Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. This has been a very long season, so if you've stuck around for the whole thing and you're not just kind of hopping around, thank you for doing that and I hope that all of the work that I put into this so far has been helpful for you. I know that I have two episodes scheduled after this, but this is actually the last episode of the season that I am recording. I have one other interview planned, but it looks like it might kind of fall through. So this, I'm anticipating might actually be the last episode that I'm sitting down to record.

Derek: 01:12

It's kind of bittersweet because I don't feel like I covered all that I wanna cover. I still have so many books just sitting in front of me and on my wish list on Audible and Scribd and all that stuff. I mean, I feel like I've just scratched the surface, but we've gone over quite a lot. So I think at this point, it's important for me to kind

Derek: 01:35

of relay one last little bit of information and episode to kind of round things out a bit, and

Derek: 01:46

then let you do the legwork wherever that takes you, whatever field of interest, whether that's truth or consequentialism or propaganda or government or, you know, whatever. Hopefully this this has been helpful for you. But for me, for this kind of last episode of of significance, I want to talk a little bit about truth and and come back to the issue of non violence. I want to talk about why I think truth is important and how that fits into the topic of non violence because this is a podcast that got started focusing on issues of non violence and I told you at the beginning of the season that propaganda is is related to violence because of the way that it it seeks to control, and the way that it masks violence. So I wanna get into those two topics today, truth and violence.

Derek: 02:44

So let's just recap a little bit. I want to pull out what I think are at least eight reasons that truth is important. Throughout this season, we've talked about truth a little bit, at least the manipulation of truth, but that for the first two thirds of the season that didn't necessarily mean that truth was inherently a good thing. And we just explored that when we got into the philosophy and and theological sections where we took a look at what about lying to the murderer at the door as Kant put it. Like is truth really always the best or is the avoidance of falsehood really always the best?

Derek: 03:30

And so here are eight reasons why I think truth should always be valued. Number one, there is a correspondence with reality. I was just reading Peter Kraft's book, what is it called? It's right here on my desk, Making Sense Out of Suffering. A really great book about the problem of evil and suffering, he's he's not gonna answer anything like logically and and, you know, tidy everything up, but he really presents just a very good overall case for, you know, a theodicy for God in in spite of suffering and evil.

Derek: 04:11

But in one of his sections, he he gets into, you know, the the modern problem of why we have

Derek: 04:19

such a big deal with with pain and suffering. And he he has a quote from C. S. Lewis from his book, The Abolition of Man. Lewis says, for the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how

Derek: 04:34

to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self discipline, and virtue. For the modern mind, the cardinal problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is technique. I think, you know, that helps to make a lot of sense for me, you know, Jacques Lule's The Technological Society. Technique, okay. Technique is when we are trying to conform reality to our desires versus the problem of old was figuring out how to conform our desires, how to conform the self to what is real.

Derek: 05:08

I think that explains a lot of what is going on in our society, some of the the trends that we see. But, you know, whether or not you recognize that there is an objective reality has a significant influence on the way that you you approach the worlds, you approach problems, you approach virtues, disciplines, all that kind of stuff. So correspondence with reality and whether or not you agree with that is huge, and that's one key aspect of truth. Another key aspect of truth is that the presentation of truth or, you know, maybe more appropriately, the refusal to tell untruth is an important step in the refusal of objectifying other people. It doesn't matter if if you think that you have a good reason to lie to somebody else, to not to tell them an untruth is to objectify them.

Derek: 06:06

Maybe they're an impediment that's in your way or maybe you view them as a lesser human or somebody unworthy of the truth, or because of your pride you don't feel like you can tell the truth, or you have to tell a lie, right? All of those things go towards objectifying somebody else. And when we talked about the importance of kingdom living and the creation of an ideal world, right, the job of a Christian is to convey the kingdom, a picture of what the kingdom should be like, then that's just not something that should take place for a Christian, the telling of untruth. So upholding truth is important in a refusal to objectify others. Third, the truth is important because it is pragmatic.

