“And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance,” – Teach Different with Audre Lorde. When is it okay to suppress the truth?

Transcript

Dan Fouts (00:09)

Hello everybody, welcome to the Teach Different podcast. We have an awesome episode today from a quote from Audrey Lorde, which is really, really deep and profound. Civil rights activists from the 1970s. And we have a lovely guest here from Swaziland in Africa. And Thandeka is her name and she’s gonna be introducing herself in a moment. Mathematics major, very interested in conversations and systems thinking. So her brain fits beautifully into this method that we’ve started here, the teach different method, which as if you’ve tried this before, involves that profound quote, which we’ll start with. And then we’re going to look at the claim of the quote, try to interpret it, say what it means to us, right? Sharing our personal stories that give evidence behind the truth of what this author is trying to say. And then we’re gonna disagree with it. We’re gonna go to the counterclaim and try to see the world from a different perspective. Again, using our personal experiences as evidence. And we like to bring in historical examples if that fits or really anything. The key is your thinking and providing reasoning behind your opinions. And you’re learning to think in a broad way. And that’s what the method is about. And then those questions are inevitably gonna arise when there’s a tension between a claim and a counterclaim. We need to resolve our opinion. What do we really believe? And often that includes asking those really good questions. So we’re gonna try those as well. All right, here we go. Here’s the quote and then our guest will way on and on first after giving a short introduction about, you know, who she is and where she comes from and what she values. All right. “And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance.” “And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance.” Audre Lorde. Thandeka, welcome to the Teach Different podcast. It’s great to see you.

 

Thandeka Malaza (02:37)

Hi Dan, hi Steve. It is lovely to be here. Thank you for having me. My name is Thandeka Malaza as I’ve been introduced on the show. I am a writer, speaker. I laugh a lot when I call myself a mathematician because if you had made me two years ago, I would have told you to please just keep it to yourself. But yes, I’m a mathematician as well. I grew up in Eswatini. I studied at the University of Witwatersrand. And I enjoy conversations around social justice because I think it’s important that we reflect on the human condition and what we stand for. So just to give in maybe a first thought and a first sort of weigh in into the conversation about this quote by Audre Lorde, I think the first thing that comes to mind is what is truth? And when we think about truth on a definitive lens, usually it’s a clear, what can I say, statement and deliverance of things that happened or things that are known. And I think that then when we suppress these things that are actual representations of what happened, then we give them truth, like power beyond endurance. So what that looks like is when you think about power then is you think about impact and the ability to change things. And change can be negative and positive. So I think what comes to mind really is we have a responsibility to know what the truth is and perhaps we also have a responsibility to always stand by it. So those are my initial thoughts around it.

 

Steve Fouts (04:24)

Agreed, always stand by it. This is taking a side and to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance. It’s taking the side of if you try to cover up truth, it will be revealed and it will have probably more power or as much as it did when it was being covered up. It’s quite a statement. And again, I agree. It seems like it’s positive or negative truth. If there’s something that should happen and you’re trying to fight it and you’re trying to keep people from their own happiness, you’re going to make it even more than more happy when it finally comes to be because you’re trying to stop something that actually is true. And then I’ve got some thoughts on the other side as well, but I’m going to save them for the counterclaim.

 

Dan Fouts (05:25)

Yeah, that’s really interesting. My first thoughts go to a personal level where if someone is suppressing a truth about themselves, often it bubbles up in unpredictable ways in different settings. It almost overtakes you if you’re trying to suppress it. And I’m trying to think of a specific example, but just someone’s, personality trait of someone’s. Can you guys think of an example of a personality trait that someone might maybe suppress and then it ends up coming out in again, positive or negative ways?

 

Thandeka Malaza (06:13)

Actually, it’s interesting that we’re speaking about truth because the first thing that came to my mind was a lie and I just thought about how impactful usually that is the effect that you have with the lie is you tell a lie essentially you’re covering up something and it can be a lie about yourself. So you can lie and say I actually grew up in California and you didn’t grow up in California

And then it starts to show that you didn’t grow up in California because someone from California will say something that only people from California say and you won’t get it. And then so in that way, you sort of have a situation where it is going in front of you. Like you said, Dan, it’s something that is now out of your control. And I think suppressing truth also has to do with the desire to control the narrative. So you want people to think you’re from California because you’re trying to imprint a certain image of yourself and so there’s this desire to control. And so I think even on an individual level, it’s like a desire to control how people perceive me. And so if I want to be seen a certain way, I am desiring control over the narrative that I know. So yeah, I think it fits really well because still you’re giving truths power beyond endurance because when people find out ten years later that she’s been lying about California it becomes harder to travel back to the truth.

