Confidence that something is true is fundamentally important for the survival of human beings. If we were unable to consider that what others tell us is either true or false, society would not be possible.
â Umberto Eco, Inventing the Enemy: Essays
I was taken with this quote last week by the now departed but perhaps most erudite man of the previous century, Umberto Eco. Eco was said to have two libraries in Italy that contained around 50,000 volumes. And many of these books were of a rare variety that is relatively unknown. According to a small passage in the book by Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from DisorÂder, Eco would separate people who visited him into two categories. The first category was those that asked, âHow many of these books have you read?â The other, and small minority of the visitors, wondered, âHow many of these books are still unread?â Eco understood a rare thing about knowledge and information: unread books are the most valuable.
I mostly work and tend to focus on people or instiÂtutions that are not telling the truth, or who are trying to conceal their true motivations from the rest of this small community. Many people have hypothesized that the job of the press is to hold those with power accountable for their actions. While I do think that is a big part of the job, I am often struck by how the press is not just a lie detector, but it highlights when our government institutions are working correctly. More importantly, the public seems to understand when an institution is not functioning properly, even if it takes time for that realization to be widely felt.
What draws me to the opening quote from Eco is that he hits on a core foundation of how society works; that we mostly trust what others tell us is true. While trusting other humans we meet is nice for day-to-day interactions, truth does not just magically shine a light on us as a society. As the father of modern Liberal Conservatism, Edmund Burke recognized in the 1700s that it is our institutions that allow for the processes of getting at the truth to be passed down from one generation to the next. Eco had a fascination with getting to the core of what âtruthâ was, and he spent most of his career studying not only what âtruthâ is, but his popÂular fiction novels were almost all about those members of society who enjoyed telling and spreading untruths.
The most powerful institution for getting at the truth and weeding out all the methods of spreading lies and untruths is, of course, our court system. Our system of justice harÂkens back 337 years to the Glorious Revolution in England of 1668 with the overthrow of King James II and the establishment of William III and Mary II as joint monarchs. It was a bloodless revolution that led to a constitutional monarchy, shifting power from the king to Parliament. That period is often credited with the creation of the Common Law, where a group of representatives, rather than a single person, decided the laws that governed our society. Those foundational laws are the backbone of liberalism and are still with us today in the little Custer County Courtroom.
However, the institutions are only as good as the curÂrent members, who comprise the legal and law enforceÂment institutions. If the members of the institution start to hold loyalty to a particular party or leader above truth, the institution stops functioning.
For our society to function, the public must have a cerÂtain level of confidence that the institutions that serve each personâs liberty are functioning. Functioning is a messy descriptor here because human institutions do not function the same way as a car engine does. When car engines are not functioning, it becomes pretty apparent that something is wrong since the engine either does not run at all or runs poorly. However, with institutions, a wider view is required to ascertain if things are performing correctly.
In my mind, there are two main ways to see if an instiÂtution is functioning properly. Above all else, an institution should be able to get to the truth eventually through the rules and processes its members engage in when faced with dilemmas. Second, an institution should be able to learn from mistakes by implementing new regulations or processes that will help future members of the institution navigate and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
I do not demand that institutions be perfect or flawless when we run stories on them. Getting at the truth after all is a messy, slow, and deliberate process. However, if one of the two main pillars, the ability to ascertain the truth and learn from mistakes, is consistently in doubt, then I know something is awry in the internal working of the current people running the institution.
As noted in the Tribune on page three of this weekâs edition, some members of the Custer County Sheriffâs Office have a history of holding loyalty and obedience to certain leaders, such as former District Attorney Linda Stanley, above the pursuit of the truth. In the past, the Custer County Sheriff, Rich Smith, seemed to hold loyalty to certain political leaders in the region over the truth of what was actually taking place.
While it is clear to me at this point that the Sheriffâs Office is struggling to maintain systems of getting at the truth, I am not yet sure it cannot learn in the future. Smith is only two years into being Sheriff, and his experience at the State Patrol did not translate very well into running a Sheriffâs Office. However, he also had no real support from the former District Attorney, and the overall justice system in the region was set back years due to Stanleyâs blinding incompetence, even though she fooled a majority of the voters in the region to elect her over qualified candidates.
We do have a District Attorney, Jeff Lindsey who underÂstands the near sacral nature of the courts and the legal process, so I am interested to watch if the Sheriffâs Office learns from the lessons that the court is meting out on his staff for their mistakes, or he and his staff will shrink from the truth and pretend it is the rest of the world, and not them, who are wrong.
While I have focused here on the Sheriffâs Office, many of our other governing institutions, such as the Custer County School Board, the Town of Westcliffe Board of Trustees, and Round Mountain Water and Sanitation DisÂtrict, have all faced tests on whether truth can rise to the surface. Only time will tell if these organizations can, in the language of the United States Marine Corps, âimprovise, adapt, and overcome.â
The survival of our institutions depends on their ability to continue the tradition of building trust through transparÂent processes.
â Opinon by Jordan Hedberg
