Truth in politics

I recently had an extended Facebook dialog with a comrade which ranged over the possibilities (or lack thereof) for a genuinely democratic politics, the usefulness (or otherwise) of lessons from history, and many related points. If I had an overall theme for my part of the discussion, it was that a genuinely democratic politics is, at least theoretically possible; that it involves a socialized decision making process based on dialog and debate, which, in contrast to capitalist economic theory, privileges reasoned, considered conclusions, arrived at after due deliberation, over the snap judgments which seem to arise from our instincts or first impulses; that to truly achieve such a decision making process would require a vastly more participatory form of democracy than our modern version, in which participation is largely limited to passively watching the news, then pulling a lever, every 2-4 years, for some candidate; and that classical Athenian democracy, for all its evident faults, had things to teach us about how to structure such a participative democracy.  (Some of these themes will be familiar to anyone who has followed this blog; others I do intend to develop, someday...)

Throughout the FB dialog, my comrade several times in passing raised the question as to exactly what is meant by “truth”.  At the time, I ignored it, because it seemed irrelevant to the current discussion, and because I rather thought, without reflecting, that the “conventional” view of truth sufficed for a political (rather than a philosophical) discussion.  If I say I fell down the stairs when I really got beat up by my spouse, the statement is untrue.  If I really fell down the stairs (and wasn’t pushed, or tripped, etc.), then the statement is true.  This definition seemed to suffice for most practical political purposes.

But I realized on reflection that that is not true, and that thinking about why it is not  makes for an excellent demonstration of my ideas about democracy.

Take a concept like the “value” of a person’s labor.  Marx’s labor theory of value, although useful on an abstract level, cannot, in my opinion, be made concrete enough to objectively yield a precise “dollar” value in specific cases.  The capitalist (aka classical or neo-classical) economic model, which defines value in terms of market price, nothing more or less, always yields a precise, objective value.  (At least it does in cases where it “matters” – where there is an immediate need to come up with a wage rate, here-and-now.  It has more of a problem with hypotheticals.)  But there are so many broad social and political factors that go into determining real-world supply and demand that to take the market price as in any way representing a just price is problematic, at best.

And yet, each of us does have his own opinion, in every specific case we encounter, as to whether a given wage is just, or not.  More importantly, these opinions are not just inexplicable “gut reactions”.  We can adduce reasons for our opinions.  “Capital is giving up present consumption, and deserves a reward.”  “The worker’s children need food, a house, books for their education.  The capitalist’s children already have all these things, and more.”  Some such opinions will be hardened beyond possibility of change, but others will be amenable to counter-argument. This makes the determination of value perfectly suited to democratic decision making – to “government by discussion” – providing unencumbered fora exist where broad and open debate can actually occur (which is not generally true in our own malformed democracies).  In this view, what is “true” (i.e., the true value of a person’s work) is not a simple matter of observation, nor is it arbitrarily determined by objective, impersonal forces, but neither is it just a relativistic matter of individual judgment.  It is a social truth, determined, for a particular time and place, by a participatory, deliberative process.

Devotees of capitalist economics will cry that to set values (i.e., prices) by fiat, even that of a democratic public, will lead to horrible economic “inefficiencies”.  “Efficiency” is an interesting word.  It is usually presented in economics discussion as if it were in-and-of-itself a positive good.  Yet efficiency draws its value from the thing that is being done.  To efficiently murder a large number of people is very different from a moral standpoint than to efficiently save a large number of lives.  And, self-serving capitalist theory to the contrary, efficiency in generating private profits is not necessarily (in fact, not often) the same as efficiently building a more just and prosperous society.

But, although this will be apostasy to many of my socialist comrades, it may not be necessary to do away with market mechanisms in determining the actual price in order to benefit from a democratic social discussion as to what is a just value.  If we can successfully debunk the capitalist theory that says the market price is by necessity a just price, and if we can get most people to see that the actual, market-determined prices at some given time are not just, this paves the way for a social examination of the question, “Why not?”  It is an opening to a discussion of exactly what political and social factors influence supply and demand such that market prices are not just.  “Goods” which could come out of this discussion could include:  increases in the progressivity of the tax code, support for cooperative enterprises and small business vis-à-vis corporate big business, introducing some level of direct social control over big business (e.g., public or union representation on boards of directors), support for universal unionization of the work force, decisions to remove more social goods (e.g., healthcare) from private markets and to better support public goods ranging from roads and education to parks and the arts, radical curtailment of commercial advertising...  Please! Extend the list, yourself.

