“What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.” Francis Bacon thus began his meditation on the role of misinformation in Elizabethan and Jacobean society in his essay, “Of Truth,” published 400 years ago. His message to his readers appears towards the end of the essay: “There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious.” Earlier in the essay, he noted that some men possess “a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.”

The academic tradition remembers Bacon as the English philosopher whose commitment to empiricism helped to usher in the glorious age of science that spawned Newton and everything that followed. It made the industrial revolution possible, before complicating the picture in the 20th century with the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Empirical “truth” enjoyed its heyday for three centuries before being called into question by the confounding equations that led new generations of scientists to question even whether particles exist. For the moment, no empirical procedure exists for settling that question.

Bacon, the moonlighting philosopher, had a day job. It consisted in part of reinforcing Queen Elizabeth’s and then King James’s surveillance state. In 1592, he established a private foreign spy network to rival his cousin Robert Cecil’s official state apparatus. As Devil’s Advocate, I would maintain that there’s no reason to suspect that Bacon’s operations were very different from how intelligence operations work today. Not so long ago, one contemporary former CIA director, Mike Pompeo, told the world: “At the CIA we lied, cheated and stole,” a confession greeted by spontaneous, enthusiastic applause by his audience.

Over the past decade, we have seen an ever-amplified outcry against the prevalence of disinformation and misinformation in our contemporary culture. Politicians blame opposing politicians and broadcast media for spreading “fake news” (translation: anything that is critical of their own actions, narratives or beliefs). Then all decent people seemed to agree the main source was social media. This spawned a debate about whether social media shouldn’t be praised for exposing the disinformation propagated by broadcast media. More recently, the preferred culprit is AI, not so much because of the algorithm’s propensity for hallucinations but for the obvious deception, managed and executed by human perpetrators, of deepfakes.

“All power centers in human history lie. Knowing that they are lying does not tell you the truth, however. Meaning knowing that Oswald did not act alone as a shooter from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, if he was a shooter at all, knowing that does not tell you who was the shooter. So often the best we can get in our skepticism is to know that we are not being told the truth.”

Polonius wasn’t just a bumbling busybody, as he is often represented, but rather the inveterate professional spy who, to please an illegitimate king, unwittingly provoked the tragic outcome of the play. The fatalities began with the chief spook’s own death in Act III, pierced by Hamlet’s sword as he was hiding behind an arras to spy on the prince’s conversation with his mother. It continued in Act IV with the madness and suicide of his daughter Ophelia and the death of his son Laertes by his own poison-tipped sword in a rigged duel in Act V. Shakespeare may have been thinking of Bacon, amongst others, when composing the role of Polonius.

But the reality we need to confront is not so much Francis Bacon’s hypocrisy as a thinker committed to the “truth.” Instead, it’s the fact, as true today as in the 17th century, that the real culprit is De Becker’s power centers and their “natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.”

Most people today sense that governments are prone to lying. Distrust of government in the US has never been greater. Especially when they are engaged in war. It may be perversely true that one of the reasons today’s leaders, in Europe as in the US, appear so eager not only to go to war, but also to prolong wars they didn’t start is that conflict provides an opportunity to indulge what Bacon called their “love of the lie.” Propaganda never prospers more than in times of open conflict, when the democratic right of the public to have access to and weigh the factors behind the conflict disappears in the name of national security. How many times have we heard pointed critical remarks of Western militarism dismissed as “Putin talking points?”

Governments lie, but they also incite others to buy into their lies, in education and the media. Pseudo-historians who create hagiographies of national heroes — think of Pastor Weems who, in the early 19th century, invented the apocryphal story of the young George Washington and the cherry tree — are capable of implanting enduring myths contrary to reality in the minds of an entire population. Educators and the media, through commission or omission, happily and often unwittingly “simply the truth” in ways that completely misrepresent not only the intentions of the actors but also — and this is the point — conceal the effects.

Last week’s Congressional hearing dedicated to discovering the truth about the CIA’s notorious MK-Ultra program briefly provided a telling example. Most of us grew up with the conviction that the massively significant program known as the Marshall Plan was not just a daring and successful initiative permitting the reconstruction of Europe after the devastation of World War II. We remember it as a morally noble act demonstrating the spontaneous generosity of the United States, always ready to share the fruits of its prosperity with its friends and allies. One of its stated aims was literally to rescue Western civilization (which, in one of its details, included preserving the health of the tobacco industry).

Understanding that the full story of MK-Ultra has been carefully hidden from the public, Congresswoman Luna interviewed two key witnesses. A third, the one recommended by Democrats, admitted she had no expertise in the matter under discussion. She was there simply to complain about the Trump administration’s defunding of the National Institutes of Health! One of the well-informed witnesses, Dr. Stephen Kinzer at one point reminded the public of what historians had long known to be true, but which educational textbooks and the media have consistently suppressed. “We now know,” Kinzer revealed, “that 5% of all the money appropriated for the Marshall Plan was diverted for covert activities. A number of US agencies were used as cover.”

What covert operations was that massive amount of money used for? Among other things, Operation Gladio in Italy that sought out “stay-behinds,” fascists and neo-fascists who could be mobilized for many things including terrorist acts and manipulating democratic elections: the kind of thing that could help the US put and keep in place governments that understood the real stakes of democracy, even if the local populations preferred other solutions. MK-Ultra didn’t need Marshall Plan funding. Instead, it used unvouchered CIA funds. The program, approved in 1953 by CIA Director Allen Dulles, was run out of the Technical Services Staff, which operated under special procedures allowing it to fund research without signing the contracts normally required by the agency.

If Bacon had lived in the US in the wake of World War II, given the strength of his intellect (and the apparent weakness of his moral fiber), he would easily have obtained all the funding needed to promote the cause of his brand of empirical science. And that, my friends, is “the Truth.”

I’ll leave the concluding thought to Dr. Kinzer, who explains why the truth is so elusive.

“There’s a reason why conspiracy theories are so widespread in America. It has to do with the dissociation between what we say we are and do and what we really are and do. It has become more and more clear to more and more people. They’re suspicious of nefarious dealings by the US and they’re also suspicious of other things that aren’t nefarious at all. But there’s just this mentality that is created by the covert sphere and that’s what makes people realize that things that used to seem really far-fetched are not so far-fetched after all.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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