Honestly...

What's the difference between a joke and a lie? Are we separate or one? Or both? Honestly, these are questions worth asking right now.

Only joking

What’s the difference between a joke and a lie? I asked my father this question when I was seven or eight years old. He’d caught me lying about something, and I responded that “I was only joking.”

I can’t remember his answer, but I got the point. Honesty matters.

Still, it can be difficult to distinguish between jokes, lies, and disguised intentions. After all, joking about something can be an effective way of softening the blow of an insult, and it’s a good way to create confusion. Jokes can also be cover-ups for lies, or used with an intention to manipulate outcomes or hurt others.

Writing about the difference between jokes and lies, Rachel Klein notes that “When you keep saying a joke that’s not true until it hurts someone, it’s not a joke anymore; it’s just a lie.” For example, recent jokes about an imminent U.S. invasion of Greenland or the annexation of Canada are not funny. They hurt. So do social media posts that attack or diminish people. They are not funny at all.

The razor’s edge

When we are confronted with countless lies every day, it’s easy to feel like we are living on the edge. We are, in fact, dangling from a dangerous precipice that includes the possibility of triggering irreversible climate tipping points that take us to a “point of no return.” No joke.

While true jokes playfully suspend reality, most lies strategically distort reality. Both jokes and lies test the boundary between “what is” and what we agree to treat as real. Rachel Klein writes that:

Moments that test our understanding of the edge between jokes and truth, on stage and in life, are a reminder of the razor’s edge between reality and imagination, between truth and lie, upon which comedy, and humanity, rests.

The razor’s edge between truth and lies becomes especially dangerous when confusion is deliberately seeded by people who have forgotten the meaning of honesty. Honesty, defined as adherence to the facts, sincerity, fairness, or straightforwardness of conduct, is closely related to integrity. Wholeness.

Bill McKibben wrote about lying in a recent newsletter, reflecting on the consequences of electing “a president who felt no compunction about just saying that climate change wasn’t real, and using all the power he could muster to kill off both the scientific effort that had alerted us to the crisis, and the policy effort to do something about it.” These lies have succeeded in wiping out climate regulation in the United States, which has profound consequences for the global environment. The impacts of climate change affect us all.

Navigating the edge

How do we navigate the razor’s edge between reality and imagination with honesty and integrity, especially when it feels like much of the world is swimming in a sea of lies? This is an old question. In fact, the term “razor’s edge” comes from the Katha Upanishad, a Hindu text on spiritual enlightenment that has been translated as:

Arise, awaken, and attain the wisdom from the wise.
This path, the wise say, is as difficult as walking on the sharpened edge of a knife.

Navigating this path is not about wobbling along in a state of indecision. It’s about connecting with our deepest values and holding the paradox of oneness lightly: we are one and we are unique.

Our individual experiences are interpreted through our bodies, our brains, and our imagination. We have the capacity to see ourselves as either separate or belonging to a larger whole. Or both.

How can we simultaneously embrace unity and diversity, recognizing that we are both separate and one?

Honestly, I don’t know. But I’m guessing that the answer comes down to awareness, equanimity, and love.

What if?

If the answer is love, could it be that the hate and hurt that are spreading around the world are the outcomes of a big lie? Could it be that either/or and us/them thinking has contributed to the mess we’re in?

I’m reminded of the first lines of poet Lemn Sissay’s beautiful performance of What if?

A lost number in the equation. A simple, understandable miscalculation. And what if, on the basis of that, the world as we know it changed its matter of fact? Let me get it right: What if we got it wrong?

‘What if we got it wrong’ is a question worth asking today, when the stakes are high and the need for just and sustainable transformations is urgent.

Last week, while sorting through papers, I came across an article by political scientist Alexander Wendt — one that he wrote in response to critiques of his quantum social theory. His speculative inquiry is based on the possibility that we have been wrong about the nature of our social world.

His response to critics emphasizes the mind-body problem and the role of consciousness in the social sciences. He points to the dangers of taking a classical approach to our social world based on separation and dualism if reality is, in fact, quantum.

Wendt’s argument is that the mind-body problem and consciousness pose serious problems for classical social science:

applying a classical grid to a quantum reality could also negatively affect social life itself. … [T]hat would be unfortunate - even tragic - at a global level if it reduced our creativity and capacity to cooperate in times of crisis. And likewise at the individual level, where producing classically rational actors means repressing the socially entangled free and vital beings that we truly are in favor of an alienated, deterministic, and mechanical simulacrum.

A classical “us-versus-them” and “humans-versus-nature” reality is detached from a quantum reality that recognizes the concepts of entanglement, uncertainty, nonlocality, and potentiality based on our inherent oneness. This detachment, Wendt claims, is a recipe for mass neurosis.

Good questions

The danger here is not that classical reality is “wrong.” It’s that insisting on it as the only reality locks us into separation, competition, and control at precisely the moment when the world is calling for cooperation, care—and love.

Children love to ask good questions, and most eventually learn the difference between jokes and lies. Surely adults can do better, too. Climate change confronts us with simple but uncomfortable questions: are we willing to be honest about a reality in which we are both unique and entangled? Can we hold multiple perspectives at once and navigate the razor’s edge between them?

Honesty is linked to integrity and wholeness, and when we look at the state of the world, we should be able to do better than this — not least for our children’s sake. Honestly.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

— William Shakespeare

Image: Milje Ivan / Shutterstock