About all of such goods, I would say to my comrades on the left:  It may not be socialism, but it ain’t hay.

While we can certainly strive to educate people within our present social structures, in order for something like the results described above to really happen, we would need a much more robust democracy than our own; one with real, broad based and open social debates, and mechanisms for such debates to feed into actual political decision making.  How we get from here to there, it is hard, at this time, to envision, although I have some thoughts on what sort of structures the end might entail.  But all I’ll say, right now, is that there are strong reasons why capitalism, oligarchy and plutocracy prefer their formal democracies to be crippled.

Questioning “Cogito”

It seems to me that Rene Descartes’ famous “Cogito ergo sum” begged the question.  His premise “I think” depends on his conclusion, “I exist”.   

Certainly the stream of impressions he adduces in support of his conclusion demonstrate something – but what?  A more appropriate conclusion would be along the lines of “Experience manifests, therefore something is,” or, more succinctly, and tautologically (this is not a bad thing): “Experience is, therefore something is.”  Or, to once more in this space quote the words (if not, in this case, the meaning) of the X-Files’ Fox Mulder:  “There is something out there.”

To get to the “I exist” actually requires a number of additional premises, first of all that this experience means something – that it is rule-based – and possibly even that is connected to something we might call a “real world”.  Descartes makes this connection only after establishing “ergo sum”, and then he makes it only by reference to a perfect and benevolent God – a premise that seems as improbable to me as it seemed certain to Descartes.  My own preferred premise for the orderliness of Experience is the anti-skeptical one:  “If  I don’t assume some rule-based nature to Experience, then there is no point in going on further with analysis”.  This is a weaker premise than Descartes’, but it has the decided advantage of being not false.  There is also the empirical argument, that I can test the rule-based nature of Experience experimentally, and therefore demonstrate it.  While testability is important, its importance is sometimes overestimated, since I cannot possibly subject every needed rule about Experience to my own personal set of empirical tests. 

As for the “real world”, well that’s really definitional, isn’t it?  I.e., a term of convenience more than a necessary premise.  If I can predictably alter Experience by action, and if I can generalize the rules for doing so such that some person on the other side of the planet whom I’ve never met can apply them to some experience I’ve never had, and also alter Experience to conform to the predictions, then it may be useful to introduce the idea of a “real world”, but this concept can hardly can be constructed so as to be testable (hence meaningful) beyond the definition just given.

Of course, as I have implied elsewhere in this blog (“Starting from Zero”, May 30, 2010), I do not really accept the Cartesian method of applying radical doubt to build up a whole body of knowledge about the world from a bare minimum of assumptions, let alone “clear and distinct” (hence immediate and unquestionable) impressions.  We always come to any problem with a whole theoretical structure, which we can twist, bend and otherwise alter piecemeal, but which we can never throw out en bloc to start afresh.   

Nevertheless, it can be fun, and sometimes instructive, to play with the Cartesian approach as with a game.  And then, developmentally, we do, at some point in our lives sort of start to build a world view from experience upon a base of the biologically given.  So it seems perhaps some form of the Cartesian approach may have a certain psycho-historical relevance.  But this is only more or less.  Given that the biochemical environment in the womb begins to affect development even before the brain begins to develop, there are no clear limits between “experientially derived” and “biologically given”.   It’s a problem with inherently fuzzy boundaries.    It is worth noting, to, that the psychological “program” or world view starts to develop long before the wiring of the biological “machine” – the adult brain – is complete.  Starting from zero remains problematic – in this case, because it’s hard to define the zero point.

Considering the developmental problem, I have written, before (“The house I live in”, October 24, 2009) that I think our concept of “I” or self is not inbred, but is learned from experience, and not at a particularly early point, either, which also contradicts the primacy of Descartes’ “ergo sum”.

