience (one I viewed then, and now, as a failure on my part), several executives came up to tell me in private to say that the meeting was the best they had had since John Cowles, Jr., had assumed leadership of the corporation! Within a year of the meeting, John Cowles fired several of those managers for disloyalty (that is, for having spoken truth to power) and several others resigned in protest over one or another of his decisions. Shortly thereafter, the Cowles family fired John. The second story is about the then-startup Federal Express Corporation. In the late 1970s, I addressed some thirty of the corporation's top managers on the subject of worker productivity. I had gotten no more than ten minutes into my talk when a young manager interrupted me and addressed a challenge to his colleagues: "The professor has made an interesting point that runs counter to a major decision top management made a couple weeks ago. I suggest we ought to reexamine that decision now in light of what we have just learned." To my amazement, the managers picked up the suggestion and turned directly to a no-holds-barred debate of the issue. What was surprising to me about the discussion was that the lower-level managers made those at the top defend their decision. When it became clear the policy couldn't be defended, the younger managers asked the bosses to change it. Which they did, then and there. This rough and tumble exchange lasted for about an hour. At the end, they all went to lunch without a trace of hard feelings, or a sign that anyone had won or lost face, power, or status. Apparently, this openness and willingness to raise tough questions and challenge accepted wisdom was part of the culture of the firm, for I seemed to be the only one in the room who found the exchange unusual. My feeling then, which I expressed in a book in 1985, was that if Federal Express could retain that rare ability to learn and to change, it was a good bet that they would continue to be a remarkable success. Quite apart from the ethical issues raised by these two examples, in hindsight one can see why the Cowles organization failed to meet the test of sustainability, and why Federal Express went on to become one of the world's most successful corporations in terms of anticipating and responding to technological, social, political, economic, and competitive change. The lesson I drew from these examples nearly three decades ago was that managers in companies with healthy cultures were constantly willing to rethink even their most basic assumptions through a process of constructive dissent. And my experience over the last thirty years confirms that companies get into moral and competitive hot water when their leaders are unwilling to test their operating premises about such (often taboo) subjects as (1) the nature of the working conditions they offer employees, (2) the purposes of their corporation, and (3) its responsibilities to various stakeholders. The failure to openly examine such behavior-driving assumptions leads to what commonly is called "group think," a state of collective denial or self-deception which often has disastrous business and ethical consequences. I hesitate to cite the late John Z. DeLorean as an authority on ethical matters, but he was one of the few business leaders to recognize the consequences of group-think. In On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors he described what he called a typical meeting of GM's executive committee in which then-chairman, Richard Gerstenberg, would pontificate and vice-chairman, Richard Terrell ("the master of the paraphrase"), would parrot his views: Gerstenberg: Goddamnit. We cannot afford any new models next year because of the cost of this federally mandated equipment. There is no goddamn money left for styling changes. That's the biggest problem we face.

Terrell, after waiting about 10 minutes: Dick, goddamnit. We've just got to face up to the fact that our number one problem is the cost of this federally mandated equipment. This stuff costs so much that we don't have any money left for styling our new cars. That's our biggest problem.

Gerstenberg: You're goddamn right, Dick. That's a good point.

DeLorean clearly was exaggerating, but this hypothetical dialogue is illustrative of a behavioral problem found in many organizations. People in groups form shared ideas-"collective representations" in the language of social anthropology-and all the forces of the group conspire to protect those notions, no matter how inaccurate or outmoded they may be. For example, as the Japanese began to win a share of the U.S. auto market in the late 70s, DeLoren portrayed GM's top managers in Detroit looking down from their fourteenth-floor executive suite onto the enormous company parking lot below and saying something like, "Look at all those big cars! Who says Americans want small ones?" Ditto GM's leaders' self-defeating collective representations about product quality. If only the pattern were confined to the auto industry. But experience shows that all managers commonly hold shared assumptions about the sources of innovation, motivation, productivity, product quality, and profitability in their organizations, and those untested assumptions drive their behavior, for good or ill. Significantly, the more basic-and therefore the more potent-the assumption the less likely it is to be examined. From what I have been told, the Altria company has squeaky-clean governance procedures, thanks to their tough internal auditing and control processes, but it is doubtful that the company's managers could raise the question of the basic morality of its cigarette business. Similarly, business professors in large research universities resist examining a fundamental premise of their enterprise that publishing in "A" journals is the sole measure of scholarly excellence. All organizations-nations, colleges, businesses, and families--hold on to such fundamental and unexamined myths. While such shared values and assumptions are necessary to hold a group together, if the glue that binds them is, in fact, toxic, it can result in organizational morbidity. That's why managers in companies with healthy cultures continually challenge old assumptions, rethink basic premises, question, revise, and unlearn outmoded truths. An often told story about Motorola during its hey-day in the 1980s concerned a young middle manager who approached then-CEO Robert Galvin: "Bob, I heard that point you made this morning, and I think you are dead wrong. I'm going to prove it. I'm going to shoot you down." The young man stormed off and Galvin, beaming proudly, turned to a shocked companion and said "That's how we've overcome Texas Instruments' lead in semi-conductors." Moreover, at Motorola during that timeframe there were no rewards for those who supported the status quo: managers got ahead only by challenging existing assumptions and by proving the fact when they detected imperial nakedness. Galvin would explain to anyone who would listen that he was far from the smartest person at Motorola, and that the success the company was due to the fact that he had surrounded himself with managers more talented than he was. And then he listened to them. Galvin not only made it clear that candor was valued, it was rewarded even if that entailed receiving information he personally found unpleasant. In fact, Galvin put into place a process by which the fundamental assumptions of the company where surfaced, and then challenged. Unfortunately, over subsequent decades the company would lose those good habits. LEAR'S FOOL But it seems possible to institutionalize what Galvin once did so naturally. When Verne Morland was an executive at NCR in the 1980s he suggested that all companies could benefit from hiring a corporate "fool." Like Lear's Fool in Shakespeare's eponymous play, the modern organizational equivalent would be a person licensed "To challenge by jest and conundrum all that is sacred and all that the savants have proved to be true and immutable." While this corporate contrarian need not dress in motley, spangles, and bells, the fool nonetheless would be obligated to 'stir up controversy, respect no authority, and resist pressures to engage in detailed analyses." In keeping with William James's observation that "genius…means little more than the facility of perceiving in an unhabitual way," consultant Nancy Reeves prophetically suggested in the 1980s that speaking truth to power might be a more natural role for women than for men to play because the former "have been outside the status quo ante, and are free to marshal historic exclusions for positive ends...women have not learned, and therefore do not have to unlearn, principles no longer pertinent…women might be the utterers of today's imperative blasphemies." Twenty years later, in the great tradition of Antigone, Enron's Sherron Watkins, WorldCom's Cynthia Cooper, and the FBI's Coleen Rowley, found themselves on the cover of Time magazine as 2002 Persons of the Year. Although Time incorrectly accused these three brave women of whistle blowing, in fact, they had received their due public recognition for their willingness to speak truth to power. Each had courageously gone to the men at the top of their respective organizations with news those leaders didn't want to hear. I use the word courageous advisedly. Too many business leaders today are like King Creon. While the dangers posed to modern messengers are no longer physical, thanks to the much-publicized behavior of imperial CEOs in the 1990s, a cultural expectation has been created that leaders need to be decisive, tough, take-charge men who quickly fire those who are not "team-players." Imagine the courage it would take to tell a Jack Welch, a Scott McNeely, an Andy Grove, or a Larry Ellison news he didn't want to hear? Even in a book by fawning admirers, Jack Welch came across as a modern-day Attila when GE managers dared to question him. Dissenters were berated, insulted, and abused: "According to former employees, Welch conducts meetings so aggressively that people tremble. He attacks almost physically with his intellect-criticizing, demeaning, ridiculing, humiliating." One humiliated former GE-executive who had been publicly dressed down by Welch for daring to question his boss admitted to the moderator of an Aspen Institute seminar in the early 1990s that Welch's furious tirade "caused me to soil my pants." Perhaps the only thing riskier than telling the boss he is wrong is to have to admit one's own mistakes. Speaking truth to power is a threatening exercise when it entails owning-up to serious error. Indeed, fear of punishment by tyrannical leaders causes many managers to become risk averse. To free his people from such crippling fears, legendary CEO Percy Barnevik issued these General Principals of Management Behavior when he became CEO of ABB in the 1980s: *To take action (and stick out one's neck) and do the right things is obviously the best.

*To take action and do the wrong things (within reason and a limited number of times) is second best.

*Not to take action (and lose opportunities) is the only non-acceptable behavior.

