1 What Do We Mean by “Truth”?
Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
—Buddha
The only way you’re going to get the truth is if it comes willingly from the other person.1
—Eric Maddox,
the Army interrogator who located Saddam Hussein,
and author of Mission: Blacklist #1
Intelligence professionals have a duty to speak truth to power. In the case of officers in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States or MI6 in Great Britain “power” is a head of state whose decisions can affect millions, even billions, of people. Intelligence pros in the corporate environment inform and advise senior executives whose decisions impact jobs and salaries throughout a company.
People like that had better know what “truth” is before they start talking to “power.” So I asked many intelligence professionals how they define truth. They would usually begin with a simple phrase you might see in the Oxford Dictionaries—“that which is in accordance with fact or reality”—but the follow-up invariably addressed the complexity of truth. Based on what they said, in optical terms, I would define truth as white light: It’s what we see when all the colors come together.
Truth is rooted in fact, but personal imagination, beliefs, and experiences affect how we process the facts. Emotions and interpretations are therefore parts of the spectrum that compose the truth. If we’re missing some of the facts and/or missing the human responses to them, then the truth has eluded us. Just as the opposite of “fact” may be “lie,” the opposite of “truth” could be defined as “inability to see the whole.”
Because of our imagination, beliefs, and experiences, human beings are capable of synthesizing ideas and points of view in a way that transcends mere computer-like analysis of data points. We don’t just sort the data, organizing them into neat columns; we make sense of them. We connect facts and ideas in uniquely personal ways to arrive at the truth.
An example of this from history has stuck with me many years because is one of the most inspiring tales of problem-solving I’ve ever heard. The United States Department of Justice under Attorney General Robert Kennedy was in a quandary as to how to stop certain Southern states from allowing racial discrimination. Many state and local laws dictated the rules of segregation, in which blacks and whites were to sit on the bus and at bus stations, the use separate rest rooms and separate lunch counters, and so on.
Along came the Freedom Riders, who challenged those practices and wanted to end such segregation. The first Freedom Rides on public buses originated from Washington, D.C. on May 4, 1961. This non-violent protest and those that followed stirred up the anger of white segregationists who turned the Freedom Rides into bloody events at terminals and on buses.
Robert Kennedy wanted an immediate way to sedate the violence, but analyzing the known options didn’t point to any quick solution:
It would not be possible to get action from Congress because a large part of the Democratic membership of Congress was made up of Southern Democrats who wouldn’t buck the will of their constituents.
Going to court to get an order either to stop the demonstrations or to stop the discriminatory practices—with the latter being preferable—would have taken a year due to appeals, and this was an immediate problem with people getting hurt.
Using the U.S. military was also impracticable for both legal and operational reasons.
Then a Justice Department lawyer named Robert Saloschin remembered something he had read about 10 years earlier. When he had first worked in Washington as a young lawyer, he was with the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). Part of his job was to read the laws under which the CAB operated, enacted in 1938. He recalled reading a section pertaining to interstate commerce, which, in very general and sweeping language, prohibited airlines from any form of discrimination, such as carrying cargo for Company A and refusing to carry cargo for Company B. He had a hunch that the language had been copied precisely from earlier laws regulating other modes of interstate transportation (railroads, trucks, and buses). This hunch wasn’t an intuitive response, but rather the direct result of allowing his experience and imagination to help him process the facts at hand.
Saloschin told Kennedy that he might find the same provision that was in the CAB law—word for word—when Congress decided to cover interstate buses. It took five minutes to find it.
Saloschin was correct. The language was there—and it could be interpreted to read that any kind of discrimination was prohibited by the law. Based on such an interpretation, the Justice Department filed a petition that day with the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) under that section of the law relating to interstate buses to order the bus lines to stop discrimination in their buses and terminals. The ICC was shocked. Despite their experiences with discrimination that took the form of uneven services to competing companies or financial inequities in the cost of transporting goods, they had never had anything to do with racial inequality before.
The FBI was ordered to go into bus terminals and take pictures of the “white” and “colored” signs in restrooms and waiting rooms. Evidence in hand, on November 1, 1961, the ICC ordered the bus companies to stop the discriminatory practices, and that ended the problem.