 

Dan Fouts (07:49)

Thank you.

 

Steve Fouts (07:50)

It’s almost gonna catch up to you. It will catch up to you eventually. People will look at you and say, you know, that person, they’re always trying to be something and say they’re something, but they’re chasing their own tail. You can just sense it in certain people. They’re trying to control too much, right? Whereas people who are comfortable with the truth, who aren’t suppressing it,

seem like they’re in a peace zone. They’re in a natural, comfortable space where there’s just a credibility you feel in them.

 

Dan Fouts (08:36.923)

I’m thinking of another example of, let’s say, grief over a death. And if someone experiences something like that, the truth would be that they’re hurting, they need help, they need support, they’re seeing the world differently, and they’re trying to suppress their feelings of grief. And in doing that, it’s impacting their other relationship in ways that are not easy to see. And so what’s happening is because you’ve suppressed the truth, you’re actually giving it power beyond endurance because now it’s infecting all your other relationships in your life.

 

Steve (09:20)

A really good example, it’s going to make you afraid maybe of losing the person that you’re talking to and you’ll start acting detached. You won’t want to form connections with them. You’ll want to stay kind of at bay and that could be perceived as being aloof, being rude and could be completely misrepresented. But there’s a reason for it. And it’s ‘cause you’re suppressing something. Let me add something. And then I want to hear from you, Thandeka as well. I was thinking about abuse. If you’ve been through abuse and,  you know, you don’t want to admit it. You don’t want to talk about it. You want to try to get over it without having to deal with it directly, whatever that means. Guess what happens in some cases. you start continuing a cycle and you start being that person that you were abused by and then you start abusing. And that’s that power beyond endurance, I think, in some people’s cases where because you haven’t dealt with your own, you end up just continuing it.

 

Thandeka Malaza (10:53)

Absolutely. I once read something about behavior modification just as an add-on there and one of the things that was in the article was behavioral modification doesn’t really work because it doesn’t deal with how you make that decision. So I think that power again is a lot of the times when we speak about power you assume something strong, something with the ability to

break through traditional, perhaps barriers and overcome that. So when people speak about powerful leaders, they speak about people who are able to impact and make a change. So in both the examples that come from the conversation where we’re speaking about abuse on one hand and grief on the other, still it’s an inherited system that you have to acknowledge. And perhaps truth starts there with our refusal to look away. So when I refuse to look away, I can actually say, this is the problem. This is why I end up making the decisions that I’m making. And in order for me to start being able to live with the truth, I must accept it. And I think perhaps that’s a lot of where we fail in our cognitive progression is we’re suppressing the truth because we think it’s the safer option. We think by ignoring that this thing is actually happening, we can somehow maintain our daily lives and we don’t have to then deal with an extra unnecessary emotional burden. I think the process of dealing with the truth can be very uncomfortable.

And I don’t know if you guys have any thoughts on that, like the comfort of a lie versus the bravery of accepting the truth.

 

Steve Fouts (12:46)

There’s at least a perceived comfort when you do it you feel like you’re protecting yourself and You’re covering something up and nobody knows. Right? You have your own world and you have your outer skin and you’re safe you think you’re safe when you first do it.

 

Dan Fouts (13:11)

But if you’re holding something, you’re suppressing the truth, it is manifesting within you. Whether you know it or not, it is impacting your life and the relationships you’re having with other people. You just don’t see it.

 

Steve Fouts (13:33)

Counterclaim. To suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance. Can I kick this off?

 

I was just talking with someone, a friend of mine, who talked about a depression that they have, based on things that have happened, truth, things that in a way they can’t get away from on some level, it’s that bad. And they said that what they do is they go to the beach and they sit there and they look out over the ocean and they find a peace. I’m thinking that that’s a counterclaim because they are suppressing the truth in the sense that they don’t wanna share their feelings with other people, but they carved out a time when they could get distracted or get better.

 

Dan Fouts (14:52)

So are you saying that they’re suppressing the truth, but they’re not giving it power, they’re achieving a state of peace?

 

Steve Fouts (15:00)

Right. Right. I don’t know, what do you think? Is that a good counterclaim?

Is there a way to, I guess this is an essential question, is there a way to suppress the truth and not give the truth power?

 

Thandeka Malaza (15:25)

I think, I was about to say that that made me think a lot and I think what I’ve come to is the intention of suppression and I think that’s interesting.

 

Dan (15:41)

The intention, the intention of suppression.

