Originally from: Mike Meredith
                        
Surveying the discussion evoked by World Healing Day has brought home to me the continuing pain and anger over the mistruths we experienced during last year's FMD crisis.

Perhaps these mistruths, scientific and political, reminded us of our other experiences of offical mistruth and "spin" e.g. the early days of the BSE saga.

Buddhists believe that the worst thing you can possibly do to another human being is to deny them their "truth" (i.e. their reality. To Buddhists, this is even worse than killing the person!!

When I first came across this ancient insight, I was quite surprised that it should be seen as SUCH a big deal, but the more I have considered the more it seems to ring true (notice here how "what is true" changed for me, in the light of education and experience).

When I attempted, a year ago, to make some sense of the FMD nightmare ("From Crisis to Transformation" www.pighealth.com/holisticindex.htm ), government and scientific integrity was a major issue that I picked out (www.pighealth.com/holistic3.htm#Democracy) and I saw it as a major threat to the integrity and vision of a democratic society.

How can we tackle the threat posed by mistruth and spin?
Well, we can (and often do!) see the perpetrator as bad and in
need of punishment (e.g. public humiliation or public vilification). This approach eases the immediate problem of what to do with our sense of outrage, but does it stop the mistruths and spin continuing? We know that punishment can work well at correcting the behavior
of small children, how well does it work with adults?
How well does it work, for example in the prison system?

One of the most frustrating and annoying aspects of being on the receiving end of mistruths and spin, is that it can be so incredibly hard to get the perpetrator(s) to even acknowledge that they have lied (after all who wants to be branded a "liar"?) or done wrong (in their eyes they may have only misjudged, been ill-informed or made an error).

In this frustrating, non-acknowledgement of our/the truth about the situation, there can be a huge temptation to drive our feedback message home a little harder, we may even find ourselves adding a little "spin" to it ourselves – just to "wind up" the dastardliness of what has been said or left unsaid in order to get people to listen. We may also find ourselves wanting to "knock some sense" into the enemy (the slippery slope where victims graduate into abusers).

Ancient wisdom: "We become the people we hate"

Some elements of the media are all too keen to join in such a fray – balanced, "keeping comments in context", objective, "understanding both sides" reporting sells rather less newspapers than inflammatory, "shock, horror, gasp" type reporting.

To make matters even worse, we have a national obsession with "victims" and "abusers" – always looking for, and of course finding, lots of nice "black and white" simple examples of "goodies and baddies" to feed our orgy of self-righteous indignation.

All this can be a fine game to play – we all need a bit of argument, fighting and righteous heroism in our lives, and of course there ARE GENUINE CAUSES to fight, dragons to slay, abusers to be stopped, victims to be supported.

However, there can come a point where battling for truth and justice may become a rather tedious, wearying or resource-consuming obsession. The battle for truth and justice can become a draining, personalised struggle for "I am right, you are wrong" in which neither side is really listening to the other – we are all too focussed on either WINNING ("attacking the enemy") or NOT LOSING ("defending ourselves").

What is the point of truth and justice? What are we fighting for?
What do we want WINNING to look like?

Are we so full of self-doubt that we can only feel secure in our truth if everyone else agrees with it?

"When I need to persuade others, I doubt myself"
(Harry Palmer in "Creativism: The Art of Living Deliberately")

If we are fighting for quality of life for ourselves and our loved ones, we are surely fighting for peace, security and co-creating a better society. When we are over-focussed on what others SHOULD BE DOING or SHOULD BE PROVIDING. we can easily lose track of our own power to develop, create, provide and lead by example.

One of the many shocks I had during the big crisis last year, was re-encountering, even in that awful situation, that section of society for whom "the truth" is "Farmers are always whinging and wanting handouts".

What is your truth about the kind of people who create and maintain the beautiful countryside of Britain and put food on millions of plates?
Is it a truth that you can experience, enjoy and manifest today, or must it wait until the day when everyone else is good and truthful?

Thanks for your time
Mike