Now turn that thought about the way we process information upside down: Sometimes people process input in a way that completely distorts the facts; they wouldn’t be able to tell you the truth if their lives depended on it. This is sometimes the case after a traumatic incident in which a victim provides “facts” about when, where, and how an event occurred, and very little matches what actually happened. In those cases, personal experience involves such upsetting emotions that memory can’t be relied upon. This phenomenon is at the heart of the work done by The Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals.
Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in nearly 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing. Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound.2
Based on these observations, I would assert that telling the truth and distorting the truth are both human abilities. The day a computer tells you the truth is the day it should be able to vote, get health insurance, and write great novels. Because truth-telling is a human ability, to get to the truth from another person, you sometimes need well-honed interpersonal skills. In the words of Eric Maddox, whose quote helped open this chapter, “The only way you’re going to get the truth is if it comes willingly from the other person.” Polygraph machines don’t have interpersonal skills. A polygraph is not about truth; it is about perception of fact.
You can differentiate between lies and facts through techniques covered in this book, but you must build on those skills to discover the truth. Many secrets of top intelligence experts center on identifying a reliable source and how to build a trusting relationship with that person. They also cover how to dig into the mind of the source to spot biases and motivations. Finally, they focus on analyzing the content at hand to arrive at a multifaceted, multidimensional picture of people, places, things, and events in time.
Their techniques are fundamental to becoming skilled at truth detection. They are useful whether you need the truth from someone in an interview, a negotiation, an investigation, or a discussion about a personal relationship.
Where Do the Facts Come From?
If we have more than five senses—sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste—then we need an understanding of “fact” that goes beyond what those five animal senses capture.
On August 8, 1920, Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture titled “Man’s Twelve Senses in Their Relation to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.” It reflects the evolution of Steiner’s thinking that development of these abilities might enable people to explore the spiritual world the way science lets us investigate the physical world. And he thought that the way to develop them was to coordinate the use of the following 12 senses: sight, taste, warmth, hearing, smell, language, touch, balance, thinking, self-movement, ego (understood as a critical element of personality), and life (the perception that we are).
Fast-forward to more current conversations about the senses and you may find a lot more than 12 cited. The logic behind the expansion is that each sense is linked to a sensor, and each sensor picks up something unique. For example, sight is actually two senses: the perception of light intensity and the perception of color. If someone invades your house in the middle of the night and all you see is a figure that’s roughly 6 feet tall moving through a dark room, you really don’t know if that person is white, black, or as green as the Wicked Witch of the West. Your sense of color is not able to function.
From a scientific point of view, Steiner was right about balance because sensors in our ears enable us to detect our orientation; they give us a sense of balance. He was also right about warmth, because there are nerve endings that are dedicated to sensing heat. It’s the same with cold, pain, itch, and pressure.
Steiner was also in sync with modern science about his designation of self-movement as a distinct sense. In an article on Howstuffworks.com titled “How Many Senses Does a Human Being Have?” the author notes: “In your muscles and joints, there are sensors that tell you where the different parts of your body are and about the motion and tension of the muscles. These senses let us, for example, touch our index fingers together with our eyes shut.”3
In giving complete facts about climbing the Matterhorn—that is, facts that take all applicable senses into consideration—you would therefore include a description of how your body felt as it moved vertically in addition to what Zermatt, Switzerland, looks like from the summit.
In short, if you think about all the things your body tells you in a given day, you can probably come up with 20 or more distinct senses, including a sense of when you have to urinate and when you’ve had too much to eat. And among those, we haven’t even mentioned the proverbial “sixth sense,” meaning an intuitive faculty that can’t be easily explained by referring to the sensors in our body.
So where do the facts come from? All of these sources of data collection we call senses.