Derek: 07:00

It is eudaimonic is the word that I've I've been using. And that is just this idea that if God

Derek: 07:08

if there's a good God, and if this good God created a good world that is supposed to work, then that world should work in line with what is good. So doing good should work by and

Derek: 07:23

large, right? Of course, we talked in our episode on eudaimonism, what does it mean to work? Right? Does it mean that I'm always going to get what I want? Does it mean that I'm going to always avoid suffering?

Derek: 07:36

No. I mean, again, if you you go to read the book Making Sense Out of Suffering, he

Derek: 07:42

has a great section, I

Derek: 07:43

think it's pretty early on in the book, just where he talks about like what is good, like what is the good. And so, I believe that if a good God created a good world to work according to good, then my refusal to tell untruth should work out the best in the end, in general, most likely. It might not work out the best initially, but for my soul, for my formation, my character formation, for the testimony to those around me, all of those things, I can trust that because there's a good God

Derek: 08:19

that not telling untruth would be the best.

Derek: 08:24

It would actually work out the best. Now, that choice isn't good because it would work out for the best, but rather it works out for the best because it is good. And that is a a very important distinction between eudaimonism there as I'm using it and consequentialism. But again, you're gonna have to go back to that episode if you want want me to flesh that out. Fourth, if we get into truth as relative, you know, of course certain truths like opinions are relative, right?

Derek: 09:00

It's true that my opinion is that, let's say, jam is the best kind of jam. Well, that's true opinion but it's not, you know, it is subjective to me because it's true that your opinion might be blueberry jam or whatever. But when we get into objective realities, objective truths that are static, like let's say, for me, I would think that moral laws would be static, like it is always wrong to not love. To fail to love somebody is always wrong, it's always evil. So no matter where you are on earth or where in time, that's always wrong.

Derek: 09:41

Or to rape somebody is always wrong. To hold some to steal a person and put them in slavery is always wrong. No matter where you are, no matter what time, I don't care how ignorant your culture is, whatever, there it is always wrong. And so that would be objective morality, right? And that but

Derek: 10:04

that depends on things being true.

Derek: 10:09

And so truth is very important for that kind of foundation. Fifth, truth is also important for Christians because it's it is a key component of the character of God. Right? God cannot lie. And so for us, it's important to understand that truth is central to who God is.

Derek: 10:33

And I guess God is love, but God also cannot lie, which means that truth is a key characteristic of of who God is. He does not tell untruths. And so what

Derek: 10:45

does that what implications does that have for us as human beings created in the image of God for Christians who proclaim to follow God? Seventh, understanding

Derek: 10:57

truth and the importance of truth is going to help us in things like the valuation of our relationships and how we treat other people. So for example, and this might be something that upsets people, I'm not judging you like I think you're terrible here, but this is something that this idea I'm about to present is something that I'm just strongly convicted of in regard to how I treat my children. But we don't do Santa Claus. Like, okay, we we do it but we we tell our kids, like, we watch a movie that has Santa in it or something, like, I like Tim Allen's Santa Claus. It's funny.

Derek: 11:39

Right? But our kids know that Santa is not real because we value telling them truth. For my wife, it was something that's that she remembers vividly when she found out Santa wasn't real and she felt kind of betrayed when she found that out, like people had lied to her. And that didn't send her off the edge to like questioning all of reality or something like that, but it it definitely had an impact on her. And that's just something for our kids.

Derek: 12:11

We're not gonna lie to our kids and say, well, you know, we lied to you for five years because it was just, you know, something we could do because you were a vulnerable kid who was easily deceived and it was fun and you were happy. Right? We we told you this lie to make you happy. That's just not something that's treating another human being with the dignity that I think that they deserve and it's not fostering the best relationships that you can. And I'm sure most families who do Santa get away with that just fine, doesn't cause any issues.

Derek: 12:42

Okay, that's great. But in general, that's just not something that's that I think is a wise thing to do or a good thing to do. But you can extrapolate that principle out to, you know, even bigger things. So, for example, not a ton bigger but a bit bigger, like when we go to the doctor, if our kids ask if something is going to hurt, we tell them upfront, honestly. We say, yeah, it's gonna hurt, right?