Another way it is interesting to contrast Descartes’ “Cogito...” with modern thinking is in the nature of the self, itself.  Descartes, of course, assumed some privileged level of granularity associated with the self.  As a Christian of his age, he could hardly have done otherwise – the individual self was the level at which the soul was allocated, the soul was essentially indivisible, and was in a sense synonymous with the self, so clearly an individual was a discrete, and in an essential sense indivisible unit.  A person could colloquially be of “two minds” about something, but that didn’t disturb the essential unity – one of those two opinions had to be the “true” one (at least in the sense of “true to oneself”), and the other false.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the unitary nature of the self came under attack philosophically, psychologically and neurologically.  One good book that includes a good analysis of the nature of the self is Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained.  The impression I drew from that book (consistent with others I’ve read, see note on references) is of a brain consisting of numerous centers, each evolved perhaps for one primary purpose, but co-opted to other uses, in other networks, by the opportunistic nature of evolution (see “Adaptation? Or Carpe Diem?”, November 30, 2010), with a conscious sense of self perhaps developing only rather late as a sort of supervisor circuit riding on top of this loose, collaborative network of parts.  In this analysis, to be of “two minds” about something may literally mean that two different parts of your brain produce differing explanations or predictions, or desire different goals.  There is no meaningful sense in which one of these is more “true” to your “essential nature” than the other.

But as I said in “The house I live in”, the constructed and non-atomic nature of my self doesn’t make it a useless concept.  As the wag said, and insofar as my day-to-day experience goes, I think I am, therefore I am, I think.

Useful references, cited or otherwise: Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, ch. 4; Gary Hatfield, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Descartes and the Meditations; Daniel C. Dennett Consciousness Explained; Stephen M. Kosslyn & Olivier Koenig, Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience; Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain; Joseph M. Schwartz, The Future of Democratic Equality; John Dewey, Experience and Nature.

Adaptation? Or Carpe Diem?

A lot of the language we use to describe evolution by natural selection is borrowed from the language of design, but natural selection doesn’t work the same way design does, so the metaphors are not very apt.  Sometimes confusion results.  Examples are “adaptation” and “purpose”.  In design, a purpose pre-exists, and materials are adapted to it.  In evolution, a change (mutation) occurs, and a use may or may not be found for it.  If the change has utility, it may be by refining some pre-existing ability to exploit the environment, which looks a little bit like design (but isn’t).  Or the utility of the change may only be relative to exploiting some previously unavailable (or less available) resource in the environment.  That looks a lot less like design, and a lot more like seizing an opportunity.

For instance, an organism with splayed toes might occasionally acquire, as a genetic aberration, webbing between the toes.  In a dry environment, this alteration might be dysfunctional (“non-adaptive”) and die out, or it might be neutral, and occur from time-to-time.  To an organism dwelling on riverbanks, though, it might open new frontiers for (better) exploitation.  If there is relatively little competition for the new, riverine resources, compared to the already well-exploited resources on dry land, the mutation may spread and become fixed, other mutations (changes in leg shape, body fat, feather type, bill type) which previously would have been useless or harmful now become beneficial, and may, if they occur, also become fixed.  Speciation may occur.

This chance-and-opportunity model is not much like design.  It’s more like exploration.  In this view, ecological “niches” are less like problems waiting to be solved than like frontiers that some mutation may make available for exploitation.

Capitalism has got to go

The other night, Susan and I saw a television commercial for a new and infinitesimally improved type of contact lens, and we thought, "All the money (millions and millions of dollars) that goes into developing and marketing such an unnecessary product as this." (And this is hardly the most egregious example!)  Meanwhile, a 3 year old toddler is being gunned down on the streets of Boston. This is crazy!  It's just crazy!  Capitalism is MANIFESTLY unable to deliver resources according to need, except in the sick, twisted, circular definition of "need" put forward by capitalism's apologists.  We can pay millions for trinkets, but we can’t afford the policing, educational resources and jobs programs that would make inner city youth feel they had real life alternatives other than joining a gang and dealing drugs.  How much longer can we tolerate this monstrous system?

