Whereas everyone raises their children teaching them to tell the truth while asking questions relating to everyday issues or to benign facts, everyone also expects one’s partner to tell the truth about their activities, relations, friends, passions and any other subjects debated in all the families year-round. The same is expected for the relations with one’s closest friends. This truth is expected the same way when one exchanges with one’s bosses or closest colleagues. One does not expect lies about a pay raise, the organization of holidays within a team or even about strategy at work. It seems justified to be able to feel confident, to trust each other and therefore live peaceful relations where discussions and debates can take place in complete serenity regardless of the subject.

Each of us would be surprised to discover that it is quite different when it is about truth beyond the family or professional framework. Each time I give a conference, I emphasize this quote from the American whistleblower Edward Snowden :

You don’t realize how hard it is to speak the truth to a world of people that don’t realize they are living in a lie.

What can possibly happen in our brains for an absolute necessity, a desire, a will to exchange with truth, exchange, communication, constructive thought, to become silent, fearful, coward or lack courage for matters far more important than oneself and one’s closest environment? Would it be about a conscience problem with variable geometry? Would it be about a lack of time in a society where one is being told and repeated from morning to night that one must be faster, more efficient, more profitable?

By dint of running head down on personal interest objectives, human beings have become the hare of the fable,  they run faster than the tortoise but have unknowingly become the big losers of their own existence. What do we run after on a daily basis? Do we have time to pause, to think? Are the human beings only satisfied with being a consumer and a contemplator of the world in which they evolve?

As such the author and philosopher Rava Bakou informs us about the ‘comfort of the habit’:

The large majority of the people is not willing to think about the meaning of their lives nor to wonder if they really are happy. They like comfort and habit. This is why mainstream media sell them ‘kit thoughts’ which are fine for them. 

This is where he joins Nietzsche’s thoughts who had analyzed that:

Often, people do not want to see, hear and talk about the truth because they do not want their illusions to be destroyed.

To live lives in the comfort of lies, closing one’s eyes on terrorist risks hightlighted for example by #Assange, one might soon be the hostage of the lies of the ones who lie to us. This terrorist risk will shake every one of us individually and collectively; it will therefore bring everybody extremely violently back to reality.

Julian Assange’s children, like any other children in the world, learn on a daily basis what the truth is. Separated from his children since their birth in spite of the fact that he has ‘only’ published information relating to proved and documented war crimes, Assange had spent his life proposing a scientific journalism, as he had liked to explain to us. Who among us can explain to these two little boys why a democracy locks their father, who has spent his whole life denouncing lies and has made the publishing of the truth his profession? How can Max and Gabriel understand the world they live in? Why doesn’t the large majority of the citizens feel concerned by the fate of these two young boys who grow up in a country which brags about being one of the biggest western democracies, the one the reputation of which has been built on the legal notion of the Habeas Corpus?

While the mid-term holidays are ending in France, parents and grandparents enjoying this parenthesis with their children and families, it seemed important to share these thoughts to collectively and individually think about the world in which tomorrow’s generations are growing into, which values we are instilling, and the priorities on which we must take action.

Let’s campaign while remembering this sentence heavy with meaning:

Silence is the greatest persecution.

Blaise Pascal