Derek: 13:08

And sometimes we say, well, it's only gonna hurt for just just a second and then it's over. Or we might say, yeah, it's gonna hurt for a little bit but we'll be there with you. Or we give them strategies for kind of coping with that pain. We're not gonna lie to them and tell them it doesn't hurt, right? We just don't think that that is good for relationships.

Derek: 13:30

And finally, love, truth is going to be important for the concepts of love and justice, right? For laying bare injustice, for speaking truth to power, for confrontation and unraveling. And that's where I want to spend the rest of this episode. Alright, before I get too deep into the non violence thing, you let let me kinda backtrack just a bit. So you've probably noticed if you've listened to any number of recent episodes that the way almost every episode ends is with me saying something like peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.

Derek: 14:15

And, you know, part of it's it's meant to be cheeky and, you know, kind of a jab and funny to to a certain extent, but it is also something that I think is very true, right? So if somebody says peace and then kills you, does it really matter what they said or does it invalidate what they said? Like, is it possible to call something peace and then kill somebody? I I don't think so. I mean, not not as as us at this point, right, not as humans.

Derek: 14:54

Maybe God has that prerogative at times because God has all wisdom and justice and like He can make wise decisions knowing his hearts and everybody's hearts and all of that kind of stuff, but like, can I really call killing somebody else peace? I don't think I I can. And I mean, Augustine recognized this to a certain extent. I know he formulated just war, yet at the same time he recognized that it was impossible for you to put up self defense if somebody was invading your home and to kill them in love, you know, to say, I love you, and then kill them, like you couldn't you couldn't do that. Now, Augustine, I think mistakenly, thought that you could love somebody and kill them in war for the state because your passions were taken out of it.

Derek: 15:45

You were just commanded to do something, so you didn't have hatred or, you know, self preservation or of your family, all of those things, right, on your heart. So you could say, I love you, and then kill the behest of the state, but he didn't think it was at all possible for you to kill in self defense. Well, I'm essentially saying the same thing, right? If you say peace, like, I am a son of the prince of peace, I am a child of peace, right? We are Christians who seek peace.

Derek: 16:16

You can say that and then you go and kill people and that doesn't really make any sense. And that's exactly what propaganda does, right? It twists words. It calls violence peace. And I talked about this in a number of different episodes, one with Rebecca Muy, where talked about the the peace of empire, the gospel of Rome.

Derek: 16:41

Right? They said that they brought peace but how was that peace obtained and how was that peace ensured by oppression and sword? Well, of course it was peace because anytime anybody did something against Rome, against their oppression, against their heavy taxation, they were brutally murdered. Yet that type of language is really easy for us to believe when we say that there's a Pax Americana at the moment, when The United States are the policeman of the world and we have brought relative peace. I mean, since the Cold War, okay, it's a Cold War, but it's cold, like there hasn't been much fighting at all, at least among the the major powers, there have just been conflicts.

Derek: 17:25

Now, of course, those those conflicts and wars in other countries, a lot of them have been proxy wars supported by the the big players in the Cold War. So we've been waging war and violence through other people that are expendable, disposable. But, you know, it seems like we have peace. I have peace. I had peace in The United States when I lived there.

Derek: 17:50

You have relative freedom and relative luxury, it gets really nice. We also looked at places like Haiti and talked about how The United States has essentially created the, by and large or with with other empires, created the situation that Haiti is in. We export our violence, we are paying people elsewhere dirt wages and we are, we have manipulated them through businesses, we have, we have heaped up economic baggage onto other countries and are blackmailing them essentially, like economically, and we've done so many things that make the lives of other people elsewhere much worse, like through our violence or our threat of violence and we call that peace and it is peace for us, which reminds me so much of The Hunger Games. Like if you watch The Hunger Games and you just think that District 13 or whatever, no District 1, whatever whatever they no, the capital. Yeah.