Paradoxically, the risks of speaking truth to power are particularly acute for those in professional services firms--the very lawyers, accountants, and consultants who are the very "gatekeepers" charged with providing business leaders with unvarnished assessments and warnings, and objective advice and counsel. In a nutshell, these professionals know that the fastest way to lose clients is to tell them news they don't want to hear. This is especially true when the news that needs to be conveyed is that the client-CEO's behavior is at the root of the company's problems. For example, it takes great moral courage for a compensation consultant to tell a CEO that he is over-paid. In a professional services firm the penalty for losing a major client is a fate worse than death: derailment from the partnership track. As the demise of the Arthur Anderson accountancy demonstrated, the incentives in most professional firms encourage people to lie to, and for, clients. And that won't change unless the ways in which professionals are evaluated and rewarded change. THE LEGACY OF ENRON In the wake of Enron and similar instances of corporate fraud and lying uncovered over the last decade, increasing calls have been made in this country for what the British call "transparency"-- that is, for business organizations free of the dirty little secrets the unveiling of which would destroy trust, ruin reputations, and wreck havoc with profits. As Warren Bennis notes, transparency cannot be legislated. Instead, it only occurs "when an organization creates a culture of candor, one in which followers are free to speak truth to power and leaders are willing to hear it." In fact, there really is no need for any secrets in organizations beyond protecting plans for new products and processes and other sources of competitive advantage. As another of my colleagues, Edward Lawler, has shown, it even redounds to the benefit of organizations to post everyone's salary. So what needs to be done? Transparency comes down to leaders doing several practical things: providing egalitarian access to information, not punishing those who constructively demonstrate imperial nakedness, not rewarding spurious loyalty, and empowering and rewarding principled contrarians. But that is easier said than done, as recent experience at the highest levels of government illustrates. A HIGHLY VISIBLE LESSON As an unimpeded flow of information is the sine qua non of a business organization's ability to meet competitive challenges, the free flow of information is necessary for a modern democracy to flourish. A dozen or so books written by Washington insiders published over the last few years document the costs in terms of careers, reputations, and even lives when America's political leaders have been unwilling to listen to uncomfortable truths. In State of Denial Bob Woodward cites a recent exchange in the oval office concerning the occupation of Iraq that eerily echoes the 1970s discussion at GM's headquarters reported by DeLorean. According to Woodward, then-Secretary of State, Colin Powell, tried to explain to President George W. Bush and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice that a major problem in Bagdad was that there were two chains of command, both reporting to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: The president looked surprised. "That's not right," Rice said. "That's not right." Powell thought Rice could at times be pretty sure of herself, but he was pretty sure he was right. "Yes, it is," Powell insisted. "Wait a minute," Bush interrupted, taking Rice's side. "That doesn't sound right." "Rice got up and went to her office to check. When she came back, Powell thought she looked a little sheepish. "That's right," she said.

In The One Percent Doctrine Ron Suskind describes how the President met foreign policy challenges with "self-generated certainty": The policy process, in fact, never changed much. Issues argued, often vociferously, at the level of deputies and principles rarely seemed to go upstream in their fullest form to the President's desk; and, if they did, it was often after Bush seemed to have already made up his mind based on what was so often cited as his "instinct" or "gut."

In The Price of Loyalty Suskind further documents how former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil would often meet such Presidential certainty with regard to economic policy. O'Neil would present a detailed policy argument to the President who would respond with a blank stare, saying nothing, and then moving on to the next subject: "I wondered, from the first, if the President didn't know the questions to ask," O'Neil recalled, "or did he know and just not want to know the answers?" In this and similar instances documented by other observers, instead of asking questions to gather information, the President kept his own counsel and made up his own mind. Significantly, such criticisms of the way decisions are made in the Administration are, for the most part, from non-partisan sources. For example, conservative columnist David Brooks offers advice on "how the next president needs to fix decision-making:" …the next president has to restore cabinet government-set up teams of rival, as Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan did…A president who vests power in cabinet members gives himself colleagues, people of similar age and stature who can argue with him face to face. By formalizing a decision-making process he balances egotistical secretaries against each other. A Rumsfeld would have to go to meetings and explain himself to his rivals. Entire departments couldn't be shut out of the loop, the way Treasury and State were. In both the public and private sectors, the very strengths of leaders are often also their weaknesses. Warren Bennis calls attention to the importance of what he calls "the Wallenda Factor," that supreme self-confidence found among most great leaders, a belief that they not only are right, but that they cannot fail. When the leader is, in fact, right-as Churchill was right in the 1930s about the threat posed by the Nazis and, hence, refused to heed the counsel of the many appeasers in his country-such resolve and determination becomes the stuff of legend. But when a leader is wrong, or when conditions change, the very same trait appears as self-defeating stubbornness (witness Creon). In this regard, Francis Bacon offered leaders sound advice some four hundred years ago, "If a man will begin with certainties, he will end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts, he will end in certainties." Clearly, the problems attendant to speaking truth to power have been around forever, and they are unlikely to magically vanish in the future. Nevertheless, experience shows that several things can be done to ameliorate these problems, and that both leaders and followers have moral obligations with regard to these actions. RESPONSIBILITIES OF MESSENGERS When one reports to an emperor, the temptation is to avoid bad news. Worse, there are rewards for flatterers and those who appeal to the vanity of the leader. Here ego is to blame not only on the part of the listener, but on the part of the messenger, as well. Former CIA Director, George Tenet, was basically an honest, competent, and hard-working civil servant in the Clinton Administration whose ego was wounded by the fact that he was never accepted as a White House insider. As the only high-level hold-over in the Bush Administration, Tenet was understandably flattered when the new President's inner-circle treated him an integral member of their team. It is easy to see how Tenet would not want to jeopardize his status by being the skunk at the party. Doubtless, nothing could cement his standing more than telling the other members of the team what they wanted to hear: Iraq would be a "slam dunk." Paul O'Neil, in contrast, made it a habit to speak truth to power and ultimately was fired by the Administration because he was not seen as a "team player." Indeed, the moral challenge O'Neil faced almost daily during his tenure in Washington was to weigh the balance between two competing goods: the frequently opposed organizational virtues of loyalty and truth telling. The character trait needed to appropriately adjust that balance is integrity. In Stephen Carter's book on the subject, the distinguished Yale law professor lays out three requisite steps for the exercise of integrity: (1) discerning what is right and what is wrong; (2) acting on what you have discerned, even at personal cost; (3) saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of right and wrong. The first criterion captures the idea of integrity as requiring a degree of moral reflectiveness. The second brings in the ideal of an integral person as steadfast, which includes the sense of keeping commitments. The third reminds us that a person of integrity is unashamed of doing the right.

However, Carter stresses that the exercise of integrity is not as simple as one, two, three. Indeed, integrity by and of itself is an insufficient virtue: after all, Adolf Hitler had oodles of it. Yet, at the same time, all other virtues are insufficient without integrity: for example, President Richard Nixon had vision, intelligence, and courage, but those proved not be enough without the catalyst of integrity. Moreover, integrity does not simply entail telling the truth. Carter calls attention to "the insufficiency of honesty," reminding us that we also have other, often competing, responsibilities. As every family knows, inappropriate or careless truth telling can be hurtful, and ultimately fatal, to relationships. In sum, before speaking truth to power can be considered virtuous, the act must meet several criteria: 1. It has to be truthful 2. It must do no harm to innocents 3. It must not be self-interested (the benefits must go to others, or to the organization) 4. It must be the product of moral reflection 5. The messenger must be willing to pay the price 6. It must not be done out of spite or anger. This list is neither complete nor all-inclusive, and each of the points requires significant elaboration. For example, in the appendix (below) I illustrate some of the ethical complications related to the role of anger. Those complications duly registered, it nonetheless can be said that we all have a moral obligation to speak truth to power when the actions of leaders are harmful to our organization, to people inside and outside the organization, and to the leaders themselves. But as hard as it is for messengers to fulfill such obligations, it is more difficult for leaders to listen to, and heed, the warnings of followers. RESPONSIBILIITES OF LISTENERS As the ancient example of Creon reminds us, the presence of excessive amounts of testosterone almost always leads to a loss of hearing. It is almost always ego-and almost always ego of the male persuasion-that makes it futile, even dangerous, to speak truth to power. As Warren Bennis and Daniel Goleman advise …leaders would do well to reflect on their own receptivity to suggestions, alternative points of views, and others' opinions. One motive for turning a deaf ear to what others have to say seems to be sheer hubris: leaders who believe they are wiser or more expert than those they lead. The literature on executive narcissism tells us that the self-confidence executives need can easily turn into a blind-spot, an unwillingness to turn to others for advice. [CEO] Kevin Sharer of Amgen keeps a cautionary portrait of General George Custer in his office to remind himself of the dangers of overestimating his leadership ability.

