The Strategy of Truth – Sunday, March 08, 1942
There is an old word that has come again into daily prominence which often implies some deception or artifice, but which does not necessarily carry with it such implication. The word is “strategy”. We hear of the strategy of warfare, the strategy of propaganda, and the strategy of achieving all manner of ends often by deceptive means. But the most effective strategy is the oldest strategy known to man. It had no beginning and shall have no end.
Expressed in one of the coined phrases of the day, it is “the strategy of truth,” and there is no other strategy that can long withstand it. The strategy of falsehood, so widely used in so many places, has one great weakness, which always causes its downfall, and that fatal weakness is that every falsehood must continually be explained by other falsehoods. If any man or a group of men set about to establish one lie they must quickly manufacture other lies to support it, and soon the whole fabricated pattern becomes so complicated that discrepancies appear faster than explanations can be made, and the whole business falls with its own weight.
To the persistent question—“What can we believe?”, there is only one answer: the only thing that we can believe permanently is truth. For the same reason that our generation cannot follow a man who still proclaims that the world is flat, just so no enlightened generation of people can long believe anything which does not check with all of the other known facts of the day and all of the other known laws and realities of the universe.
Falsehood and error, are believed only by the misinformed, and ultimately they, too, will know the truth, and so any man or any generation that wants to protect itself against ultimate breakdown must lay its plans upon the strategy of truth—all of which brings to mind the eloquent utterance from the Psalms: “Let the lying lips be put to silence.” There never was and never will be a man smart enough to support any falsehood permanently, no matter how well conceived his strategy nor how ably he brings other fabrications to its support. The strategy of truth is the only strategy that may be trusted for ultimate results.
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, March 8, 1942, over Radio Station KSL and the Nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright – 1942.
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March 08, 1942
Broadcast Number 0,655