Derek: 18:58

You think that the capital is like The United States and District 13 is is kind of like Haiti. And you're like, well, wait a second. The capital is the way that it is because all of these other other places are like sending in the resources to it, like they're they're exploiting the other districts. Like, that's such a social commentary, like, it's brilliant and it's like, that's The United States. So anyway, that was kind of a off the beaten path, but the point is that it's easy to call something peace and especially for for you to believe it if you are feeling that peace and to not see that peace being disturbed for other people.

Derek: 19:48

It's easier to for you to dismiss the peace of other people and you say, well, no, I'm I'm offering peace, right? Look how benevolent we are in The United States. You zoom in on a smaller scale if you wanna not view The US as a whole on the global stage as a villain, like, go ahead and look at The US in a smaller scale, right? So you want to view yourself, like let's say, the white community as good. When I say that racism has been taken care of pretty much, I mean, the way back in 1969 at least, back with civil rights legislation and all that kind of stuff, I mean, we aren't racist anymore and we've even added more legislation on top of that to make housing fair, to make jobs fair, all that kind of stuff.

Derek: 20:46

So, of course, there's no more racism, like, that's largely resolved. We have peace. Yet, then when there are riots or when there are demonstrations and people are expressing that they don't have the peace that you're telling them they have, then our community is extremely offended. Well, how dare they do that? How dare they rise up and express themselves that way?

Derek: 21:18

Because we we say peace, but that peace is just untruth, it's propaganda, something that makes the the group in power feel good about themselves and have a cudgel to bash those who disagree with them. And who are the people who disagree with them? Well, generally, the people who are the the most depressed and who have nothing left to lose, who say, you know, they're not the people who are are just scraping by and able to live, they're the people who are just so fed up, they they can't take anymore because they've experienced so much violence or oppression, and they finally give up and fight back. And Doctor. King, right, he tried to kind of bridge this gap here because there's something beautiful in in Christianity, and doctor Saya, in in our interview, talked a bit about prophetic witness, and, you know, I mean, a lot of my episodes are called The False Prophet Of, right, when when I explored the church.

Derek: 22:29

And I I've discussed all throughout the season the importance of being a true prophet. Like, the the role of prophecy in the Christian faith is extremely vital. It's it's central. And so what doctor King did is he took this this beautiful aspect of Christianity which says, we are to be prophetic witnesses, and we are to be prophetic witnesses on behalf of the oppressed. So, the oppressed, when when they get tired and when they get fed up, they they will cry out.

Derek: 23:02

But as Christians, we are supposed to enter into that and cry out with them and for them. We are supposed to be their advocates. And look at Job, Job is a great example of that, but he talks about his advocacy for the poor and the widow. James talks about how true religion is to, you know, go to the the widow and the orphan in distress. Doctor King and other modern prophets and prophets of old, they recognize this type of thing and they tap into that and direct that the voice of the oppressed and speak on behalf of the oppressed in a way that that people will hear.

Derek: 23:49

And at the core of prophetic witness is what we're talking about here in this episode, what we've really been talking about all season. The the core, the kernel is truth. The example that I go to all the time, and I forget if it's the the Selma March or something around there, but whatever it was, it was it was one of these times where you had a bunch of kids, like little pretty little kids show up during the

Derek: 24:18

civil rights era. And I mean, when you have kids on TV being beaten or arrested or they're dog attacks and fire hoses and all they're doing is marching peacefully, like, that reveals something, right? If

Derek: 24:41

if you have all of these this white community in the South talking about, you know, the importance of of community, the importance of structure, the importance of, you know, keeping the peace and all of this stuff, and you see a bunch of black kids walking around and simultaneously, you see the just hatred and vitriol on these white people's faces, and you see them unleashing attack dogs and beating people who are just walking, like, reveals the truth that you can keep saying peace all you want. You can keep saying these untruths all you want, but non violence and prophetic witness, its job is to reveal the truth. You can't deny that truth. So sure, a lot of non violent action has become street theater today. I mean, I talked about Benjamin Lay a little bit and some of

Derek: 25:44

the things that he did were theatrical, And like, that is great. Right? That can

Derek: 25:49

be important. That can be helpful. But I think the best prophetic witness, the best non violent action is is the type of action that reveals the core truth that you want to show. Gandhi has another famous one, right, the the Salt March, where you just had people going to take salt, like, why should they not be able to have salt? Like, why should Britain be able to to tax that and take money from it?