That is why I believe the mantle of true greatness should be reserved only for those leaders who possess the "feminine" virtues of humility, inclusion, vulnerability, service to others, and respect for people. In this regard, one could do worse than to keep a portrait of the late President Gerald Ford as a positive reminder of what great leadership entails. Shortly after he died, New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted that the former President "encouraged dissent in his inner circle. He had no enemies, no ego, no agenda, no ideology, no concern for his image." A day earlier, on same the op-ed page of the Times , Harvard historian Orlando Patterson described attending a meeting at the White House in which Ford listened intently, and with humility, to the points made by a diverse group of experts. In short, President Ford was totally unlike the testosterone-fueled political and business leaders whose faces typically are found on the front page of news and business magazines. And, I can assure you, Ford's were not the traits of leadership advocated in most business schools today where take-charge decisiveness is prized over the ability to listen. In short, Americans are getting the kind of leadership our society celebrates. That being the case, we cannot expect a sea change in the behavior of those who should be more open to candor without there first being a change in the context in which leaders operate. ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES In the private sector, change will not occur until corporations consciously begin to select, train, develop and reward leaders who listen--that is, Gerald Fords in the making. Yet, in an on-going study of top managers in large corporations, my research colleagues and I have found that executives are far-more-often selected for their proven ability to compete with their fellow members in the C-suite than for their demonstrated teamwork. This reward system encourages the hoarding of information, which then leads to testosterone-fed conflict. Changing that system is the responsibility of boards of directors, the people who have the ultimate responsibility for choosing leaders. Truly independent boards also would go a long way toward providing a needed check on executive ego, and a positive source of objective, disinterested truth to power. It is often useful to bring in outside "organizational anthropologists," independent observers skilled in identifying potentially toxic behaviors and the hidden values which drive them. In 1973, Warren Bennis and I coined the term "organizational culture" and created a diagnostic tool to identify the unique behavioral characteristics of a company, for example profiling the type of person who tends to get ahead in an organization. One question we asked was, "What is the company joke that no one would dare to tell the boss?" Since it is the values of leaders that drive organizational behavior, any process that helps to surface those honestly will help to establish a climate of candor. By objectively asking, "What do we really cherish and hold dear-quality? technical excellence? power? executive privilege?"-organizations take a useful first step in that process. Finally, actions that break down the artificial barriers that separate the few at the top of an organization from the many down-the-line serve to encourage an increased flow of information. In this regard, continued executive resistance to such proven practices as employee involvement and other forms of participation in decision making and sharing information is nothing short of remarkable, if not shocking. Indeed, nothing has to be invented to create an effective culture of candor. For example, in the 1980s Kirk Hanson played a major role in calling national attention to the practices of Springfield Re (now SRC Holdings), a company where every employee has access to all financial and managerial information and is taught how to interpret and apply it. The net effect, in the words of the company CFO, "is like having 700 internal auditors out there in every function of the company." That is the definition of transparency, of a company with no secrets, one in which every employee is empowered to speak the truth. This "culture of candor" was created by CEO Jack Stack who had to forgo the ego-satisfying pleasure of being "the boss" and adopt the roles of teacher and listener. He had to learn to trust his employees with managerial and financial information typically horded by executives in most companies, as he had to trust them to act responsibly on the basis of that information. In sum, this most un-Creon-like behavior is what the ancient Greeks called "virtuous" leadership. Appendix Practical Applications: "Exit, Voice, or Loyalty"? The main defenses used against organizational dissidents are 1) to challenge their loyalty, and 2) to dismiss them as angry malcontents. In 2004, the Bush Administration argued that criticisms leveled against it by counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke should be discounted because the ex-White House aide's judgment was warped by anger. That argument gained some traction with the public: understandably, Americans expect a level of institutional loyalty from public servants and find unseemly those who kiss and tell (especially those "jilted" by their bosses and who, thus, are trying to "even the score"). And it did appear Clarke had become seriously disgruntled when he found himself out of the loop at the White House, and his advice ignored by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. How do we know if Clarke's undeniable anger was justified, on the one hand, or an adequate reason to discredit the veracity of his critique, on the other? As the Greeks saw it, the exercise of virtue is not easy, either for those followers who would speak truth to power or those leaders who need to hear the truth. Aristotle says it takes time and effort to build the habits of ethical analysis that lead to subsequent right behavior. In order to break the comforting habits that lock us into self-defeating behavior, the Ancient says we need to embark on a series of exercises to develop our moral muscles. To illustrate what he means, he cites the practical case of a man who must struggle to control his anger. Aristotle starts by acknowledging that everyone gets angry from time to time, so if a person's face occasionally turns red, that doesn't signify anything about his character. Nor should we be concerned with inherited traits: it is morally inconsequential if someone's face is red all the time. But if a person habitually becomes inflamed with anger, and those who know him are constantly on edge waiting for the tell-tale signs of red ears and cheeks indicative of an oncoming eruption, that is a valid indicator of a character flaw. Aristotle then calls positive attention to the person who is prone to go red-faced with anger but has learned to control it . In general, he concludes it is virtuous to be even-tempered. But he doesn't stop there. His discussion of the emotion is nuanced: He goes on to say there are times when anger is called for and appropriate. In fact, if one does not become angry over a grave injustice, he says one cannot be considered virtuous. The secret is in knowing when to be angry and then how to direct it usefully. The virtuous person, he says, becomes angry at the right time, over the right issue, and to the right degree. He then cites examples of questions we might ask of ourselves in order to develop the moral muscles need to allow us to do that habitually. Properly understood, his example of anger management is not only practical, it serves to illustrate how we can free ourselves from the prison of whatever particular emotion might prevent us from behaving virtuously. ORGANIZATIONAL EXAMPLES A look at what today's social scientists have to say about the behavior of indignant employees in public and private organizations provides a framework for understanding Aristotle's ancient ethical perspective. In the early 1970s, MIT social scientist Albert O. Hirschman posited that employees who disagree with company policy have only three options: "exit, voice, and loyalty." That is, they can 1) offer a principled resignation, 2) try to change the policy (speak truth to power), or 3) remain loyal "team players." Experience shows most people choose option three, the path of least resistance. They swallow whatever moral objections they have to dictates from above, concluding they lack power to change things or, worse, will be punished if they attempt to do so. Indeed, such "loyalty," is assumed: most executives expect employees will be good soldiers and not question company policy (or, if they do, will go away quietly). But sometimes employees find the actions of employers so unconscionable they feel they have no choice but to resign and "go public" with their objections. Typically, this is the last resort for those who have voiced disagreement internally and exhausted channels of appeal but feel they were not given a serious hearing. On rare occasions, a respected organizational insider will proffer such a principled resignation but, typically, those who quit over matters of principle are powerless, or those who have been pushed to the extreme of quitting by the disrespect shown to them by superiors. After all, how many employees would resign if they felt they were listened to, and their options respected, even if they didn't get their way on a matter of principle? In general, people have to be angry as hell before they quit and go public. And, because anger is such an unattractive, unsettling, and even frightening trait, angry people seldom have much influence, and are easily dismissed by those in powers as "out of control." But anger can be a socially useful fuel, as the wrathful 2004 Presidential candidacy of Howard Dean illustrates. Dean seemed legitimately angry over the Bush Administration's decision to invade a country that he believed had no intent to attack America, and presented no real threat to the nation's security. His anger-fueled campaign served the purpose of mobilizing his party to challenge the Administration's war policies (those Democrats who weren't angry enough had acquiesced to the invasion of Iraq). Even though he was a member of the opposition party whose supposed duty is to offer loyal criticism, Dean paid a price: his hostile demeanor was ridiculed by allies and foes alike. And, when Dean ultimately went red-faced wiggy on national television after a primary loss, he obviously blew it by Aristotle's standards of appropriate anger: he got angry at the wrong place, to the wrong degree, and over the wrong issue. In contrast to politicians, angry ex-employees risk a lot more than being mocked by late-night talk show hosts: they open themselves to attacks on their personal lives by the considerable force of their threatened institutions. That's why most workers have to be totally teed off before they violate the norms of organizational loyalty. To get angry enough to face onslaught on one's character and veracity requires not only fundamental disagreement over policy--typically involving the conviction that a moral principle has been violated--but also deep personal hurt. Such were the mixed motivations in recent high-profile corporate cases of whistle blowing at cigarette-maker Brown and Williamson and at Unum Provident Insurance. In both instances, corporate leaders responded with the standard organizational defense that the whistle blowers' testimonies should be discounted because they were "disgruntled" (the ex-employees were portrayed as angry "nut cases" with enough skeletons in their closets to outfit a Halloween ball). Moreover, many institutional leaders argue that employees owe loyalty to them as individuals. In contrast, whistleblowers typically say they owe their first allegiance to their organizations. Indeed, it is when employees believe their leaders betray their organization's integrity that their anger mounts sufficiently to justify the risks of whistle blowing. Nothing makes formerly loyal employees angrier than values-betraying leaders who claim "L'etat, c'est moi." In contrast, Aristotle says the organization takes precedence over its leaders. Hence, to the Administration's charge that such critics as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and national security advisor Richard Clarke were "too angry" to be trusted, Aristotle would say, of course they were angry: "Those who are not angry at the things they should be angry at are thought to be fools." Indeed, if they weren't angry they would still be inside, loyally carrying out orders, or trying to voice disagreement through established processes. They had tried that, failed in their attempts to be heard, and then opted for vocal exits. Doubtless, it would be prettier if whistle blowers weren't so angry, but anger is often a necessary spur to doing the right thing. Indeed, what might have happened had Secretary of State Colin Powell allowed his reported anger over the decision to invade Iraq to overcome his military-disciplined instinct to loyally fall into line with Administration policies? Had he instead resigned and publicly voiced his concerns, would Americans then have been so accepting of the questionable evidence on W.M.Ds? Who knows? But it does seem clear that if we too quickly ignore the angry words of disgruntled former officials, fewer of them will be willing to step forward, and there will be fewer safeguards of the public interest. Aristotle adds one important admonition: "the good tempered man is not revengeful." A PERSONAL EXAMPLE As I now read Aristotle, I can't help but recall the most difficult career issue I have personally struggled with: what to do when the leaders of the organization I worked for betrayed its essential values. Because I had firmly believed in those values, my response was over-the-top emotional: I became mad as hell. When I expressed that anger to colleagues and friends, their response was "Cool it. They're not going to change, so it won't do you any good to get angry. If you can't live with the situation, then just quit. But don't burn bridges by making a stink." One friend went so far as to tell me that my anger was "unattractive." Frankly, I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to think about the issue, and didn't know how to behave. But since the only thing more damning that can be said about an employee than he is "angry" is that he is "disloyal," I bottled up my emotions, quit, and went quietly away. Years later, the organization was still in a tailspin, and I found myself still angry and not at all certain I had done the right thing. In retrospect, I wish I had been able to analyze the issue with the help of Aristotle's insights. After rereading what he has to say about anger, I now feel my response had been half right, at best. I still believe I did the right thing by quitting when my bosses put themselves above the values of the organization, but I don't think I channeled my anger in a useful way: before I quit I should have tried to offer them a constructive suggestion by which they could have gotten back on track. And, once having left, I think I erred in not having had the moral courage to "go public" to call attention to what was happening. Had I reached out to powerful outsiders who also cared about the organization, I might have prevented the leaders from damaging its integrity. For that course to have succeeded, I would have had to be clearly acting for the good of the organization, and not in a "revengeful" sprit. Aristotle's insight that virtuous people become angry at the right time, over the right issue, and to the right degree, now allows me to see that, by repressing my legitimate anger, the act of quitting not only had no constructive impact, I also made myself unhappy. Had I asked myself the ethical questions Aristotle raises, I think I might have directed my anger more positively, and gotten rid of it much sooner. Indeed, I even might have effectively spoken truth to power. NOTES 1. Warren Bennis, "Building a Culture of Candor," The Conference Board Annual Report, 2004 2. These two examples from James O'Toole, Vanguard Management , Doubleday, 1985 3. Ibid 4. Ibid