The rationalizers of markets claim that capitalism will reflect peoples “real” needs, as determined by their marginal utility.  That people’s “free market” decisions reflect their marginal utility isn’t really something that can be proven – it’s taken as self-evident.  And since we can’t know what is in people’s minds except by their actions (as expressed in their market behavior), the only way we have to measure people’s needs is by what the market produces.  This leads to the circularity in the argument that says market outcomes are good because the only way we can know what is good is to look at what the market produces, which, since markets satisfy peoples real needs, which can only be measured their market behavior, must be good.

The problem is that market theory fetishizes isolated, individual, decision making models, but this is not the way we make our BEST decisions.  Our best decisions are made collaboratively, after discussion and deliberation with our friends and other interested parties.  That is to say that GOOD decisions are made collectively, deliberatively, democratically.  Classical economics has built a whole theory of “optimal” resource distribution around the WORST kind of human decision making – isolated, individual, selfish, snap-judgments.

Now there’s a word for making economic decisions collaboratively, deliberatively, and democratically.  That word is SOCIALISM.  Socialism gives us a theory of resource distribution based on the BEST kind of human decision making.  Capitalism gives us a theory based on the worst kind.  And so capitalism always gives us bad results.  Capitalism gives us the things we think we need when we’re unconsciously reacting to hormonal stimuli (don’t even get me started on advertising...)  It does NOT give us the things we would REALIZE that we needed if we stopped and thought, listened to other people, and considered what our priorities really were.  And THAT leads to horrible maldistributions of resources in ways that don’t satisfy ANY of the needs that most of us REALLY feel.  As the sorrowing parents of far, far too many murdered children, in Boston and elsewhere about this nation and the world, could tell you.

The Mulder Argument

The essence of mystical/magical/religious thinking, that which distinguishes it from truly philosophical thinking, may well be something that could be termed “the Mulder Argument” (after fictional FBI agent Fox Mulder on the television show “The X-Files”).  This argument is given in four words: “I want to believe.”  I’ve run across this argument in many forms.  Once, when I had backed a theist who thought she could prove the existence of her God completely into a corner, she escaped by saying, “I just can’t accept a world like that.”  Others, asked to provide any sort of justification for their claims fall back on, “I just know.”  Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, must be much more ruthless than this.  If philosophy is “love of wisdom”, than you must love it wherever it leads you.  If you don’t like the direction, learn to live with it.  I summed this up to myself, years ago, in a epiphany which I worded as: “My desires are not probative.”

Since it is very central to my view of the world that all important traits of organisms can be explained by evolution by natural selection, I have had some concerns over the question:  “How could such a false argument become so ubiquitous in the human species?”  Isn’t a trait counter-adaptive if it consistently leads one to believe things that are false?  I think I’ve finally come at an answer to these questions, and come at it through another puzzle, specifically, through trying to reconcile my own principle of the non-evidentiary nature of desire with a premise given at various places in Marx and Gramsci, vis. the philosophy of praxis, which states quite the opposite, i.e., that reality is made by humans, especially acting socially, and that in this sense, the desire, or more precisely the will, is in fact probative.

I think it all boils down to taking the correct domain for each argument.  Reality is not something that is taken passively by organisms, but is something dynamically modified by them in the course of their existence.  This is a very important insight.  Organisms alter their “environment” just as much as the environment causes modifications in organisms.  In this sense, for a thinking organism like a human, believing in something can often be instrumental to its being so.  But there are limitations on this principle.  If I believe that I will change the government, then perhaps I can.  But if I believe I can literally move mountains with my mind, or with prayer, then that will not happen.  I will have to add a liberal quantity of muscle, time and the application of earth-moving equipment to my faith, if I want to bring this result about. 

Human minds have evolved to be capable of rational thinking, but it is by no means assured that all thinking that goes on therein will be rational.  If I believe that I will change the government, or find food, or win a fight, or find a wife, then perhaps I will.  If I believe that I cannot, then certainly I will not.  It would be more rational to believe that “maybe I can, if I try hard enough,” rather than simply “I will,” but the more rational belief is more complex, and more susceptible to doubt, and may therefore be inferior to the simple (if less correct) version in many matters of practical success or survival, i.e., matters directly susceptible to natural selection.  This would be enough for evolution to select for a tendency to find your desires probative.  In order to be equally efficacious, in many practical life matters, as the irrational belief, the rational belief would have to be combined with an iron determination.  Iron logic and iron determination may be a more admirable combination than sloppy thinking and blind faith, but it is perhaps a more difficult combination for random mutation to generate.  As for the cases in which blind faith leads to an incorrect judgment, well, believing in God or not believing may in general have far less effect on the existence or non-existence of your posterity than whether or not you believe you will successfully woo your wife.