In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell adds another dimension to our thinking about what constitutes a perceived reality. He opens the book with a riveting story about the J. Paul Getty Museum’s acquisition of a statue believed to be created about 530 BC. For 14 months, a scientific team analyzed the statue with tools of modern science and declared it authentic. The Museum publicized its extraordinary purchase with the New York Times running a front-page feature in fall 1986 on this rare piece ancient art—only to question the authenticity of the purchase five years later.4
In the meantime, what had happened wasn’t so scientific—that is, explicitly analytical. Shortly after fall 1983, when the statue first came to the Museum, various art historians and other art experts had their first glance at the statue. Their reactions could best be categorized as somewhere between disbelieving and critical about the authenticity of the piece.5 They didn’t use electron microscopes, mass spec-trometry, X-ray diffraction, and X-ray fluorescence to reach their conclusions, as the Getty’s science experts were doing; they eyeballed the piece. In this summary, Gladwell refers to four world-renowned art experts who immediately identified the statue as a fake:
When Federico Zeri and Evelyn Harrison and Thomas Hoving and Georgios Dontas—and all the others—looked at the kouros and felt an “intuitive repulsion”—they were absolutely right. In the first two seconds of looking—in a single glance—they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months.6
Combining the rapid gut response described by Gladwell—a kind of instantaneous processing of a multi-sensory experience—with the slower processing of the Getty Museum’s science team, you can arrive at an awareness of how much information may go into a single fact, such as whether or not a statue is authentic.
How Do Imagination, Beliefs, and Experiences Shape the Facts?
What we perceive as truth brings at least three interrelated elements into play: imagination, belief, and experience.
Truth and Imagination
Imagination is a precious gift, enabling us to explore the what-ifs of life. As individuals we are on a continuum in terms of how imagination- and logic-based we are.
Some psychiatrists use a simple test designed by the father-son team of Herbert and David Spiegel to make the determination of a where a person lies on that continuum. Now deceased, Herbert Spiegel was clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and probably best known for his treatment of the woman with multiple personalities called Sybil. David Spiegel is associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford University. Both achieved status as world-renowned experts in the clinical uses of hypnosis. It is their focus on hypnosis that led them to develop the test to determine how trance-prone a person is—that is, how easily someone daydreams and can let imagination take hold, putting logic and reality aside for a while. The test helps the clinician evaluate a person’s space awareness, time perception, myth-belief premises, and processing style.7 It poses questions such as “When you’re in a theater watching a play or movie, do you ever get so into it that it takes you a few moments to get reoriented after the curtain comes down?”
This capacity has relevance in a discussion of truth because the ability to allow the mind to wander into what-ifs is one of the ways to understand why a great many people buy into conspiracy theories. And if you have any doubt that this is a lot of people, consider the study “Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion,” published in the March 2014 American Journal of Political Science. University of Chicago researchers J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood took an unprecedented look at the nature of mass public support for conspiracy theories. They concluded: “Using four nationally representative surveys, sampled between 2006 and 2011, we find that half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory.… In contrast with many theoretical speculations, we do not find conspiracism to be a product of greater authoritarianism, ignorance, or political conservatism.”8
They determined that people very likely support conspiracy theories because of a willingness to believe in forces that are unseen yet intentional, and who feel drawn to narratives about the struggle between good and evil. In other words, they are talking about people whom the Spiegels might label “trance-prone,” having the ability to dissociate in a way that gives rise to imagination.
In commenting on the study for National Public Radio, NPR’s social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam added another insight to the explanation of why Americans—perhaps, especially Americans—are so prone to believe in conspiracy theories:
[T]he stereotype about people who believe such theories is that they’re poorly educated, or superstitious or that they are political partisans. It turns out the consistent predictor of such beliefs is something that you might almost call an all-American attitude—a belief in individualism, distrust of authority. And together those things translate into a desire to avoid being controlled by large secret forces.9
Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent David Major, the first director of Counterintelligence, Intelligence and Security Programs on the National Security Council Staff at the White House, approaches the reason from a complementary angle: “People like to believe in conspiracies because it’s the nefarious ‘they’ who are responsible for something shocking. We don’t know who ‘they’ are, but if we did know who ‘they’ are, it would solve a lot of problems.”10
With these thoughts in mind, we can get a deeper understanding of why people believe conspiracy theories, but that even if a majority of people believe such a theory, that doesn’t raise it to the status of truth. Having the awareness and skill to question a conspiracy theory are vital to anyone who wants nothing but the truth.
