There Are Four Lights: Truth Power and the Courage to See

There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the captain is abducted held by an enemy  force. He’s in a dark room with one man who turns on 4 overhead spotlights and asks Captain Picard how many  lights he sees. Picard says there are 4 lights. The captor says, “There are 5 lights.” Picard, again says, “There are  4 lights.” He’s then stripped and hung up by his wrists. He’s denied food and sleep. The captor returns periodically  to ask Picard how many lights there are. They aren’t looking for information about the fleet or anything else. They  just want him to see 5 lights.  

There’s a similar story in Orwell’s 1984, holding up 4 fingers, requiring the protagonist, Winston, to say  there are 5. In that story, after torturing him, Winston says there are 5 fingers to make the pain stop. It doesn’t  stop. Saying there are 5 isn’t the point. He has to actually see 5 fingers when only 4 are shown. 

The captain in the Star Trek story suffers much pain, but he keeps yelling that there are 4 lights. He’s  promised a good life, a gentle life, if only he can acknowledge that there are 5 lights, but in his suffering, he keeps  repeating, “There. Are. Four. Lights.” He’s rescued, and in the final scene he’s with a therapist, who is also a  good friend. To her he says: 

“At the end, he gave me a choice – between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was say that  I could see five lights, when in fact there were only four.”  

The friend says, “You didn’t say it?” 

He responds, “No, but I was going to. I would have said anything at all, but more than that- I believed I  could see five lights.” 

It’s not that he was willing to speak the lie. It’s that he believed it.  

When the same test is administered in the book 1984, Orwell tells us: 

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential  command.” 

The danger is not that the subjects would lie. The danger is that they would believe it. Power is not in the  facts. Power lies with the people who define reality. 

We are living in a moment when reality is beginning to fracture under the weight of so many lies. We are  in danger of losing the truth. 

That statement is so bold, it might sound hyperbolic. After all, my life looks much like it did a year ago.  I’m guessing your lives do too. School is still in session. Movies are playing in theatres. Contracts are still binding.  Things appear to be pretty normal.  

I think Renee Good’s life looked and felt pretty normal too. She was in her neighborhood, doing what she  and her neighbors do. When ICE comes around, they blow whistles as a warning sign. They yell and witness, and  when she had to leave to…I don’t know what – run errands? Get her kids? She got in her car to do that. She didn’t  know that she had crossed into a different world where neither law nor human decency exist. She was shot by an  officer of the state right there in her Honda Pilot.  

No one could come to her aid. She was an enemy of the state, a terrorist, as the Party has confirmed, and  the laws of our Constitutional Republic didn’t apply. 

And when that happened, many people thought the chaos in Minneapolis would stop. Obviously, things  are out of control and the rule of law will kick in. 

It didn’t. 17 days later Alex Pretti, after trying to help a woman to her feet who’d been pushed to the  ground, was tackled and then shot at least 10 times.  

Ernst Fraenkel, the German political sociologist, described his experience in Nazi Germany as a tale of  two nations. It’s what he called The Dual State. In the Normative State, things operate as expected with a  governmental system that abides established laws and norms. In the Prerogative State, which runs parallel to the  Normative State, often on the same streets, there’s a system of arbitrary power that is dictated by the executive  who has unchecked authority to target enemies of the state.

The existence of the Normative State lulls most people into passivity. Everything Is Fine. They don’t have  to care about whatever chaos might be happening elsewhere. In fact, it’s not happening. There are reasons for it  that fit into our shared understanding of the world. There’s nothing to see here, just move it along. 

This concept of two worlds isn’t entirely new here in the US, or in most nations. There are often two sets  of laws – one for the majority, and one for an oppressed minority. Or, one set of laws that stands for most but is  applied randomly for others. 

Every mother of a Black child knows this too well. There have been, from our founding, two nations under  God, quite divisible. 

I’m not going to suggest, though, that something hasn’t changed. Instead of seeing this through the lens  of common experience, we need to be willing to state out loud that we see the fractured nation, we see the work  of The Party. Things are not normal and we know it. There are Four Lights. 

Part of what makes this moment more dangerous is the scale and the institutionalization of the rewriting  of the facts. The President of the United States, the American Cabinet, most of the Executive Branch, and the  majority of both the Congress and the Supreme Court are collaborators in perpetrating the Lie.  

And the Lie is simple. There are enemies in our nation trying to bring us down. We have to do everything  we can to get rid of them so we can be safe and happy again.  

What we have is a massive othering that includes everyone in this country who wasn’t born here, every  transgender person, every non-binary person, every gay, lesbian or bisexual person, every doctor who offers  reproductive health care or vaccines, every lawyer who defends any of these people, every protestor or resistor or  worker for human or civil rights, and now, one year in, every Democrat. Each group has been named an Enemy  of the State, a danger to the nation, people who have to be eliminated. 