5. Ibid 6. Ibid 7. Quoted in Noel Tichy and Stratford Sherman, Control Your Own Destiny or someone Else Will , Doubleday, 1993 8. I was head of seminar programs at the Aspen Institute at the time 9. Quoted in James O'Toole Leadership A to Z . Jossey-Bass, 1999 10. Bennis, op cit 11. Edward E. Lawler " " Jossey-Bass, 12. Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III , Simon and Schuster, 2006 13. Ron Suskind, The One Percent doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 , Simon and Schuster, 2006 14. Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neil , Simon and Schuster, 2004 15. David Brooks, "Building a Team of Rivals," New York Times, 2006 16. Stephen L. Carter, ( integrity ), Basic Books, 1996 17. Warren Bennis and Daniel Goleman, "Transparency is Inevitable," 2007, Unpublished ms 18. Frank Rich, op-ed column, N.Y.Times , January 7, 2007 19. James O'Toole, Making America Work , Continuum, 1981 20. Quoted in James O'Toole Leadership A to Z . Jossey-Bass, 1999

21. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies , Free Press, 2004 22. James O'Toole, C reating the Good Life: Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness , , Rodale, 2005 23. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty , Harvard University Press, 1970

Essay on Honesty for Students and Children

500+ words essay on honesty.

Honesty implies being truthful. Honesty means to develop a practice of speaking truth throughout life. A person who practices Honesty in his/her life, possess strong moral character. An Honest person shows good behavior, always follows rules and regulations, maintain discipline, speak the truth, and is punctual. An honest person is trustworthy as he always tends to speak the truth.

Honesty is the Best Policy

A major component for developing moral character is Honesty. Honesty helps in developing good attributes like kindness, discipline, truthfulness, moral integrity and more. Lying, cheating, lack of trust, steal, greed and other immoral attributes have no part in Honesty. Honest people are sincere, trustworthy and loyal, throughout their life. Honesty is valuable and it is the habit of utmost importance. There are famous quotes, said by a great personality like “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom”. It holds good due to its ability to build, shape and motivate integral values in one’s life.

Benefits of Honesty

Honesty is always admirable in the family, civil society, friends and across the globe. A person with honesty is respected by all. For one to build the character of Honesty entirely depends on his/her family values and ethics and his/her surrounding environment. Parents showing honest behavior and character in front of their children create an impact on the children and we say “Honesty lies in their genes”. Honesty can also be developed practically which requires proper guidance, encouragement, patience, and dedication.

An honest person is always known for his/her honesty just like a sun is known for its eternal light and unlimited energy. It is a quality which helps a person to succeed in life and get much respect. It gives identification to the moral character of a person. Dishonest people may easily get trust and respect from other people. However, they lose that forever whenever they get caught.

Being dishonest is a sin in all the religions, however, people practice it for their short time benefits and selfishness. They never become morally strong and their life becomes miserable. An honest person moves freely in society and spread his/her fragrance in all directions. Being honest is never mean to bear the bad habits of others or bear ill-treated activities. Everyone has rights to reveal and take action against what is going wrong with him.

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Importance of Honesty in Life

Honesty plays an important role in everyone’s life and it is a character which is visible with open eyes like an open book. Having considered as an Honest person, by society is one of the best compliment one can dream of in his/her entire life. It is the real character a person earns in life by being sincere and dedicated towards it. Lack of honesty in society is doom. It is due to the lack of proper interpersonal relationship between parents-children and students-teachers. Honesty is a practice which is built slowly and patiently, firstly at home and then school. Hence home and school are the best places for a child to develop Honesty since his/her growing times.

Home and school are the places where a child learns moral ethics. Thus, the education system should ensure to include some essential habits and practices to keep a child close to morality. Children must be instructed right from the beginning and their childhood to practice honesty. Youths of any country are the future of that country so they should give better opportunities to develop moral character so that they can lead their country in a better way.

For all human problems, Honesty is the ultimate solution. Corruption and various problems are everywhere in society. It is because of the decreasing number of honest people. In today’s fast and competitive world, we have forgotten about moral and integral ethics. It is very important and necessary for us to rethink and remodel, that we bring the honesty back in society so that everything goes in a natural manner.

Moral ethics of a person is known through Honesty. In a society, if all the people seriously practice getting honest, then society will become an ideal society and free of all the corruptions and evils. There will be huge changes in the day-to-day life of everyone. It can happen very easily if all the parents and teachers understand their responsibilities towards the nation and teach their children and students about moral ethics.

People should realize the value of honesty in order to manage social and economic balance. Honesty is an essential requirement in modern time. It is one of the best habits which encourages an individual and make capable enough to solve and handle any difficult situation in his/her life. Honesty acts as a catalyst in strengthening our will power to face and fight any odds in life.

FAQs on Essay on Honesty

Q.1. What are the basic principles that were followed by Gandhiji?

Ans: The six principles followed by Gandhiji were Truth, Non-Violence, Simplicity, Faith, Selflessness, and Respect for an Individual.

Q.2. Who gave the proverb, “Honesty is the Best Policy”? Ans: Benjamin Franklin one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, gave the proverb, “Honesty is the Best Policy”.

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The Uncomfortable Truth

The following is an excerpt from my #1 New York Times Bestseller Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope . Just like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck questioned our conventional wisdom on what makes us happy, Everything Is F*cked questions our assumptions on what makes life worth living. You can order it here .

If I worked at Starbucks, instead of writing people’s names on their coffee cup, I’d write the following:

One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing.

Enjoy your fucking coffee.

I’d have to write it in really tiny lettering, of course. And it’d take a while to write, meaning the line of morning rush-hour customers would be backed out the door. Not exactly stellar customer service, either. This is probably just one of the reasons why I’m not employable.

But seriously, how could you tell someone, in good conscience, to “have a nice day” while knowing that all their thoughts and motivations stem from a never-ending need to avoid the inherent meaninglessness of human existence?

Because, in the infinite expanse of space/time, the universe does not care whether your mother’s hip replacement goes well, or your kids attend college, or your boss thinks you made a bitching spreadsheet. It doesn’t care if the Democrats or the Republicans win the presidential election. It doesn’t care if a celebrity gets caught doing cocaine while furiously masturbating in an airport bathroom (again). It doesn’t care if the forests burn or the ice melts or the waters rise or the air simmers or we all get vaporized by a superior alien race.

You care, and you desperately convince yourself that because you care, it all must have some great cosmic meaning behind it.

You care because, deep down, you need to feel that sense of importance in order to avoid the Uncomfortable Truth, to avoid the incomprehensibility of your existence, to avoid being crushed by the weight of your own material insignificance. And you—like me, like everyone—then project that imagined sense of importance onto the world around you because it gives you hope.

Is it too early to have this conversation? Here, have another coffee. I even made a winky-smiley face with the steamed milk. Isn’t it cute? Here, I’ll wait while you Instagram it.

Okay, where were we? Oh yeah! The incomprehensibility of your existence—right. Now, you might be thinking, “Well, Mark, I believe we’re all here for a reason, and nothing is a coincidence, and everyone matters because all our actions affect somebody, and even if we can help one person, then it’s still worth it, right?”

Now, aren’t you just as cute as a button!

See, that’s your hope talking. That’s a story your mind spins to make it worth waking up in the morning: something needs to matter because without something mattering , then there’s no reason to go on living. And some form of simple altruism or a reduction in suffering is always our mind’s go-to for making it feel like it’s worth doing anything.

Our psyche needs hope to survive the way a fish needs water. Hope is the fuel for our mental engine. It’s the butter on our biscuit. It’s a lot of really cheesy metaphors. Without hope, your whole mental apparatus will stall out or starve. If we don’t believe there’s any hope that the future will be better than the present, that our life will improve in some way, then we spiritually die. After all, if there’s no hope of things ever being better, then why live—why do anything?

Here’s what a lot of people don’t get: the opposite of happiness is not anger or sadness. 1 If you’re angry or sad, that means you still give a fuck about something. That means something still matters. That means you still have hope. 2

No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference. 3 It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all?

