The Death of Meaning

by

Special to United Methodist Insight | June 25, 2025

It’s not new, this lying thing. It has been around, probably since humanity grasped sentience as we rose to walk on two legs. From hiding food found around primal campfires to concocting conspiratorial fabrications that boggle the mind, lying has been with us throughout our history.

Indeed, I remember growing up in a Christian home where truth-telling was assigned a high value. I would sport my best innocent look as I was asked, “Did you take those cookies?” “No,” I would say with as honest a tone as I could muster. I was, of course, caught and reprimanded as I was sternly told that “truth matters.”

It is true. Truth matters for a lot of reasons. Here are just a few.

Truth establishes trust so commerce may be carried on as goods and services are traded across the globe. If you have twenty tons of grain and sell it under the guise of being forty tons of grain, trust is eroded. Trade suffers.  

Truth makes scientific inquiry and advancement possible. As researchers go about their work and record accurate information about experiences and observations, their records make next steps possible as science creeps forward. But if false data is offered, trust in science declines. Perhaps nowhere is this more painfully clear than the concentrated campaign to discredit vaccinations in our country. People are literally dying of measles now, a disease once almost eradiated. And they are dying because of the lie that vaccines don’t work. Truth matters.

Truth makes society function. As a country based on the rule of law, truth-telling holds people accountable for violating law and commonly held standards of decency. Truth-telling in conversation, in regulations that keep our food healthy and our air clean, come together to make us healthier and safer. But when truth itself is under constant assault, when courts and systems of justice are overwhelmed with lie after lie, justice becomes a punchline in a painfully cruel joke.

Truth makes personal relationships possible. As people and communities come together for mutual benefit and aid, truth-telling is the foundation of trust. If there is no trust … there is no relationship. If someone is discovered cheating on an exam or stepping out on their spouse, the lies told to cover these actions fracture families and businesses and destroy relationships. Who can trust when the nation’s leader literally lies hundreds of times each day?

The necessity of truth finds its way even into our collective sanity. Without a generally accepted standard of truth, the stability and consistency necessary to maintain mental health are eroded. If a person is repeatedly lied to about their worth as an individual, the ability to root growth and healing in truth evaporates because, quite simply, truth seems to no longer exist. Lying robs us of a level of consistency, predictability and a sense that we have at least some control over our lives. Without that sense of autonomy and agency, mental health deteriorates.

One might recall, back in the first Trump regime, his press officer countered accusations against him by saying that there were “alternative facts” that they alone possessed.   

Alternative facts? Indeed. We are in the midst of a focused effort to dismantle truth itself.

The fact of the matter is that in the present neo-fascist state of things, lying is so pervasive, so constant that it has begun to unravel the fabric of meaning itself. Gradually, as lying becomes a given in daily communication, there is little upon which people can base their grasp on reality. If water is dry and deserts are wet, if up is down and down is up, how does one orient themselves in the world? Thus, the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, told often enough, becomes seeded as truth in the uncritical brains of a significant number of American citizens, even though the lie has been proven false in multiple settings.

The flood of lies overwhelms any consensus about meaning, laying waste to the meaning of our democracy.  

The more we acquiesce to and do not resist this ever-thickening web of lies, the more meaning itself slips from our grasp. There are studies that show an alarming growth in mental illness among our young people. Could this be because there is a waning consensus around the truth of things as simple as “vaccines save lives?” What happens to meaning when good people are painted as evil and despicable people are lifted up as godly? What becomes of our common interaction when even the simplest virtues of compassion and empathy are decried as leftist conspiracies?

One effective action we can take in this moment is to insist on truth. Everywhere, every place, every day. Let us do away with the euphemistic term “mis-information,” and call it what it is. Lies. The term “mis-information” makes lying seem like an accident; something not worth mentioning. Let us call out the lies and the liars. Let us hold them accountable.  And let that accountability begin as we ourselves speak truth, insist on truth, live into truth so that this swelling tsunami of lies can be mopped up like the brine from a broken jar of pickles on Aisle 12.

The struggle for truth is the struggle for democracy. More than that, it is the struggle for meaning. Telling truth in a world where lying is commonplace is an act of courage. Living out of truth in the current smog of cynical lying is a heroic act.

It is time for a new generation of heroes to rise up. It’s time for renewed vigilance, for a new discipline of refusing lies wherever they are encountered. As we exercise the practice of truth, real trust, real meaning and real peace will begin root and grow again in our culture.

It's not too late. It’s never too late for truth.

The Rev. Schuyler Rhodes is a retired clergy member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church who now lives in southwest Utah.