“Buy the truth and do not sell it – wisdom, instruction and insight as well.” ~ Proverbs 23:23
“Where did you hear that?”
I was asked this question the other day as I was discussing something I saw on the news with another person. After I told them, they replied, “Oh. Well that makes sense then. I don’t get my news from them. They can’t be trusted. I only listen to (fill in the blank).
Interestingly enough, I was listening to the news this morning and the topic about integrity in the news media came up. The anchorwoman who was leading the interview with another media personality seemed to have happened upon a moment of institutional awareness in that very moment and posed this revealing question on-air:
“Am I doing more harm than good?”
I could picture in my mind her producer behind the scenes, shouting expletives in her earpiece and saying, “Stop! Stop! Cut to a commercial! Cut to a commercial!”
William Shakespeare once said, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” He could’ve just as easily said, “all the world is a marketplace, and all the men and women are buyers and sellers.”
We are all buyers and sellers. In this day and age, has this ever been more true? Just like my friend who questioned the legitimacy of the source of my information about the current event we were discussing the other day, we all tend to take sides. All of us, to some extent, have been conditioned to only want to hear what we want to hear. And if we hear it often enough, repeat it to others often enough, we then eagerly take it to the marketplace neatly presented and spread out on our table of wares. For the right price, you can have it. And we’ll even wrap it in a box and put a pretty little bow on top.
This is precisely how each of us, to some degree, become profiteers of false information. Or, if you prefer the modern day vernacular, fake news.
As for the truth itself, there doesn’t appear to be much of a demand for it these days; or at least not as much of a desire for it, in and of itself, as a standalone virtue. Many of us find it much more palatable when diluted with sprinkles of confirmation bias and personal gain.
As Guildenstern said to Hamlet in Scene 2 of Act 2: Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream… to which Hamlet replied, a dream itself is but a shadow.
Put another way, the foolish sell the substance for the shadow, but the wise sell the shadow for the substance. Or as a meat salesman would tell his apprentice, “Sell the aroma and the sizzle; not the steak.”
In the evening when we look over the balance ledger of our day, we take note of what was bought and sold. At the bottom of the sheet there is a line revealing the net gain or loss. A fool has the tendency to sell the better things to purchase the worse, while the wise man seeks only the valuable things that endure, for which he refuses to part with for a mere shekel.
The truth comes pretty cheap these days, for few want to hear it.
Former Blackout Artist 