One of the most enduring conspiracy theories in American history concerns the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Gallup organization conducted a poll just before the 50th anniversary of the assassination and found that 61 percent of Americans believe that others besides Lee Harvey Oswald were involved. This is actually down from a high of 81 percent, which Gallup reported in both the mid-1970s and early 2000s.11
To explain—at least partially—how we got to this point of delusion, it’s important to reference the Russian art of disinformation. Over the years, I’ve interviewed a number of people in the intelligence community, and they agree that Russian intelligence services have a mastery of disinformation as part of their so-called operational games. This aptitude for getting people to accept false information as true did not diminish with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; it is a distinguishing feature of the KGB’s successor, the FSB.
And what do the Russians have to do with the popular theory that the Kennedy assassination was the result of a right-wing conspiracy involving the CIA? They started it. At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, retired Major General Oleg Kalugin of the KGB was in New York, conducting espionage and influence operations as a Radio Moscow correspondent with the United Nations. He notes: “We received a cable from Moscow, which bluntly said that we should say that right-wing guys hated Kennedy and they killed him—that it was an American plot to assassinate him.… It was all about blaming Americans—CIA and FBI. ‘They are all behind it’ was the Soviet line.”12
The first book asserting the theory was Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?, written by Joachim Joesten and first published by a British company. Both Joesten and Victor Perlo, the man who reviewed the book for the New York Times—thus giving it immense credibility—were instruments of the KGB.13 Thomas Boghardt, former historian of the International Spy Museum, puts the successful effort into the larger context of Soviet and Russian disinformation activities in modern history in his article “Active Measures,” available for download on the Spy Museum website.14
Millions of people, therefore, have embraced the conspiracy theory created by the KGB and popularized by people like filmmaker Oliver Stone. They see it as the truth, and no amount of evidence to the contrary is likely to shake them loose of their vision. In fact, as Shankar Vedantam noted in his NPR commentary, people who buy into a conspiracy theory have a tendency to expand the scope of the conspiracy when confronted by facts that refute it:
A conspiracy theory is where you believe in a theory where no matter how much disconfirming evidence comes in, you somehow convert that disconfirming evidence into part of the conspiracy. So with Barack Obama’s birth certificate, for example, the moment the birth certificate came out from Hawaii, the people who believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States would say the Hawaiian hospital now is in on the conspiracy as well.15
Truth and Belief
As you consider this passage from Genesis 3:1–7 (New American Standard Bible), ask yourself to what extent it rings true for you:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from [a]ny tree of the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.
If you take the Bible literally, you believe it’s a fact that a snake spoke to a naked woman and convinced her to do something bad. To you, that’s truth. If you take this passage figuratively, you believe that human beings tend to be weak in the face of temptation, so we’d better evaluate our options carefully or we have a lot to lose. The person who takes the passage literally would probably agree with the person looking at it figuratively; they could agree on the truth as it captures the frailty of human will. They would not, however, agree that there is truth in the statement “a snake spoke to a naked woman.”
I don’t know for sure that a serpent has never spoken, although logic tells me that it’s unlikely. Herein lies the crux of the discussion about whether or not certain religious beliefs should be labeled “truth” if the acid test for truth is whether or not it reflects reality.
The difference between the two people and their perception of truth is not a simple matter of logic. That is, it cannot simply be explained by saying that either snakes talk or they don’t talk. Although it seems to be true that analytic thinking can temporarily decrease religious belief, even in devout believers,16 a study done by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), researchers indicates that believers and non-believers actually have a lot in common in terms of their perception of what’s true and what isn’t. The study, conducted by Sam Harris, Jonas Kaplan, and colleagues, was the first to compare religious faith to ordinary belief at the level of the brain.17
Until the early part of the 20th century, we had little hard evidence to go on—that is, brain science—to determine whether or not religious believers and non-believers differ in how they evaluate what is factual. With the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we can now view images of the brain in action, and see how the brain responds when it’s in a state of belief or disbelief. In fact, there is a place where “faith happens” in the brain, whether it reflects a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God or that Eric Clapton is the best rock guitarist who’s ever lived. Another way to describe what happens in the brain is to say that our capacity to believe isn’t content-driven in that sense that a religious belief doesn’t show up in a brain scan as any different from a political or a cultural one.