Hopelessness is a cold and bleak nihilism, a sense that there is no point, so fuck it—why not run with scissors or sleep with your boss’s wife or shoot up a school? It is the Uncomfortable Truth, a silent realization that in the face of infinity, everything we could possibly care about quickly approaches zero.

Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness , and depression . It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction. This is not an overstatement. 4 Chronic anxiety is a crisis of hope. It is the fear of a failed future. Depression is a crisis of hope. It is the belief in a meaningless future. Delusion, addiction, obsession—these are all the mind’s desperate and compulsive attempts at generating hope one neurotic tick or obsessive craving at a time. 5

The avoidance of hopelessness—that is, the construction of hope—then becomes our mind’s primary project. All meaning, everything we understand about ourselves and the world, is constructed for the purpose of maintaining hope. Therefore, hope is the only thing any of us willingly dies for. Hope is what we believe to be greater than ourselves. Without it, we believe we are nothing.

When I was in college, my grandfather died. For a few years afterward, I had this intense feeling that I must live in such a way as to make him proud. This felt reasonable and obvious on some deep level, but it wasn’t. In fact, it made no logical sense at all. I hadn’t had a close relationship with my grandfather. We’d never talked on the phone. We hadn’t corresponded. I didn’t even see him the last five years or so that he was alive.

Not to mention: he was dead. How did my “living to make him proud” affect anything?

His death caused me to brush up against that Uncomfortable Truth. So, my mind got to work, looking to build hope out of the situation in order to sustain me, to keep any nihilism at bay. My mind decided that because my grandfather was now deprived of his ability to hope and aspire in his own life, it was important for me to carry on hope and aspiration in his honor. This was my mind’s bite-size piece of faith, my own personal mini-religion of purpose .

And it worked! For a short while, his death infused otherwise banal and empty experiences with import and meaning . And that meaning gave me hope. You’ve probably felt something similar when someone close to you passed away. It’s a common feeling. You tell yourself you’ll live in a way that will make your loved one proud. You tell yourself you will use your life to celebrate his. You tell yourself that this is an important and good thing.

And that “good thing” is what sustains us in these moments of existential terror. I walked around imagining that my grandfather was following me, like a really nosy ghost, constantly looking over my shoulder. This man whom I barely knew when he was alive was now somehow extremely concerned with how I did on my calculus exam. It was totally irrational.

Our psyches construct little narratives like this whenever they face adversity, these before/after stories we invent for ourselves. And we must keep these hope narratives alive, all the time, even if they become unreasonable or destructive, as they are the only stabilizing force protecting our minds from the Uncomfortable Truth.

These hope narratives are then what give our lives a sense of purpose. Not only do they imply that there is something better in the future, but also that it’s actually possible to go out and achieve that something. When people prattle on about needing to find their “life’s purpose,” what they really mean is that it’s no longer clear to them what matters, what is a worthy use of their limited time here on earth 6 —in short, what to hope for. They are struggling to see what the before/after of their lives should be.

That’s the hard part: finding that before/after for yourself. It’s difficult because there’s no way ever to know for sure if you’ve got it right. This is why a lot of people flock to religion because religions acknowledge this permanent state of unknowing and demands faith in the face of it. This is also probably partly why religious people suffer from depression and commit suicide in far fewer numbers than nonreligious people: that practiced faith protects them from the Uncomfortable Truth. 7

But your hope narratives don’t need to be religious. They can be anything. This book is my little source of hope. It gives me purpose; it gives me meaning. And the narrative that I’ve constructed around that hope is that I believe this book might help some people, that it might make both my life and the world a little bit better.

Do I know that for sure? No. But it’s my little before/after story, and I’m sticking to it. It gets me up in the morning and gets me excited about my life. And not only is that not a bad thing, it’s the only thing.

For some people, the before/after story is raising their kids well. For others, it’s saving the environment. For others, it’s making a bunch of money and buying a big-ass boat. For others, it’s simply trying to improve their golf swing.

Whether we realize it or not, we all have these narratives we’ve elected to buy into for whatever reason. It doesn’t matter if the way you get to hope is via religious faith or evidence-based theory or an intuition or a well-reasoned argument—they all produce the same result: you have some belief that (a) there is potential for growth or improvement or salvation in the future, and (b) there are ways we can navigate ourselves to get there. That’s it. Day after day, year after year, our lives are made up of the endless overlapping of these hope narratives. They are the psychological carrot at the end of the stick.

If this all sounds nihilistic, please, don’t get the wrong idea. This book is not an argument for nihilism. It is one against nihilism—both the nihilism within us and the growing sense of nihilism that seems to emerge with the modern world. 8 And to successfully argue against nihilism, you must start at nihilism. You must start at the Uncomfortable Truth. From there, you must slowly build a convincing case for hope. And not just any hope, but a sustainable, benevolent form of hope. A hope that can bring us together rather than tear us apart. A hope that is robust and powerful, yet still grounded in reason and reality. A hope that can carry us to the end of our days with a sense of gratitude and satisfaction.

This is not easy to do (obviously). And in the twenty-first century, it’s arguably more difficult than ever. Nihilism and the pure indulgence of desire that accompanies it are gripping the modern world. It is power for the sake of power. Success for the sake of success . Pleasure for the sake of pleasure. Nihilism acknowledges no broader “why?” It adheres to no great truth or cause. It’s a simple “Because it feels good.” And this, as we’ll see, is what is making everything seem so bad.

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of my #1 New York Times Bestseller Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope . You can order it here .

See: A. J. Zautra, Emotions, Stress, and Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 15–22. ↵
I don’t use the word hope in this book in the way it is typically used academically. Most academics use “hope” to express a feeling of optimism: an expectation of or belief in the possibility of positive results. This definition is partial and limited. Optimism can feed hope, but it is not the same thing as hope. I can have no expectation for something better to happen, but I can still hope for it. And that hope can still give my life a sense of meaning and purpose despite all evidence to the contrary. No, by “hope,” I am referring to a motivation toward something perceived as valuable, what is sometimes described as “purpose” or “meaning” in the academic literature. As a result, for my discussions of hope, I’ll draw on research on motivation and value theory and, in many cases, try to fuse them together. ↵
M. W. Gallagher and S. J. Lopez, “ Positive Expectancies and Mental Health: Identifying the Unique Contributions of Hope and Optimism ,” Journal of Positive Psychology 4, no. 6 (2009): 548–56. ↵
This is almost certainly an overstatement. ↵
See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973). ↵
Am I allowed to cite myself? Fuck it, I’m going to cite myself. See Mark Manson, “ 7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose ,” MarkManson.net , September 18, 2014. ↵
For data on religiosity and suicide, see Kanita Dervic, MD, et al., “ Religious Affiliation and Suicide Attempt ,” American Journal of Psychiatry 161, no. 12 (2004): 2303–8. For data on religiosity and depression, see Raphael Bonelli et al., “ Religious and Spiritual Factors in Depression: Review and Integration of the Research ,” Depression Research and Treatment vol. TK, no. TK (2012). ↵
Studies done in more than 132 countries show that the wealthier a country becomes, the more its population struggles with feelings of meaning and purpose. See Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener, “ Residents of Poor Nations Have a Greater Sense of Meaning in Life than Residents of Wealthy Nations ,” Psychological Science 25, no. 2 (2014): 422–30. ↵

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Speaking truth to power: a conversation on Complaint! and Experiences of Power Abuse in Academia

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Beauty Of Truth : Essay, Speech, Article, Paragraph, Composition

Beauty of truth : essay, speech, article, paragraph, composition.

Beauty Of Truth : We all have been taught since childhood “ hamesha sach bolna chahiye ”( we should always speak the truth) but if we just sit back and reflect for a moment our whole day activities majority of us will find that we hardly follow this statement nowadays. So the question arises, Is speaking truth so difficult? Does it take a lot of courage and endeavours to speak the truth? The answer is No. Truth is all pervasive, it cannot be denied.

It is very easy to speak lies but if one knows the beauty of truth, I think one will always follow the path of the truth. The first and for most benefit of speaking truth is that it provides immense peace and satisfaction. When someone speaks lies the conscious of the person pokes him every time that he has spoken a lie and this disturbs the inner peace of the person .Nothing counts more than the inner satisfaction and peace of the person. When someone speaks the truth he never faces this situation. He is always at ease and has a perpetual smile on his face which is the reflection of his satisfaction and peace.

The path of lies is short and easy. It appears attractive and tempting. It lures the person by highlighting the immediate benefits but it is just an illusion which is short lived. It just provides success and happiness which is short lived. The path of honesty may appear difficult, where results can only be achieved through sincere and diligent hard work, but its results are permanent. The one who follows this path always emerges successful, happy and contended.

Beauty Of Truth : Essay, Speech, Article, Paragraph, Composition

The people who speak the truth, how worse the situation may be, becomes an ideal and role model for others. He leads by example. Such people who always follow the truth even in the most difficult of situations is admired and respected by all and set an example for others. They are the live examples of the fact that truth triumphs always.

When a person speaks a lie he can save momentarily himself, but when it is discovered he loses the confidence and respect of the person to whom he spoke the lies but a person who follows the path of the truth never faces this situation. He is always respected and honoured by everyone and holds a respectable position in the society.

