In a moment marked by distortion, spin, and eroding trust, Stephen Bauman reflects on what happens when truth itself becomes negotiable.
This episode explores honesty, accountability, and the quiet but urgent work of reclaiming integrity—in our public life and in our own.
TRANSCRIPT:
The story goes that addressing a crowd during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was asked why he didn’t just declare the slaves to be free and be done with it. Lincoln replied by asking the crowd, “If I told you that a lamb’s tail was a leg, how many legs would a lamb have?” “Five,” came the answer: “No, four,” said Lincoln. “Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”
This little parable has been haunting me for months and sounds especially naive today given how our political class has flipped Lincoln’s perspective upside down, aggressively insisting, “Don’t be ridiculous! Of course there’s such a thing as a five-legged lamb!” The lies and misrepresentations have been coming at us at a bewildering pace, deforming our cultural and political expectations for fact-based truth-telling. That’s why Lincoln seems so wildly old-fashioned in his sensibilities. In his day everyone would have found his pithy story quite humorous given the obvious moral. Today it falls flat, sounding sadly irrelevant to current conditions.
If ever there was a cause for profound cynicism for the state of things, this life-threatening allergy for candor and accountability makes a strong case. Asserting lies and cover-ups as Truth (capital “T”) never changes their essential nature. Another old aphorism comes to mind here--it goes like this: “Truth comes as conqueror only to those who do not receive it as a friend.” Most of us learn this the hard way at some point in our lives--hopefully on the early side. We discover for instance, that an enduring, loving, and trusting relationship cannot be sustained with half-truths and BS. And what’s true for us in healthy relationships is equally true in healthy democracy, which is why I’m willing to accept the label of “hopelessly naive” in wondering if we’ll be able to work our way back to Lincoln.
