When fake becomes culture
Dr. Michel E. Abs
Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches
Man invents in his daily life methods of dealing and patterns of behavior that he adopts in managing his life affairs in order to secure his interests and to preserve his social, economic, political and other achievements.
They are the mechanisms of self-preservation and self-defense. Psychology has called them "defense mechanisms", a concept that has become one of the axioms of psychology and there is no controversy around it, as it spread even among non-specialists and people interpret many behaviors as falling within this concept.
But the human mind has invented, since ancient times, a means of dealing with others, which has taken various forms historically and has become part of human culture: falsehood.
Falsehood is not only a pattern of behavior or a means of dealing needed by those who have abandoned the values of honesty and transparency and have a lot to hide from people, in order to avoid shame or accountability, or both. Rather, it has become rooted in ways of thinking and reactions.
Untruthful behavior spreads among people, the spread of wildfire, boosted by means of communication that are no longer able to control what is published through them after the information revolution has become at its peak, and what is to come is greater.
Through the communication networks, which convey to us the patterns of behavior that were not taken into account, people learned about falsity and took pleasure in it, as they found in it many things that they do not accept. So they adopted it as pattern of social behavior which was generalized to large segments of human society which was transformed into a society of fake despite the existence of large numbers of honest people with a high degree of transparency.
Fake people live among us every day, flatter us and false-praise us. They greet us while they would like us to be wiped from the face of the world, hug us with a dagger in their hand, and make us hear sweet-talk while they curse us in secret.
False people adopt wooden expressions that are suitable for every time and place, expressions that have lost their meaning because they have become trite, thinking - or whishing - that they can pass their approaches that do not deceive anyone.
The falsifiers justify every shortcoming and vice by giving it a meaning and a legitimacy that does not exist except in their sick imagination. They philosophize the evils they commit and strive to defend them in order to convince themselves before convincing others. They think that by convincing themselves, they convince others.
The paradox of bad time is that this falsehood has become a culture and has positioned itself in modern society, striking the system of values and turning man into a creature that enslaves himself when he convinces himself that this falsehood is the truth.
It is a new era of slavery where man worships his interests by submitting to the requirements of falsehood and hypocrisy. This is a starting point for false relationships between people, through which each person manipulates the feelings of the other, and social life becomes a sea of malice in which the honorable are lost and called naive.
In such a social context, few are those who maintain their basic ideals, and they walk without hope or expectation in a corrupt social life that attracts weak souls and prevents them from walking towards the light and towards the truth whose knowledge is what liberates.
Falsehood is accompanied by many related behaviors, and hypocrisy is one of them. Man has produced it them since the beginning of civilization, and Christianity has been fighting them until today. Christianity today is in the most difficult stages of its struggle with this declining trend of human beings, a trend that destroys the humanity of humankind before it eliminates him from existence. Nevertheless, it remains that “Blessed are the poor in spirit. For theirs is the kingdom of the heavens,” because with their innocence as bright as snow they burn the falsehood, hypocrisy and deceitfulness of those who chose this path, because some snow is so frosty that it becomes burning.
Moreover, Christians do not forget for a moment that they are the salt of the earth and that they must prevent the corruption of salt with all their might, and that they are the light of the world and they are a lamp that must remain on the beacon to shine before people, as the Lord taught us in his Sermon on the Mount.
The challenges are many, and the struggle continues, and whoever holds the right in aspirations arrives.