Truth is all pervasive and continuous. It does not need to be proved. It does not need evidence and figures to establish its identity. Truth exists independently. It does not need any support. Speaking the truth can melt the hardest of the person and can amend the worst situation. It can turn the most unfavourable situation as favourable in just few moments so speaking truth creates an environment of optimism around the person which is needed to strive in the difficult of the situations.

Truthfulness is not limited to the outside world. A person needs to be honest to one self also. When a person is honest to himself/herself, it makes him content, free from any feeling of guilt. The person enjoys every moment of his life, whatever the situation may be. Victory always comes to such people.

The path of truth is difficult to follow, it takes a lot of patience and courage to follow it but those who follow this path are always gifted with contentment ,happiness and self -satisfaction which are the key elements to a happy life.

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Speaking Truths with Film Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary

by Bill Nichols (Author)
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About the Book

How do issues of form and content shape the documentary film? What role does visual evidence play in relation to a documentary’s arguments about the world we live in? In what ways do documentaries abide by or subvert ethical expectations? Are mockumentaries a form of subversion? Can the documentary be an aesthetic experience and at the same time have political or social impact? And how can such impacts be empirically measured? Pioneering film scholar Bill Nichols investigates the ways documentaries strive for accuracy and truthfulness and simultaneously fabricate a form that shapes reality. Such films may rely on reenactment to re-create the past, storytelling to provide satisfying narratives, and rhetorical figures such as metaphor or devices such as irony to make a point. Documentaries are truly a fiction unlike any other. With clarity and passion, Nichols offers incisive commentaries on the basic questions of documentary’s distinct relationship to the reality it represents, as well as close readings of provocative documentaries from this form's earliest days to its most recent incarnations. These essays offer a definitive account of what makes documentary film such a vital part of our cultural landscape.

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Bill Nichols is a leading authority on documentary film and the author or editor of a dozen books. His Introduction to Documentary is the standard text in this area. He lectures widely and consults often with documentary filmmakers on their projects.

"There is a fluidity in Nichols’ writing that gently forces us to see the 'blurred boundaries' . . . between all forms of visual expression. In reading these essays, one is often struck by how much is illuminated, not only within the boundaries of documentary film but into the historical, political, social and cultural world that provides the fertile ground where ideas take root." — Documentary

"Nichols’s marvelous volume of essays . . . spans forty years of his contribution to contemporary film theory. It offers lucid, articulate, and illuminating studies of both general issues in documentary theory and of individual films. Readers familiar with his books will find fascinating essays here, both supplementing his published volumes and adding new perspectives on his work." — European Legacy

PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION PART I. DOCUMENTARY MEETS THE NEIGHBORS: THE AVANT-GARDE AND FICTION FILM PART II. THE AUDIO IN AUDIOVISUAL PART III. BEYOND “JUST THE FACTS”: EVIDENCE, INTERPRETATION, AND SOCIAL CONTEXT PART IV. ETHICS AND IRONY IN DOCUMENTARY PART V. POLITICS AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM NOTES INDEX

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Movies and methods, volume 1, movies and methods, volume 2, los angeles documentary and the production of public history, 1958-1977, kartemquin films, where truth lies, trauma cinema, for documentary, mining the home movie, film manifestos and global cinema cultures, cinema and the wealth of nations.

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The Dangers of Speaking Truth in Henry Iv

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Speaking The Truth In Love, Essays related to A Statement, Chicago Nineteen forty-five

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ACKER, LAWRENCE
AMLING, C. M.
ARNDT, W. *
BARTELS, H.
BAUER, W. E.
BEHNKE, C. A.
BERNTHAL, AUG. F.
BOBZIN, AUG. F.
BRETSCHER, PAUL M. *
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BRUSTAT, A. W.
CAEMMERER, RICH. R. *
COATES, THOMAS
DEFFNER, L. H.
ENGELBRECHT, H. H.
FRIEDRICH, E. J.
GEISEMAN, O. A.
GIESELER, C. A.
GLABE, E. B.
GRAEBNER, THEO. *
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HEMMETER, BERNARD H.
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HOFFMANN, OSWALD
KRETZMANN, A. R.
KRETZMANN, KARL
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KUNTZ, WERNER
KURTH, ERWIN
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LOOSE, F. W.
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POLACK, W. G. *
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SCHROEDEL, THEO. H.
THEISS, O. H.
WEBER, EDMUND W.
WENCHEL, J. FREDERIC
WIND, H. F.
"Dr. Behnken himself took a most serious view of the matter. 'In an open meeting of more than 70 pastors on July 1, 1947, the President of Synod said that A Statement , as its words read, contains ‘doctrinal aberrations’ which are ‘in themselves potentially divisive of fellowship.’”
" DO YOU KNOW—? , a mimeographed paper detailing the history of 'A Statement' and subsequent developments in the LC—MS, published by the Chicago Study Club [Missouri Synod pastors and laymen], p. 1. From the files of Prof. Glenn E. Reichwald"
"'A Statement' as such no longer is a basis for discussion according to the 'Agreement' reported by the President"

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Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation

By Manvir Singh

Millions of people have watched Mike Hughes die. It happened on February 22, 2020, not far from Highway 247 near the Mojave Desert city of Barstow, California. A homemade rocket ship with Hughes strapped in it took off from a launching pad mounted on a truck. A trail of steam billowed behind the rocket as it swerved and then shot upward, a detached parachute unfurling ominously in its wake. In a video recorded by the journalist Justin Chapman, Hughes disappears into the sky, a dark pinpoint in a vast, uncaring blueness. But then the rocket reappears and hurtles toward the ground, crashing, after ten long seconds, in a dusty cloud half a mile away.

Hughes was among the best-known proponents of Flat Earth theory , which insists that our planet is not spherical but a Frisbee-like disk. He had built and flown in two rockets before, one in 2014 and another in 2018, and he planned to construct a “rockoon,” a combination rocket and balloon, that would carry him above the upper atmosphere, where he could see the Earth’s flatness for himself. The 2020 takeoff, staged for the Science Channel series “Homemade Astronauts,” was supposed to take him a mile up—not high enough to see the Earth’s curvature but hypeworthy enough to garner more funding and attention.

Flat Earth theory may sound like one of those deliberately far-fetched satires, akin to Birds Aren’t Real, but it has become a cultic subject for anti-scientific conspiratorialists, growing entangled with movements such as QAnon and COVID -19 skepticism. In “ Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything ” (Algonquin), the former Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill writes that the tragedy awakened her to the sincerity of Flat Earthers’ convictions. After investigating the Flat Earth scene and following Hughes, she had figured that, “on some subconscious level,” Hughes knew the Earth wasn’t flat. His death set her straight: “I was wrong. Flat Earthers are as serious as your life.”

Weill isn’t the only one to fear the effects of false information. In January, the World Economic Forum released a report showing that fourteen hundred and ninety international experts rated “misinformation and disinformation” the leading global risk of the next two years, surpassing war, migration, and climatic catastrophe. A stack of new books echoes their concerns. In “ Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It ” (Columbia), Paul Thagard, a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, writes that “misinformation is threatening medicine, science, politics, social justice, and international relations, affecting problems such as vaccine hesitancy, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, claims of racial inferiority, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine .” In “ Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity ” (Norton), Sander van der Linden, a social-psychology professor at Cambridge, warns that “viruses of the mind” disseminated by false tweets and misleading headlines pose “serious threats to the integrity of elections and democracies worldwide.” Or, as the M.I.T. political scientist Adam J. Berinsky puts it in “ Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It ” (Princeton), “a democracy where falsehoods run rampant can only result in dysfunction.”

Most Americans seem to agree with these theorists of human credulity. Following the 2020 Presidential race, sixty per cent thought that misinformation had a major impact on the outcome, and, to judge from a recent survey, even more believe that artificial intelligence will exacerbate the problem in this year’s contest. The Trump and the DeSantis campaigns both used deepfakes to sully their rivals. Although they justified the fabrications as transparent parodies, some experts anticipate a “tsunami of misinformation,” in the words of Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and the first C.E.O. of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “The ingredients are there, and I am completely terrified,” he told the Associated Press.

The fear of misinformation hinges on assumptions about human suggestibility. “Misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other dangerous ideas, latch on to the brain and insert themselves deep into our consciousness,” van der Linden writes in “Foolproof.” “They infiltrate our thoughts, feelings, and even our memories.” Thagard puts it more plainly: “People have a natural tendency to believe what they hear or read, which amounts to gullibility.”

But do the credulity theorists have the right account of what’s going on? Folks like Mike Hughes aren’t gullible in the sense that they’ll believe anything. They seem to reject scientific consensus, after all. Partisans of other well-known conspiracies (the government is run by lizard people; a cabal of high-level pedophilic Democrats operates out of a neighborhood pizza parlor) are insusceptible to the assurances of the mainstream media. Have we been misinformed about the power of misinformation?

In 2006, more than five hundred skeptics met at an Embassy Suites hotel near O’Hare Airport, in Chicago, to discuss conspiracy. They listened to presentations on mass hypnosis, the melting point of steel, and how to survive the collapse of the existing world order. They called themselves many things, including “truth activists” and “9/11 skeptics,” although the name that would stick, and which observers would use for years afterward, was Truthers.