Note that I am not saying that there is a “gene” for the Mulder Argument.  I am just saying that a predilection for believing what you want to be true, however complexly coded in genes, memes and individual experience, may in general lead to some differential reproductive success.

But none of this makes blind faith a rational argument for deducing the nature of things as they are, as opposed to (within a limited domain) things as they will be.  The will to believe probably yields even more success if it is tempered with a realistic appraisal of when to apply it and when not to (and, just possibly, when it really makes no difference one way or the other).  This is essentially what Gramsci was trying to get at with his oft-cited “pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.”  Despite the theological overtones, this same insight is reflected in a quotation popular within another tradition I’ve had some exposure to:  “Oh Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change [including the evidence of your own non-existence!], the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Creating absurdity

Gramsci, in an offhand comment in Americanism and Fordism (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 279), speaks of modern society creating “absurd positions”.

The idea that society can create an “absurd position” is an interesting one, with some (to me) less-than-obvious philosophical implications.  The concept of absurdity represents a disjunction between an observed condition and reason.  Can non-social reality, for instance “create” an absurd condition?  If it does, the presumption is that the flaw is in the reasoning, not in the underlying reality, since the purpose of reason is to understand reality, and the presence of a disjunction indicates that reason has failed, in some way, to do so.

With social reality, however, the situation is different.  This is because social reality itself involves an element of reason.  Social reality is the result of the individual and collective strivings of men and women (as well as their interactions with, and constraints on them from, the non-social world).  Their strivings reflect their goals, aspirations and beliefs, and their (individual and collective) reasoning with respect to these.  These goals and beliefs and this reasoning can include contradictions both within an individual element, and between elements of the aggregate.  The aggregate, or more properly Gestalt, is “modern society”.  When looking at the Gestalt as if from outside (really, of course, from one particular “inside” vantage point), some of these contradictions become manifest, resulting in the perception of an “absurd position”.

Of course, this perception of absurdity is itself relative to a particular analysis, involving a particular set of goals, beliefs and reasoning, which may contain its own errors and contradictions.  Locating the source of an apparent absurdity, therefore, whether in the “social position” or in the observer’s reasoning, is a non-trivial problem.  I do not wish to introduce the kind of relativism that says there can be no truth to the matter – that all is just a “matter of opinion”.  But developing a definitive, irrefutable argument in support of one’s interpretation – an argument that can successfully “take on all comers” – is probably impossible.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, of course.  Striving to develop such arguments, and convincing as broad a swathe of society as possible, is part of one of the fundamental problems of politics, the struggle for hegemony.

False Profits and Gramsci's Truth

Dean Baker’s book, False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy, is a depressing book.  Not through any fault of the author.  It is an excellent book.  It is not depressing because Baker offers no hope.  He suggests technically simple and practical solutions to the economic problems he points out.  It is depressing, rather, because history and any cursory review of the present political landscape suggest that there is not a snowball’s chance in Death Valley that any of his solutions will be put into practice – or any other solutions that would really help solve what are, for most of us, the underlying economic problems.  The reason for this, like Dean Baker’s suggestions, is fundamentally quite simple:  what is best for most of us is not best for the relative few who currently have power, both hegemonic and state, on their side.

Baker’s book, like his last one (Plunder and Blunder), has a simple premise:  the current economic crisis was the predictable result of a bubble economy based on flagrant inflation of real estate prices (specifically, for owner-occupied homes).  The bubble and the inevitability of the resulting crash were perfectly evident, to anyone who, like Baker, focused an unbiased analysis on the data.  Yet through it all, those who were supposed to be responsible for guiding our economy ignored, and even actively denied it.