 

Thandeka Malaza (15:50.192)

Yes. So like your friend wanted to deal with something but they had acknowledged it, so they were aware that there is a problem here. But I can’t talk about it, to Steve yet. I can’t articulate the problem out loud. And perhaps I’m suppressing it for my own greater good. And perhaps the power, maybe there is no power there. I think the intention for suppression is where I think maybe I’d like for us to explore. Unless of course there is a positive benefit to suppression outside of power. Perhaps suppressing the truth can give you peace. I don’t know. I don’t know how far your thoughts go there, Dan.

 

Dan Fouts (16:53)

I’m still thinking on this. I heard everything you said and what Steve said. Sometimes when you suppress the truth, you don’t give it power. It’s almost like you escape it in healthy ways. Just to say the same thing again and again. An escape from an unpleasant truth through suppression is it necessarily giving it power? Showing its weakness, you’re showing that it doesn’t have control over you.

 

Steve Fouts (17:47)

Quick example, if you’re depressed and you know that if you’re around other people, guess what’s going to happen? You’re going to make them depressed. You’re going to be negative Nellie. You’re not going to help them. You’re not going to help you. So you do it, you suppress it, and you make off on your own and you protect other people. I don’t think that’s giving truth, your depression, a power. I think that that is being in control of your state. That maybe you can’t get yourself better overnight, but you can acknowledge who you are and the fact that if you stay around other people right now, you’re gonna make it worse for everybody. So you’re really, you are acknowledging the truth in a way.

 

Thandeka Malaza (18:56)

There’s I think a short story about, not maybe a short story, but what would you do if so maybe if you’re in the middle of a war and the people that are causing the war in your country come knocking at your door and they say hey we’re here and we’re looking for Steve and Dan says Steve is not here when Steve is there. So the question then becomes, is that a truth or a lie? And should it matter? And the answer, think, so beautifully, I read a lot of things and I think sometimes I do too. I never know what’s going to inspire me, but the response that was given on this, it was a tweet. She says, they’re not really asking you for the truth. They’re asking you to betray your friend. And I think perhaps unveiling what truth means and the importance of truth in any given setting is important. Because like for instance, if we’re sitting around a table and we’re celebrating something, perhaps the truth about where you are mentally doesn’t really matter in that moment. It shouldn’t be powerful enough to override everything else. But perhaps the timing is incorrect. So I think if we look at where the truth is coming from, the perspective, what the reality is for who, then we’re able to interrogate the power it has better.

 

Steve Fouts (20:31)

Very contextual, right? And I got another way to say what you just alluded to, Thandeka, is there such thing as a noble lie? Is there such thing as a good lie? And I love your example. Here’s another one. This was actually in Plato’s Republic, my favorite philosopher, talking about if your friend owned a gun or a weapon of some type, and they returned to your house intoxicated or not of sound mind, and they asked you where it was. And you knew where it was. Do you tell them where it was? That’s the truth. Very contextual. I’d say you could argue that you’ve understood the situation. There is a truth greater than the actual question they asked and you being very literal and saying, yes, I do know where it is. Here it is. There’s a much bigger context there that you have to consider.

 

Dan Fouts (21:55)

And so connecting it to the quote then, it’s okay to suppress the truth sometimes.

 

Steve Fouts (22:03)

Yes, it’s good. It’s not just okay. It’s morally right.

 

Dan Fouts (22:06)

Yeah. It’s good. Yeah. Cause this is saying is to give it power. Right. It’s exactly.

 

Immanuel Kant has another famous example. Immanuel Kant, the famous moralist, he wrote the metaphysics of morals and he uses the situation of an intruder coming into your house where you have hidden your family in the closet and the intruder says, where’s your family? And the question is whether you should lie or not in that situation. Now, interestingly enough, Kant argues you should always never, you should always tell the truth. Never suppress the truth because you can only control your intentions of telling the truth. You cannot determine what the consequences are. And so the only, because the only thing you can be certain of is your intentions, you must always tell the truth, which we could debate back and forth, but that’s kind of related to what we’re talking about here.

 

Steve Fouts (23:23)

If Kant were here, I would say I’m glad I’m not in his family.

 

Dan Fouts (23:27)

Yeah, I would agree. All of my students think he’s a little bit crazy on that one.

 

Thandeka Malaza (23:37)

That is hilarious.

 

Steve Fouts (23:44)

Well, I don’t know, I’m… Go ahead, go ahead.