The Truthers held that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were masterminded by the White House to expand government power and enable military and security industries to profit from the war on terror. According to an explanation posted by 911truth.org, a group that helped sponsor the conference, George W. Bush and his allies gagged and intimidated whistle-blowers, mailed anthrax to opponents in the Senate, and knowingly poisoned the inhabitants of lower Manhattan. On that basis, Truthers concluded, “the administration does consider the lives of American citizens to be expendable on behalf of certain interests.”

A dog tries to reconcile fight between their owners.

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The Truthers, in short, maintained that the government had gone to extreme measures, including killing thousands of its own citizens, in order to carry out and cover up a conspiracy. And yet the same Truthers advertised the conference online and met in a place where they could easily be surveilled. Speakers’ names were posted on the Internet along with videos, photographs, and short bios. The organizers created a publicly accessible forum to discuss next steps, and a couple of attendees spoke to a reporter from the Times , despite the mainstream media’s ostensible complicity in the coverup. By the logic of their own theories, the Truthers were setting themselves up for assassination.

Their behavior demonstrates a paradox of belief. Action is supposed to follow belief, and yet beliefs, even fervently espoused ones, sometimes exist in their own cognitive cage, with little influence over behavior. Take the “Pizzagate” story, in which Hillary Clinton and her allies ran a child sex ring from the basement of a D.C. pizzeria. In the months surrounding the 2016 Presidential election, a staggering number of Americans—millions, by some estimates—endorsed the account, and, in December of that year, a North Carolina man charged into the restaurant, carrying an assault rifle. Van der Linden and Berinsky both use the incident as evidence of misinformation’s violent implications. But they’re missing the point: what’s really striking is how anomalous that act was. The pizzeria received menacing phone calls, even death threats, but the most common response from believers, aside from liking posts, seems to have been leaving negative Yelp reviews.

That certain deeply held beliefs seem insulated from other inferences isn’t peculiar to conspiracy theorists; it’s the experience of regular churchgoers. Catholics maintain that the Sacrament is the body of Christ, yet no one expects the bread to taste like raw flesh or accuses fellow-parishioners of cannibalism. In “ How God Becomes Real ” (2020), the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann recounts evangelical Christians’ frustrations with their own beliefs. They thought less about God when they were not in church. They confessed to not praying. “I remember a man weeping in front of a church over not having sufficient faith that God would replace the job he had lost,” Luhrmann writes. The paradox of belief is one of Christianity’s “clearest” messages, she observes: “You may think you believe in God, but really you don’t. You don’t take God seriously enough. You don’t act as if he’s there.” It’s right out of Mark 9:24: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

The paradox of belief has been the subject of scholarly investigation; puzzling it out promises new insights about the human psyche. Some of the most influential work has been by the French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. Born into a Jewish family in France in 1942, during the Nazi Occupation, Sperber was smuggled to Switzerland when he was three months old. His parents returned to France three years later, and raised him as an atheist while imparting a respect for all religious-minded people, including his Hasidic Jewish ancestors.

The exercise of finding rationality in the seemingly irrational became an academic focus for Sperber in the nineteen-seventies. Staying with the Dorze people in southern Ethiopia, he noticed that they made assertions that they seemed both to believe and not to believe. People told him, for example, that “the leopard is a Christian animal who observes the fasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.” Nevertheless, the average Dorze man guarded his livestock on fast days just as much as on other days. “Not because he suspects some leopards of being bad Christians,” Sperber wrote, “but because he takes it as true both that leopards fast and that they are always dangerous.”

Sperber concluded that there are two kinds of beliefs. The first he has called “factual” beliefs. Factual beliefs—such as the belief that chairs exist and that leopards are dangerous—guide behavior and tolerate little inconsistency; you can’t believe that leopards do and do not eat livestock. The second category he has called “symbolic” beliefs. These beliefs might feel genuine, but they’re cordoned off from action and expectation. We are, in turn, much more accepting of inconsistency when it comes to symbolic beliefs; we can believe, say, that God is all-powerful and good while allowing for the existence of evil and suffering.

In a masterly new book, “ Religion as Make-Believe ” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philosopher at Georgia State University, returns to Sperber’s ideas with notable rigor. He analyzes beliefs with a taxonomist’s care, classifying different types and identifying the properties that distinguish them. He proposes that humans represent and use factual beliefs differently from symbolic beliefs, which he terms “credences.” Factual beliefs are for modelling reality and behaving optimally within it. Because of their function in guiding action, they exhibit features like “involuntariness” (you can’t decide to adopt them) and “evidential vulnerability” (they respond to evidence). Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, largely serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence.

One of Van Leeuwen’s insights is that people distinguish between different categories of belief in everyday speech. We say we “believe” symbolic ones but that we “think” factual ones are true. He has run ingenious experiments showing that you can manipulate how people talk about beliefs by changing the environment in which they’re expressed or sustained. Tell participants that a woman named Sheila sets up a shrine to Elvis Presley and plays songs on his birthday, and they will more often say that she “believes” Elvis is alive. But tell them that Sheila went to study penguins in Antarctica in 1977, and missed the news of his death, and they’ll say she “thinks” he’s still around. As the German sociologist Georg Simmel recognized more than a century ago, religious beliefs seem to express commitments—we believe in God the way we believe in a parent or a loved one, rather than the way we believe chairs exist. Perhaps people who traffic in outlandish conspiracies don’t so much believe them as believe in them.

Van Leeuwen’s book complements a 2020 volume by Hugo Mercier, “ Not Born Yesterday .” Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the École Normale Supérieure who studied under Sperber, argues that worries about human gullibility overlook how skilled we are at acquiring factual beliefs. Our understanding of reality matters, he notes. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be disastrous. On top of that, people have a selfish interest in manipulating one another. As a result, human beings have evolved a tool kit of psychological adaptations for evaluating information—what he calls “open vigilance mechanisms.” Where a credulity theorist like Thagard insists that humans tend to believe anything, Mercier shows that we are careful when adopting factual beliefs, and instinctively assess the quality of information, especially by tracking the reliability of sources.

Van Leeuwen and Mercier agree that many beliefs are not best interpreted as factual ones, although they lay out different reasons for why this might be. For Van Leeuwen, a major driver is group identity. Beliefs often function as badges: the stranger and more unsubstantiated the better. Religions, he notes, define membership on the basis of unverifiable or even unintelligible beliefs: that there is one God; that there is reincarnation; that this or that person was a prophet; that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate yet one. Mercier, in his work, has focussed more on justification. He says that we have intuitions—that vaccination is bad, for example, or that certain politicians can’t be trusted—and then collect stories that defend our positions. Still, both authors treat symbolic beliefs as socially strategic expressions.

After Mike Hughes’s death, a small debate broke out over the nature of his belief. His publicist, Darren Shuster, said that Hughes never really believed in a flat Earth. “It was a P.R. stunt,” he told Vice News. “We used the attention to get sponsorships and it kept working over and over again.” Space.com dug up an old interview corroborating Shuster’s statements. “This flat Earth has nothing to do with the steam rocket launches,” Hughes told the site in 2019. “It never did, it never will. I’m a daredevil!”

Perhaps it made sense that it was just a shtick. Hughes did death-defying stunts years before he joined the Flat Earthers. He was born in Oklahoma City in 1956 to an auto-mechanic father who enjoyed racing cars. At the age of twelve, Hughes was racing on his own, and not long afterward he was riding in professional motorcycle competitions. In 1996, he got a job driving limousines, but his dream of becoming the next Evel Knievel persisted; in 2002, he drove a Lincoln Town Car off a ramp and flew a hundred and three feet, landing him in Guinness World Records.

When Hughes first successfully launched a rocket, in 2014, he had never talked about the shape of the planet. In 2015, when he co-ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund the next rocket flight, the stated motivation was stardom, not science: “Mad Mike Hughes always wanted to be famous so much that he just decided one day to build a steam rocket and set the world record.” He got two backers and three hundred and ten dollars. Shortly afterward, he joined the Flat Earth community and tied his crusade to theirs. The community supported his new fund-raising effort, attracting more than eight thousand dollars. From there, his fame grew, earning him features in a documentary (“Rocketman,” from 2019) and that Science Channel series. Aligning with Flat Earthers clearly paid off.

Not everyone believes that he didn’t believe, however. Waldo Stakes, Hughes’s landlord and rocket-construction buddy, wrote on Facebook that “Mike was a real flat earther,” pointing to the “dozens of books on the subject” he owned, and said that Hughes lost money hosting a conference for the community. Another of Hughes’s friends told Kelly Weill that Flat Earth theory “started out as a marketing approach,” but that once it “generated awareness and involvement . . . it became something to him.”

The debate over Hughes’s convictions centers on the premise that a belief is either sincere or strategic, genuine or sham. That’s a false dichotomy. Indeed, the social functions of symbolic beliefs—functions such as signalling group identity—seem best achieved when the beliefs feel earnest. A Mormon who says that Joseph Smith was a prophet but secretly thinks he was a normal guy doesn’t strike us as a real Mormon. In fact, the evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers argued in “ Deceit and Self-Deception ” (2011) that we trick ourselves in order to convince others. Our minds are maintaining two representations of reality: there’s one that feels true and that we publicly advocate, and there’s another that we use to effectively interact with the world.

Two whales are recorded by microphone hanging from a boat.

The idea of self-deception might seem like a stretch; Mercier has expressed skepticism about the theory. But it reconciles what appear to be contradictory findings. On the one hand, some research suggests that people’s beliefs in misinformation are authentic. In “Political Rumors,” for example, Berinsky describes experiments he conducted suggesting that people truly believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that the U.S. government allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen. “People by and large say what they mean,” he concludes.

