The Memory of Truth

People believe what they want to believe. There is nothing you can do about it, nothing you can say to change their mind, no evidence that will convince them to the contrary, especially if said evidence will show them to be much smaller people than they think they are.

It does not make them bad people: It only makes them oblivious. And we all know obliviousness and ignorance is not necessarily equivalent to evil. Until, of course, such someone loses an eye, or his freedom, or desire to live.

But still, people will believe what they want to believe. It is somehow connected to the persistence, or lack thereof, of memory: It is a hazy shade of comfort that people will seek refuge under when truth blazes too hot and too bright, like the noonday sun. So people remember what they wish, what absolves them of guilt, what reassigns blame, what validates what it is they have or have not done.

Memory, after all, is not necessarily the truth, and the connection between belief and honesty is a tenuous thing at best. Honesty has nothing to do with facts, the same way that it has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. What it is has to do with guilt, and absolution and validation and one's perception of one's self.

A person may be absolutely honest, and still be nowhere near recounting the facts as they are in its entirety: not if it would mean the sacrifice of self. It is a rare person who would sacrifice one's innocence, or the perception of the most important being in the universe of him, for the truth: I can only think of one person in the entire history of the world who has so done.

And He got crucified.