 

Thandeka Malaza (23:47)

No, I was just about to say that it’s interesting because when you think about suppressing the truth, a lot of the time we just think truth is good. And truth is not always good. It’s not always good for someone to know something at a particular point in time. But I also think that we run the danger here of weaponization of that statement. And I think we go back again to what philosophy is always about is testing the conditionality to say even if it’s argued that you cannot control the outcome in some instances are you able to choose for yourself whether you tell the truth or not because it’s very difficult to say my family’s in the closet when someone’s carrying a weapon and you have no idea what the intentions are with the weapon so I guess though you also run the risk that maybe they’re there to save your family And you lying about where your family is might mean you’re putting them in even a greater precarious situation because of the limit of truth. So I think we don’t know everything. And I think that’s why sometimes we struggle so much because we think that the knowledge we have allows us to be absolute and know the difference between good and bad and pass judgment when in truth we can barely see past our noses. And this continuous interrogation of what truth is expands our minds. My mind is being expanded right now. So I think to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance is a huge statement that I think we’ve been trying to break apart like an elephant. But it’s interesting.

 

Steve Fouts (25:38)

There’s a lot to this. You made me think of, I guess I’m flipping back to the claim, but I don’t know where this is flipping actually, because you can acknowledge that lying, not telling the truth is appropriate in some settings and it can save people and keep people safe that you care about. And it can actually be the morally right thing to do. You know, so don’t think you have to tell the truth all the time. Okay, let’s be contextual, right? But then there are people that will take that literally and say, I’m never going to tell the truth. I’m going to make up whatever I need to make up at any point. I’m going to create my own reality. And that reality is going to be repeated again and again. I’m gonna give the same lie again and again and again. I’m gonna make truth.

I don’t know. That’s like, that’s a power as well. I don’t think the truth always comes creeping back to say, you were lying. Now it’s gonna be revealed that you’re lying. Well, I hope that’s true, especially if someone is ill intent, right? And they’re doing it to manipulate people, not a noble lie, but just lies and lies and lies for their own self-serving purposes. I don’t know if it gives truth power if you lie enough. I think you make your own reality and it’s scary.

 

Dan Fouts (27:30)

I think it depends if it’s, I’m moving to social media right now. If there’s so much lying on social media, so much exaggeration and hyperbole, maybe what that is doing is giving truth a power beyond endurance in that it’s so dramatic and so much hyperbole and so much exaggeration that it’s causing within the population that’s receiving this over time a growing desire to fight it. That you’re creating a beast that wants to defeat these lies ultimately. Maybe the suppression is what’s causing a larger power in reaction to it. I’m thinking like, if you think of like revolutionaries in history, how is it that countries go through Well, the American Revolution. If you think of the early Americans feeling like their truth was being suppressed by England over time, what was happening underneath all this was a recognition that something needed to be done and then ultimately the revolution. So that gave power beyond endurance, the way in which they were treated. Historically, if you think of revolutions, I think you can connect this.

 

Steve Fouts (29:09)

And you’re back to the claim. They tried to suppress the early settlers in America and look what they created. Their own government. You know, and they completely broke.

 

Thandeka Malaza (29:29)

Absolutely, and I think that ties so beautifully with the idea that Steve Biko has, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Steve Biko, but also a civil rights activist in South Africa. So this idea of you might be able to kill the revolutionary, but you can never kill an idea whose time has arrived. So that’s the truth, you know. And if you think about Newton’s laws of physics, to say that for every force, there must be an equal and opposite reaction to that force. So if the force is a lie, there must be an equal force, which is the truth, in order to balance that out. It’s like yin-yang. You find the balance. And even if you want to control a narrative so terribly, so badly, eventually it catches up to you. Not just even on an individual level, but on a social level, a political level, a consciousness level, eventually that lie will be revealed and the truth will endure. So I think in the context that Audre Lorde exists in, that’s exactly what she’s trying to communicate.

 

Steve Fouts (30:36)

That’s really good. You just got me hopeful.

 

Dan Fouts (30:40)

Yeah, that’s great. I have to do another historical example in American history.

 

Steve Fouts (30:45)

I was gonna do one too.

 

Dan Fouts (30:46)

With American slavery, you think of the absolute suppression of truth of the dehumanizing nature of slavery over time led to things like the Underground Railroad. That the suppression of the truth led to a power of resistance, a movement that was so strong in light of the injustices. This could be a great quote in a US history class.

 

Steve Fouts (31:18)

Do you know what the Underground Railroad is, Thandeka?

 

Thandeka Malaza (31:24)

I’ve seen reference to it in Harriet Tubman’s film.