Bottom line: Our magical brains decide what’s true regardless of content. It doesn’t really matter if you’re religious or non-religious. The biology of the human brain gives us essentially the same capacity to embrace something as truth because, for whatever reason, we happen to believe it is. A person who is convinced the person in the adjacent apartment is from another planet would therefore pass a polygraph when asked if his neighbor is an extraterrestrial.
Sam Harris asserts that this finding may someday give us tools to determine “belief detection” in a manner analogous to how we now to do “lie detection.” It’s another layer of analysis in determining whether you are hearing nothing but the truth.
Truth and Experience
Wendy Aronsson is a psychotherapist who has been counseling individuals, couples, and families for more than 25 years. She has heard “true stories” that don’t quite fit with what she knows to be factual about the person’s situation or feelings. And yet, in order to help people, she needs to respect that the stories are their truths. Aronsson, author of Refeathering the Empty Nest, wouldn’t be able to build the trust necessary to have productive, healing sessions with them if she nit-picked a story about painful moments with a spouse. It’s the pain of the relationship that demands her focus, with the details of the story having relevance, but perhaps not dominance.
Aronsson explains, “Two people can be looking at the same thing and describe it quite differently. Their truths are not identical because of the experiences they bring to the table.”18 Though this appreciation for individual perspective may not play well with law enforcement, for example, it is essential and valid for professionals like Aronsson.
That said, omissions or distortions of salient facts undermine her ability to help. So there’s a balancing act in any session: The extent to which a therapist takes what the client says as “truth” is affected by the extent to which knowing the facts is the only way the therapist can really help the person.
Trevor Crow, also a therapist, offers a wonderful example of how experience shapes truth in a book we wrote together: Forging Healthy Connections. It’s the story of Diane and Mike, and how their perspectives on her friends nearly tore them apart. Diane genuinely saw some women who had done exploitive, and even abusive, things to her as friends; in contrast, Mike saw them as people who had a keen sense of how to victimize both him and Diane. Each held fast to what she and he perceived as the truth.
Diane’s “truth” disintegrated when Trevor told the couple the story of scorpion and the frog, and then explored why Diane was a frog. The story goes like this: The scorpion is catching a ride across the river by riding on the back of the frog. He stings the frog on the head. As the frog is dying, he whimpers, “Why did you do that to me?” The scorpion replies, “I’m a scorpion, dummy.”19
What Diane rapidly realized was that her bullying older sister, who had the mother’s relentless affection, had gotten her accustomed to associating “accepting the status quo” with “keeping the peace.” As soon as Mike understood Diane’s “truth,” he could move closer to her. The happy ending is that they came together to see her exploitive friends and their antics the same way. Their shared experiences altered what both of them would now consider the truth.
More common examples of how personal experience affects the way a person processes facts concern dating, eating, driving, and other day-to-day events. Your hostess asks, “Why won’t you eat your lamb chop?” You answer that you’ve never had a lamb chop you’ve liked. So is the truth of that exchange that lamb chops taste bad? No. The fact is, you’ve never eaten a lamb chop you liked, but the truth is, you might like one that was prepared well.
So What Is Truth?
Truth embodies facts collected as a result of sensory input, but it also captures relationships between and among pieces of information.
Two facts may be that Mark works in New Orleans and flies home to Philadelphia on weekends. If you knew nothing else, as is the case with many of his coworkers, you might draw the conclusion that he hates New Orleans and misses Philadelphia. The truth is that he loves New Orleans, but his wife won’t move there with the children because her social circle is in Philadelphia. So every weekend, he leaves the place he would like to call home and goes back to a city he’s never enjoyed. In this story, a fundamental element of the truth is the person’s feelings.
Truth has a foundation in reality. A person’s imagination, beliefs, or experiences have the power either to illuminate that reality or to make it hard to see.