Despite being raised to believe that lying is “bad” or that it is sinful, some of the most fond memories that I have come from direct lies told by my elders. Adults frequently lie to children about cartoonized holidays. For example, Santa and the stories of Christmas are filled with lies and half-truths. We see that in ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas there are lies throughout the poem. Henry Livingston wrote “'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.” The myth of Santa may have been created to promote positive behavior in children, but it also presents a very hypocritical argument; those who are aware of the myth of Santa, yet still speak to prove his existence, are lying.
Another way that people make a conscious decision to lie, whether it be to other adults or to children, is through censorship. Censoring something only permits a certain level of truth to be displayed. Therefore, when somebody uses censorship to prove a point, they are only allowing for one section of the story or of the truth to be displayed. Censorship at its extremes may look similar to North Korea’s regime to eliminate threads to and from the outside world. In North Korea exposed: Censorship in the world’s most secretive state, an article published by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Nouran Sedaghat suggests that “North Korean journalists all belong to the ruling party and use their position to consolidate national unity around Kim Jong-un, who took over leadership of the state from his late father in December, 2011. Censorship abounds as the regime limits the ability of North Korean citizens to access outside information. As the BBC reports, radio and television sets in North Korea are given to households and pre-tuned to government stations, while radios must be checked by and registered with the police.” In this scenario, Kim Jong-un is using censorship to disallow information about the outside world to be presented to North Korea. By doing this, the citizens of North Korea are only aware of how things are done where they live. North Korea’s political efforts do not allow for a presentation of choice or of opportunity across the globe, but instead they only allow for a presentation of why North Korea is simply ‘the best’.
Although censorship may be large and dominant, in most circumstances it is not a massive regime. We use censorship consciously or subconsciously everyday. Each time we turn on the television to a news network, we can choose to watch either a democratic or a republican newscast; each presenting the same political matter with different information to prove a point in their defense. We have seen censorship in a political background throughout our existence. In the American Anthropological Association’s Statement on “Race”, we are informed that “Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them.” Public knowledge during both When the Emperor Was Divine and Heart of Darkness did not portray this information. From what was presented to the public by the world’s great leaders during both of the books, being of a minority group to either Europe or America meant that you were a lesser individual in genetic or evolutionary terms. We can see this in Heart of Darkness when Marlow describes the slaves as animals. Conrad shares this when he writes “All their meager breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages.” (p. 13
We continue to see people choose to lie throughout conversations and human relationships for different motives. One of the motives to lie in a relationship is to protect the other person or the other group of people. Marlow is found guilty of lying to Kurtz’s Intended when tells her “The last word he pronounced was - your name.” (p. 71) Truthfully, Kurtz’s last words were “The horror! The horror!” Marlow later goes on to describe why he decided to not tell her the truth when Conrad writes “It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. [...] Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice was due? Hadn’t he only wanted justice? [...] I could not tell her. It would have been too dark.” Marlow made the decision that it was in the best interest of the woman to not be aware of her fiancees last words. He may have decided to lie in this instance to protect the joyful memories that she had of Kurtz. Or possibly, Marlow was attempting to keep the woman in her “beautiful world”, a belief shared by many in 1908. As mentioned in Heart of Darkness, Conrad shares this thought by writing “we must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own.” (p. 44)
Despite our attempts to preserve and make right of our wrongs, many of today’s global issues could be resolved by simply presenting all of an issue or multiple sides to a story at one point. Of course, when we begin to share information with others, emotion and its impacts begin to affect what we share and whom we share with. For every time that we choose to not tell the truth, there is a motive behind it. Whether this motive is to preserve the happiness of another, to destroy somebody, or to simply maintain a majority thought, we commit an act of censorship that may work in the opposite way that we would like it to.
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