 

Steve Fouts (31:29)

There you go. So it was a network that was established in different states to hide runaway slaves, right? And what a great example, Dan, with African Americans. I mean if you want to think about justice and the the lie that started What the truth would look like someday I would say the truth will look like African Americans in leadership of this country. Is there a better sense of justice? Formerly demeaned as human beings, now they’re relied on to take the society forward. And we have to talk about Nelson Mandela, if you wanna talk about a, my goodness, 26 years in prison or what have you, think of him putting his fist up when he got out and that truth that was suppressed. I mean, that was, that gave him power. That’s another example.

 

Thandeka Malaza (32:41)

I absolutely agree. I’m also reading, sorry, Thomas Sankara and you know, one of the things that he alludes to is how lies will make people make decisions that don’t serve the interests of many. So for instance, if you tell a narrative in a certain specific way, and you are responsible for that narrative and there’s a trust in you to deliver that narrative and you contort it in a way, you’re responsible for the decisions that people make based on the integrity of your word. And I think what starts revolutions and what starts resistance movements is the lie of, you know, resources, the lie of considering me as another human, the lie of, you know, it’s as if you’re saying one thing, but you’re treating me in a very different way. And then I have to interrogate then the distance between the two to find that maybe you’re actually lying to me. And because you’re lying to me and there’s so much injustice, I feel as though I have to react. And that reaction is what then is going to expose my narrative to make yours less powerful, you know.

 

Steve Fouts (34:10)

You gave me your power by mistreating me. Now I have it. Essential questions. I already threw a couple out. Noble lie. Is there an appropriate time for noble lies? That was one of them.

 

Dan Fouts (34:33)

How do I know when I should suppress the truth? Should I ever suppress the truth? There’s so many variations of that.

 

Thandeka Malaza (34:54)

How do I know when I should suppress the truth?

 

Dan Fouts (35:00)

Love it.

 

Thandeka Malaza (35:02)

Yeah, that is a very powerful question. I think that’s a question that people will, we can sit in a good 10 minutes of silence trying to unpack. Someone else can say whenever I feel as though my autonomy is threatened, then I should lie. But also perhaps it also goes back to values. What do I value the most? And if I value something, then I will lie for it, And is that lie sustainable? Maybe it doesn’t have to be. Maybe it just has to get me out of a quick fix. So I think if you gave us enough time to come up with the metric, we probably would. But also, it’s so tricky because lies, like we said, are so linked to wanting to control the narrative. So perhaps knowing the intent of that lie, why are you telling this lie? Are you telling this lie to protect your children, your students? Then sure, then maybe that’s a good lie. But are you telling this lie so you can get away with stealing $20 and not telling anyone? Then you should probably tell the truth. So I think it’s a bit of a slippery slope because someone can say they were just protecting themselves by lying about that. But also what are the limits then? So it’s a very, swing, I think.

 

Steve Fouts (36:24)

I love how you said that. I’m gonna argue that the answer to the question or the way I would answer the question, how do you know when to suppress the truth is that number one, first and foremost, get your mirror out, look at yourself, think about your intentions. Number one. If you’re good and you’re honest, be fine. You can suppress the truth. Tell the lie you need to tell. But if you’re, you know, looking for 20 bucks or want to do this or that, and you know it’s just kind of a selfish thing, you gotta check yourself. So it is intent, Thandeka. That’s what I would say. That’s how I would answer it. That’s the number one priority criteria when you ask yourself, how do I know when to suppress the truth?

 

Dan Fouts (37:28)

And then you have to dig even deeper, which we don’t have to answer now and say, what is the right intention to have? Because there’s all kinds of intentions and you’d have to compare those on a continuum as well. I’m teaching ethics.

 

Steve Fouts (37:46)

Well, we don’t have time for that.

 

Dan Fouts (37:47)

No, I know. Well, great. This has been, this has been a really fun, heavy in a good way.

conversation. Like this really makes you think about a lot of things. I mean, Audre Lorde, “and to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance.” Well, we endured this conversation. It wasn’t easy, but we endured it. Thandeka, thank you so much for being our guest. Your work is fantastic. And it was a pleasure having a conversation with you today.

 

Thandeka Malaza (38:29)

Dan, thank you so much. Steve, thank you as well. I think I’ve had so much fun just because I really thought about it today. I think the first time I saw it, I loved it because I said the truth will set you free and the truth will set itself free. But thinking about the limits and the conditionality, I think, has made me realize a lot about even writing about issues around the truth and what it means for narratives. So I think it’s been a very beautiful conversation. I’ve learned a lot and thank you for having me.

 

Steve Fouts (39:05)

Thank you. It’s such a pleasure. We got to do it again.

 

Dan (39:07)

Thank you.