After the Truth (Book One)

One

It is happening again. Covid-19 was a warning. This time it will be worse, far worse.

We should have learned our lesson, but we did not. All we learned was to make the lies more thorough.

How do I save civilization? How do I save a civilization that does not seem to want saving? Tomorrow, I have twenty-eight minutes to try and save us all.

Is that hyperbole? Is that a lie?

It is neither. And that is terrifying.

Tomorrow morning, I must stand upon the rostrum in the UN General Assembly building in New York and address a sea of delegates. With my allotted twenty-eight minutes I must convince many of the world's leaders and dignitaries that in this fractured world we live in, there is one single danger we all face. My biggest concern is I am not a high-profile world leader. I am not a skilled politician. I am a scientist, a doctor.

Ambition does not drive me to take the rostrum. It is the urgency of the distressing facts I have discovered that made me accept the invitation to speak. A few have asked me to try and convince the many.

I will speak only facts and the truth as I describe the coming danger. But do my audience want to listen to the truth? Can they even hear it?

When I speak tomorrow, I will not be "bending of the truth", or be "economical with the truth", or "tell less than the truth" (or more than the truth?). I will not "exaggerate the truth", "misspeak a truth", "twist the truth", "stretch the truth", "spin the truth", or even "slightly distort the truth".

Neither will I be "accidently inaccurate". Or "factually shaky". Neither will I make an "incorrect promise", a "terminological in-exactitude", "inadvertently make a false representation", or "make a factual shortcut". I will not give "alternative facts" or "put a positive construction" on my words.

If I were someone else, I might be "a little misleading", "truthfully challenged, or "say an untruth", or otherwise be "unreliable" with my statements.

My audience, it concerns me, are used to twisting and contorting the truth. They use whatever alternative facts and false representation they can to feed their supporters and bludgeon their opponents. In such a sea of "factual shortcuts" and untruths, will my real facts and the truth just be swamped, drown and sink to the abyss without trace?

It is an apocryphal story that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow, but such an analogy seems to me a factor in the danger we all now face. One of our biggest failures in the Information Age is how much time and capital is spent creatively renaming lies.

How can facts and the truth compete with such a cacophony of untruths? The truth is inconvenient, slow, cumbersome, and doesn't return enough power or money.

Lying is quicker and easier.

How then can I make myself heard when I speak? I am trying to write down here notes that will help guide and focus me tomorrow. However, I keep coming back to a frightening reality: The truth was a seasonal trend, and it is now out of fashion.

What then comes after truth? What will come after my speech?

With what derogatory epithets and hashtags will I be branded? Is that what has replaced truth and facts: Lies and labels?

We are all connected, all the time, bombarded with a torrent of words every nanosecond, but which are truths, and which are lies?

Is it easier not to care? It was, but not now.

Those shouting the loudest fill the ocean of lies the quickest and everyone else is left drowning in the polluted, stagnant sea.

Will my voice be too weak?

Surely it cannot be. My truth is built upon clear facts. But how do I pour clear water into the polluted pool without it being lost?

I will not have time tomorrow to detail every aspect of my investigations, but I must recall the most important discoveries and dangerous facts I have learnt. I must then clearly show the logic of what is to come if we do not change.

One of the last truths I will declare is to announce that I have become infected by the pathogen that is such a danger. I am already a victim of what is happening. If I am careful it will not cost me my life, but I fear it will cost me my family.

There is no alternative, though. The situation is almost beyond control. We all have a narrow window of opportunity to act and survive, but only if those leaders listening to me tomorrow collectively take responsibility and act fast.

I have already spoken to some who will be in my audience tomorrow. Many of them simply want to know ways to stop the spread of the infection that has consumed me. That will not work, not in today's world. No drugs or quarantines can stop this disease. Only a fundamental change will eradicate the waiting disaster of the infection.

What I will propose tomorrow is simple, it is common sense. But I fear it will be yet another tragedy of our time that it will be received as such an abhorrent idea.

The other way is the end of us all.

Or is it the truth that the end has already begun? I hope that truth is a lie.