You’d think this would be more alarming, but isn’t because even those of labelled “enemies” are living  in the Normative State. We can see the Prerogative State from where we sit, but we haven’t crossed the line yet. While some people are being sent to detention centers where there is very little food and no bathrooms,  where children are existing in a state of heightened trauma, where people are being carted off to countries they’ve  never been to and where they cannot be found, most of us are living in a Normative State where our lives are still  governed by rules, where permits and licenses are processed, where elections occur on schedule and markets and  trains and storms are all still relatively predictable.  

This experience is necessary. It keeps us relatively passive. It creates an experience of continuity and  stabilizes the country, dampening our resistance. The last words Renee Good said were. “Dude, I’m not even mad  at you.”  

She wasn’t. She was living in a Normative State where ICE agents behave badly and good people blow  whistles. It is not unusual or somehow outside the frame of traditional American life. The dual state doesn’t announce itself. It’s a reality that is denied by what Orwell calls – and I will call – The Party. Most people start out in the Normative State and get shifted into the Prerogative State without knowing  it. In both states, the law doesn’t stand on its own. It is coopted by the Party. It’s not that the nation is lawless, but  that the law becomes executive property, applied haphazardly, irresponsibly, and to the benefit of those in power. Truth is also coopted. Federal officials offer different accounts, alter or deny eyewitness testimony, retell  the story to their benefit. They alter images, create AI video, flood the zone with entirely false “proof” designed  for maximum emotional impact. And the people believe them. That was a gun. She was running him over. They  are terrorists. There are 5 lights. 

Some of you have been asking me if we can get out of this without a war? This seems to be an ongoing  wonder. The answer is Yes. It has been done. Spain did it after Franco. Chile did it after Pinochet. South Africa  did it. So did South Korea. Frankly, the US did it too after McCarthy, and each time a country pushes through  authoritarianism, they find themselves more deeply committed to democratic systems than when they started.  

It hasn’t ever happened, though, when the people waited for norms to snap back on their own, or because  some election fixed everything, or because the courts stepped in and saved democracy. It ended because the people  engaged both mass protest, and deep organizing; spoke truth to each other, partnered with each other, refusing the  Big Lie, and avoiding collective amnesia in the quiet times, which I might suggest is what happened between the  two Trump terms. 

So, back we go to Picard and Winston, both tortured and convinced that what they could see and hear was  not true, that the Party, alone, is the arbiter of Truth. How did they recover?

Here I turn to Hannah Arendt who tells us that authoritarianism doesn’t begin by terrorizing the people; it  begins with their loneliness. Before our systems break, before we are willing to believe The Lie, we are isolated  and alone.  

We know this. The epidemic of loneliness we’ve been talking about since the pandemic is real and even  just claiming ourselves victims of it can feel shaming. But, loneliness isn’t just a private sorrow. It’s a political  condition. Media – both mass media and social media – replaces lived experience. We sit alone in our homes,  celebrating nothing, sharing nothing, feeling like there’s something happening somewhere and we aren’t part of  it. 

We turn to online spaces where outrage replaces judgement, where we get lost in torrents of images that  fill our brains and our bodies, leaving us feeling worse – lonelier, angrier, sadder. 

And we connect with others – read their comments, agree with snippets of thought, add our own fury to  the whirlwind. And others agree. And we give in to the rising tornado, letting it blow us into whatever groups  might help us feel connected, less alone, more wanted and seen and safe.  

Belonging replaces truth. We don’t care how many lights there are. If you say there are 5, that’s good with  me. 

When we are isolated, we feel disempowered and unmoored. Propaganda works not because people are  stupid. It works because people are lonely.  

Winston, once he’s released and goes back into the world, continues to suffer. He is profoundly alone.  Memory is no longer shared. He cannot test his perceptions against others. Language doesn’t stabilize meaning.  The common world has dissolved for him, making his reality only what others say it is.  

Picard, on the other hand, recovers. He returns to his friends. He is seen and heard and trusted. He  remembers that there were only 4 lights.  

The greatest acts of resistance are found in the restoration of communities where truth can be spoken and  believed.  

My dear friends, my people, my community, this is what we do. This is who we are. We gather each other  up. I believe your Truth and you believe mine. When you tell me of your experience in the world, I listen, I see  and hear and I remember. Andrea Gibson tells us, “Even when truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is.”  

In a time defined by the Big Lie, a time saturated in deceit, when bearing public witness is done at the risk  of death, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. 

Together, fending off the rising waters of loneliness, the pull of social and mass media, and the fear of  crossing into the prerogative state, holding fast to one another, we will howl with our final breath… There. Are. Four. Lights.