On the other hand, there’s research implying that many false beliefs are little more than cheap talk. Put money on the table, and people suddenly see the light. In an influential paper published in 2015, a team led by the political scientist John Bullock found sizable differences in how Democrats and Republicans thought about politicized topics, like the number of casualties in the Iraq War. Paying respondents to be accurate, which included rewarding “don’t know” responses over wrong ones, cut the differences by eighty per cent. A series of experiments published in 2023 by van der Linden and three colleagues replicated the well-established finding that conservatives deem false headlines to be true more often than liberals—but found that the difference drops by half when people are compensated for accuracy. Some studies have reported smaller or more inconsistent effects, but the central point still stands. There may be people who believe in fake news the way they believe in leopards and chairs, but underlying many genuine-feeling endorsements is an understanding that they’re not exactly factual.

Van der Linden, Berinsky, and Thagard all offer ways to fight fabrication. But, because they treat misinformation as a problem of human gullibility, the remedies they propose tend to focus on minor issues, while scanting the larger social forces that drive the phenomenon. Consider van der Linden’s prescription. He devotes roughly a third of “Foolproof” to his group’s research on “prebunking,” or psychological inoculation. The idea is to present people with bogus information before they come across it in the real world and then expose its falsity—a kind of epistemic vaccination. Such prebunking can target specific untruths, or it can be “broad-spectrum,” as when people are familiarized with an array of misinformation techniques, from emotional appeals to conspiratorial language.

Prebunking has received an extraordinary amount of attention. If you’ve ever read a headline about a vaccine against fake news, it was probably about van der Linden’s work. His team has collaborated with Google, WhatsApp, the Department of Homeland Security, and the British Prime Minister’s office; similar interventions have popped up on Twitter (now X). In “Foolproof,” van der Linden reviews evidence that prebunking makes people better at identifying fake headlines. Yet nothing is mentioned about effects on their actual behavior. Does prebunking affect medical decisions? Does it make someone more willing to accept electoral outcomes? We’re left wondering.

The evidential gap is all the trickier because little research exists in the first place showing that misinformation affects behavior by changing beliefs. Berinsky acknowledges this in “Political Rumors” when he writes that “few scholars have established a direct causal link” between rumors and real-world outcomes. Does the spread of misinformation influence, say, voting decisions? Van der Linden admits, “Contrary to much of the commentary you may find in the popular media, scientists have been extremely skeptical.”

So it’s possible that we’ve been misinformed about how to fight misinformation. What about the social conditions that make us susceptible? Van der Linden tells us that people are more often drawn to conspiracy theories when they feel “uncertain and powerless,” and regard themselves as “marginalized victims.” Berinsky cites scholarship suggesting that conspiratorial rumors flourish among people who experience “a lack of interpersonal trust” and “a sense of alienation.” In his own research, he found that a big predictor of accepting false rumors is agreeing with statements such as “Politicians do not care much about what they say, so long as they get elected.” A recent study found a strong correlation between the prevalence of conspiracy beliefs and levels of governmental corruption; in those beliefs, Americans fell midway between people from Denmark and Sweden and people from middle-income countries such as Mexico and Turkey, reflecting a fraying sense of institutional integrity. More than Russian bots or click-hungry algorithms, a crisis of trust and legitimacy seems to lie behind the proliferation of paranoid falsehoods.

Findings like these require that we rethink what misinformation represents. As Dan Kahan, a legal scholar at Yale, notes, “Misinformation is not something that happens to the mass public but rather something that its members are complicit in producing.” That’s why thoughtful scholars—including the philosopher Daniel Williams and the experimental psychologist Sacha Altay—encourage us to see misinformation more as a symptom than as a disease. Unless we address issues of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we’ll make little headway against an endless supply of alluring fabrications.

From this perspective, railing against social media for manipulating our zombie minds is like cursing the wind for blowing down a house we’ve allowed to go to rack and ruin. It distracts us from our collective failures, from the conditions that degrade confidence and leave much of the citizenry feeling disempowered. By declaring that the problem consists of “irresponsible senders and gullible receivers,” in Thagard’s words, credulity theorists risk ignoring the social pathologies that cause people to become disenchanted and motivate them to rally around strange new creeds.

Mike Hughes was among the disenchanted. Sure, he used Flat Earth theory to become a celebrity, but its anti-institutionalist tone also spoke to him. In 2018, while seeking funding and attention for his next rocket ride, he self-published a book titled “ ‘Mad’ Mike Hughes: The Tell All Tale.” The book brims with outlandish, unsupported assertions—that George H. W. Bush was a pedophile, say—but they’re interspersed with more grounded frustrations. He saw a government commandeered by the greedy few, one that stretched the truth to start a war in Iraq, and that seemed concerned less with spreading freedom and more with funnelling tax dollars into the pockets of defense contractors. “You think about those numbers for a second,” he wrote, of the amount of money spent on the military. “We have homelessness in this country. We could pay off everyone’s mortgages. And we can eliminate sales tax. Everyone would actually be free.”

Hughes wasn’t a chump. He just felt endlessly lied to. As he wrote near the end of his book, “I want my coffee and I don’t want any whipped cream on top of it, you know what I mean? I just want this raw truth.” ♦

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

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New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

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Guest Essay

J.D. Vance: The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up

A photograph of a large stack of tube-shaped artillery shells, stretching out of the frame in every direction.

By J. D. Vance

Mr. Vance, a Republican, is the junior senator from Ohio.

President Biden wants the world to believe that the biggest obstacle facing Ukraine is Republicans and our lack of commitment to the global community. This is wrong.

Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.

The Biden administration has applied increasing pressure on Republicans to pass a supplemental aid package of more than $60 billion to Ukraine. I voted against this package in the Senate and remain opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war. Mr. Biden has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground.

The most fundamental question: How much does Ukraine need and how much can we actually provide? Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine. That is also wrong. This $60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.

Consider our ability to produce 155-millimeter artillery shells. Last year, Ukraine’s defense minister estimated that the country’s base-line requirement for these shells was over four million per year but that it could fire up to seven million if that many were available. Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year — less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million — 30 percent of what’s needed — by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad.

Just this week, the top American military commander in Europe argued that absent further security assistance, Russia could soon have a 10-to-1 artillery advantage over Ukraine. What didn’t gather as many headlines is that Russia’s current advantage is at least 5 to 1, even after all the money we have poured into the conflict. Neither of these ratios plausibly leads to Ukrainian victory.

Proponents of American aid to Ukraine have argued that our approach has been a boon to our own economy, creating jobs here in the factories that manufacture weapons. But our national security interests can be — and often are — separate from our economic interests. The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque. We can and should rebuild our industrial base without shipping its products to a foreign conflict.

The story is the same when we look at other munitions. Take the Patriot missile system — our premier air defense weapon. It’s of such importance in this war that Ukraine’s foreign minister has specifically demanded them. That’s because in March alone, Russia reportedly launched over 3,000 guided aerial bombs, 600 drones and 400 missiles at Ukraine. To fend off these attacks, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and others have indicated they need thousands of Patriot interceptors per year. The problem is this: The United States only manufactures 550 per year. If we pass the supplemental aid package currently being considered in Congress, we could potentially increase annual production to 650, but that’s still less than a third of what Ukraine requires.

These weapons are not only needed by Ukraine. If China were to set its sights on Taiwan, the Patriot missile system would be critical to its defense. In fact, the United States has promised to send Taiwan nearly $900 million worth of Patriot missiles, but delivery of those weapons and other essential resources has been severely delayed, partly because of shortages caused by the war in Ukraine.

If that sounds bad, Ukraine’s manpower situation is even worse. Here are the basics: Russia has nearly four times the population of Ukraine. Ukraine needs upward of half a million new recruits, but hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men have already fled the country. The average Ukrainian soldier is roughly 43 years old , and many soldiers have already served two years at the front with few, if any, opportunities to stop fighting. After two years of conflict, there are some villages with almost no men left. The Ukrainian military has resorted to coercing men into service, and women have staged protests to demand the return of their husbands and fathers after long years of service at the front. This newspaper reported one instance in which the Ukrainian military attempted to conscript a man with a diagnosed mental disability.

Many in Washington seem to think that hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have gone to war with a song in their heart and are happy to label any thought to the contrary Russian propaganda. But major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic are reporting that the situation on the ground in Ukraine is grim.

These basic mathematical realities were true, but contestable, at the outset of the war. They were obvious and incontestable a year ago, when American leadership worked closely with Mr. Zelensky to undertake a disastrous counteroffensive. The bad news is that accepting brute reality would have been most useful last spring, before the Ukrainians launched that extremely costly and unsuccessful military campaign. The good news is that even now, a defensive strategy can work. Digging in with old-fashioned ditches, cement and land mines are what enabled Russia to weather Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive. Our allies in Europe could better support such a strategy, as well. While some European countries have provided considerable resources, the burden of military support has thus far fallen heaviest on the United States.

By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence. But this would require both the American and Ukrainian leadership to accept that Mr. Zelensky’s stated goal for the war — a return to 1991 boundaries — is fantastical.

The White House has said time and again that it can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.

J.D. Vance ( @JDVance1 ), a Republican, is the junior senator from Ohio.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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