What makes Baker furious, in False Profits, is that the people who failed to see the bubble, who even acted as bubble boosters, have suffered no ill consequences from their actions.  The same people have been left in charge of public and private management of the economy; the same people are reporting on the economy, and appearing as experts on television shows.  Baker minces no words.  These people should have been summarily fired.  When one of these pundits appears on television, or before Congress, to warn (for instance) on why too much deficit spending is a bad thing, Baker says the first question they should be asked is, “Exactly when did you stop being wrong about the economy?”

Class differences are clearly visible in the government’s response to the crisis.  The bailout to the banks came first and was almost infinitely generous.  Baker points out that the much-touted TARP funds were only the tip of the iceberg; huge sums were made available, for free, or virtually so, by the Federal Reserve Bank, and other government agencies, with almost zero publicity.  The result was that the financial industry, and other commanding heights of our economy were virtually made whole at the public expense.  Meanwhile, the stimulus, intended to get the real economy going again – i.e., get people back to work – was relatively miserly, and was politically difficult, at that.  Baker estimates that the federal stimulus was only about 1/10th of what was needed, based on technical measures, and in fact was so small as to little more offset the anti-stimulus of state and local cutbacks.  (I have read other estimates that say the stimulus and anti-stimulus were in fact almost exactly equal.)

Baker is at pains to point out all the “bad science” arguments put forward against bigger stimulus and deficit spending, in favor of the bank bailouts, “too big to fail”, etc., etc., etc.  The trouble is, Baker is a voice crying out in the wilderness.  The bad science is repeated ad infinitum, becoming the “conventional wisdom” (to use the term coined by another liberal economist more widely read than Baker, but almost equally unheeded).  The voice of reason never makes it to the airwaves.

I have one major quibble with Baker.  (I have a few other minor ones, but only one that is systematic.)  This quibble involves his constant implication of incompetence, “mismanagement”, and the like to those who steered the economy into the abyss.

My question to Baker is, from their point of view, where was the error?  As a class, the chieftains of the economy made sure they were made whole.  While some traders and speculators, and a whole lot of common shareholders, undoubtedly lost money, at least for a while, and some, perhaps, were ruined, the capitalists and especially the financiers as a class managed to make money throughout – hand over fist during the bubble, and at a quite respectable (if that is the right word) rate through the crash. 

Meanwhile, the economy limps along with punishingly high unemployment.  Is this accidental?  A comrade of mine highly placed in organized labor talks of labor law reform (such as the ill-fated Employee Free Choice Act) as strategic reform, in contrast to the tactical battles we usually fight.  It is strategic because it alters the terrain of the battle field, changes the balance of power between capital and working people.  (Of course, capital realizes this, too, which is why EFCA had to be defeated.)

Similarly, high unemployment is strategic for capital, because it weakens the bargaining power of the labor force, and, especially if sustained, lowers the expectations of working people.

I can’t believe that only a few left-leaners like Baker, my friends and I can see these kinds of things.  Which leads me to believe that at least some of the captains of industry (or princes of finance) saw the bubble, knew the crash would come, and calculated, all along, how best to profit through it.  Perhaps Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, for example – a very smart man, who, based on the way his company positioned itself before and in the early days of the crash, clearly had a better sense than many of the imminent risk inherent in mortgage-based derivatives.

Antonio Gramsci said, “In mass politics, to tell the truth is precisely a political necessity,”  which sounds almost oxymoronic to those who believe that politics and truth are inherently strangers to each other.  But Gramsci wasn’t talking about politics, in general, he was talking about the politics inherent, or which should be inherent, to the socialist movement.

It is all about hegemony.  Hegemony is when one class leads society, not by raw force (which would be called dominance or authority), but by winning the consent of the other classes.  We live in our society under bourgeois or capitalist hegemony.  Since the capitalist system is designed to exploit us (working people) for the benefit of those who control property (capital), the capitalist class MUST lie to win our consent.  If we knew the truth, we would rebel.  Gramsci sought to replace capitalist hegemony with the hegemony of the working class (socialism, or as he would have said, communism).  Doing this depends on telling radical truth, exposing capitalist lies, making people understand their true power and their true worth.  "The truth will set you free," although (and actually because) as Gloria Steinem pointed out, first it will piss you off.  A society that is not exploitive does not depend on, and in fact CANNOT be based on, lies.  Or so Gramsci believed.

But to win, this way, we have to get the truth OUT.