Derek: 26:17

Why why shouldn't they be able to do that? To have their own salt? Like, that doesn't make sense. Okay, they walk to get salt, and while they're walking to

Derek: 26:24

get salt, they're gonna go get beaten, and they don't raise a hand to even defend themselves. So, you can't couch this as, well, you know, the police are defending themselves, it's just they're beating a bunch of people who are poor and can't afford a ton

Derek: 26:43

of money, who just want a simple staple of life like salt. Really? Like, you're revealing the truth of empire there. You're revealing the truth of violence. So, when it comes to truth, you know, it is the fabric of reality, like it is it is what actually exists.

Derek: 27:06

And you can change definitions, and you can, you know, make things murkier and propagandize and whatever you wanna do. But there are other ways to expose the untruth of something besides through words. That's what prophetic witness does, that's what non violent action does. It exposes the untruth, the untruth of empire,

Derek: 27:33

the untruth of false peace, the untruth that abusers are are using, whatever untruth it is. And it

Derek: 27:44

does that through the truth of one's life laid bare. It happens through suffering. It's not an easy truth to bear, and it's just like the cross, right? Jesus went to the cross, that was a a big form of non violent action. And sure, there was plenty of other big stuff going on in, know, theologically there, but I mean, one aspect of it certainly was that he was showing, he was revealing what what the religious institution was, and he was revealing what the political empire was, and what that does to people who seek justice, and who love mercy, and who want to walk humbly with God.

Derek: 28:29

Religious institutions or institutionalized religion and political structures, empires, they kill those kinds of people because those kinds of people take away power. It's better that one man die for the nation than that the whole nation perish, right? Well, the

Derek: 28:48

one man or the the one group of people that will always be sacrificed on the altar of empire and institutionalized religion are the prophets. There's a great quote in this vein from Philip Barragan,

Derek: 29:07

where he says, quote, the poor tell us who we are, the prophets tell us who we can be, so we hide the poor and kill the prophets, end quote. And that's pretty much the summary of this season, isn't it?

Derek: 29:25

Talk about doing justice, and we've explored a lot of injustices that have been done by various groups all the way from individual abusers up to the systematic nature of of government. There's a lot

Derek: 29:41

of injustice that's done. And

Derek: 29:45

we've talked about the importance of living in a community of truth and speaking the truth. But truth, especially in an era of propaganda, which I don't know that there's ever not an era where governments and such don't propagandize, but living in in such a heavily propagandized era because we have so much media,

Derek: 30:09

it it seems like it's impossible to escape all the lies being touted.

Derek: 30:16

Those who seek truth, those who latch onto it, and even more so those who try to reveal the truth, not just with words and, you know, making million millions of dollars off of YouTube channels that take advantage of everybody's infatuation with conspiracy theories, but people who actually live out lives that reveal truth.

Derek: 30:43

We we kill them or find other ways to silence them.

Derek: 30:49

This is in part why I think it's so important that I ended the season the way that I did, talking about discipleship and truth. Because the goal isn't for you just to know about propaganda and injustice and just to be able to spout off about various conspiracy theories. It's for you, for me, for us to be able to go out into the world and to bear the truth because that's how good is done in the world. That's how the world changes, through through prophets who bear the truth, who refuse to bear untruth and to call something something not what it is. Right?

Derek: 31:33

We call a spade a spade. We're not gonna call empire saviors. We're not going to call

Derek: 31:40

war and death peace. We don't do that. So hopefully you

Derek: 31:45

can take this charge and you can take this season, you can feed off of it, and you can use it as a jumping off point to to become a prophet in the world. That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.