What is truth?
In the Christian Bible, in the Gospel of John, Jesus says something about truth: ‘πᾶς ὁ ὢν ἐκ τῆς ἀληθείας ἀκούειμου τῆς φωνῆς’. Translating the phrase from the Greek is not easy: ‘Everyone on the side of truth listens to me’, says the New International Version. The New Living Translation: ‘All who love the truth recognize that what I say is true.’ The Authorised Version is very unhelpful: ‘Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.’
It’s not the word for truth that’s difficult to translate: ἀλήθεια, pronounced aléthia, is a rather beautiful word that translates directly. It’s the other words that make it all a bit vague.
I am not alone in finding this phrase difficult to understand. Pontius Pilate, who had been trying to get Jesus to admit that he was a political revolutionary, asks, ‘What is truth?’
Pilate is definitely not having difficulty understanding that one word, but ‘what is truth?’ is often quoted as though he is being disingenuous. He is made to appear as though he knows full well what truth is, and he is dismissing it as a consideration. He is cynical. A more sympathetic reading might be that Pilate is genuinely baffled by the phrase, ‘every one that is of the truth heareth my voice’, as an answer to his fairly blunt question, ‘art thou a king, then?’
We can also take ‘what is truth?’ as a straightforward question: What is this structure, ‘truth’? What does it mean?
This is a reasonable question, because it can be very difficult to know the truth. We humans have imperfect senses and imperfect brains, and so we can only ever perceive or describe a shadow of reality. (Plato had something to say on the subject.) Reality is the film running through the projector, but we only ever see the image projected on the screen. That image on the screen might be blurry or sharp (especially if I’m not wearing my eyeglasses), but it’s not the same as the image on the film. If I’m wearing someone else’s eyeglasses, it’s all going to be even more blurry.
We need to use structures in order to understand and describe reality, and one of those structures is ‘truth’.
Even when we tell the God’s honest truth, our utterances never quite achieve a 1:1 relationship with reality. Even when we hear the truth, we never hear something that has a 1:1 relationship with reality. When we talk about truth, we are describing something as close as possible to that 1:1 relationship.
Truth is part of a schema that enables us to understand the relationship of utterance to reality.
I think Archbishop Abbott missed a translating trick when he was creating the King James Bible. I prefer the term ‘authenticity’ to ‘truth’, and I think that, at the risk of bothering my Christian friends, Jesus’ answer might be translated as, ‘everyone who is authentic understands me’.
Pilate is baffled, because Pilate is not authentic. Pilate does not accept a 1:1 relationship with reality. In John’s gospel, Pilate knows that he is condemning an innocent man to crucifixion, tries to weasel out of it by offering to release Jesus in honour of Passover, explains the weaselling inauthentically by saying it was an ancient custom (it wasn’t), and ends up having Jesus executed nonetheless.
Ideas like integrity and authenticity describe the relationship between our thoughts, our utterances, our identity and our reality. They describe how well we understand the delta between utterance and reality, and how we aspire to and succeed to narrow that delta. They help us define our relationship to reality, and to the truth; and others judge our trustworthiness based on our integrity and authenticity.
Ways and means
This is not a discussion of the nature of truth, though. This is a discussion of schema.
Strategy is part of a schema. It’s part of a set of structures we impose on the world in order to help it make sense. There is no objective phenomenon of strategy, but understanding the concept helps us to understand what actions we need to take in order to achieve our aims.
This is to understand schema, not to deride strategy. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we create a schema when we need to make sense of the world around us.
Strategy is a term which comes to modern languages from ancient Greek, where it meant ‘the general’s work’ or ‘the leader’s work’. The office of strategos— army leader—replaced the older job polemarchos— warlord—during the Greek classical period. Stratos meant army, from a word meaning array, as soldiers were arrayed on ancient battlefields, related to the modern English words ‘strew’ and ‘straw’. Agos, the other half of the word strategos, meant ‘leader’. We can look at shades of meaning between the old concept of polemarchos and the new concept of strategos, which distinguish the leadership requirements of effectively getting the best out of an increasingly sophisticated and empowered body of citizen-soldiers.
The Greek word is redolent of marshalling forces for war, and many other words we use in the Western world for leadership, organisation, confrontation and success have their roots in the warfare of classical antiquity.
The term is used in modern military science to distinguish some types of activity from others. Strategy is the marshalling of ways and means in order to achieve a goal. In this phrase, ‘ways’ refers to the intellectual aspect of achieving the goal: how are you going to get there? ‘Means’ refers to the resources required to achieve the aim, and the modern use of the term ‘human resources’ rather than ‘personnel’ or ‘people’ is useful here in reminding us that the means includes people. Going forward I’ll bring in the concept of capability as another way of understanding ‘means’.
This use of ‘ways and means’ can be dated to the earliest years of modern English. In the British Parliament, ‘ways and means’ became a term of art referring to taxation, and one of the first committees established in the lower house of the US Congress was the Committee on Ways and Means, which originally examined both revenue and expenditure.
The statement that ‘the end justifies the means’, became a phrase attributed to St Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Jesuit Order) in anti-Catholic propaganda, which is not to say that Loyola didn’t use the phrase. It’s usual use is to excuse or lampoon the idea that a sufficiently lofty goal is capable of elevating even the sleaziest means of achieving the goal. This pithy statement of the phrase has its origins in the plays and poetry of Sophocles and Ovid, but it was Niccolo Machiavelli who gave the term unironic meaning. ‘In actions of all men, especially princes, where there is no recourse to justice, the end is all that counts. A prince should only be concerned with conquering or maintaining a state, for the means will always be judged to be honorable and praiseworthy by each and every person, because the masses always follow appearances and the outcomes of affairs, and the world is nothing other than the masses.’ (Emphasis is mine.)
Machiavelli’s point is not that the any end justifies any means, but that it doesn’t matter. It is a statement of cynicism and, as it happens, inauthenticity. Never mind the means, he says, the general public will believe whatever you tell them. Do whatever you need to do in order to achieve the aim. Here, Machiavelli is being a sleazeball. When attributed to Loyola, this line is meant to be exalting his goals so high that they justify any means of achieving them. St Ignatius is, through these words, depicted as a fanatic.
We do not need to be sleazeballs or fanatics. There is another way.
‘The end justifies the means’ can mean that there is a relationship between ends and means, and any schema we use to achieve our goals has to understand this relationship. The way we make our strategy shapes the results of our strategy. If we are inauthentic in the way we make our strategy, we will have an unsuitable strategy. If we get someone else to do our strategy homework, then we will get someone else’s strategy. That’s about as useful has having someone else’s eyeglasses.
Strategy and schema
In the structured approach to war advocated by Carl von Clausewitz, strategy exists to achieve politik, that is policy. The leader (in Clausewitz’s 19th Century Prussian imagination, the king) acts as the rational faculty of the state, and policy is the leader’s understanding of what needs to be done. War, to Clausewitz, is a continuation of policy; it is a set of ways and a set of means by which to continue policy. Clausewitz’s famous utilitarian phrase, that ‘war is nothing more than a continuation of policy by other means’ is a statement of military strategy serving policy.
In this schema, designed to help us understand how to marshal ways and means to achieve ends, strategy (‘leaders’ work’, ‘generals’ work’) is a term which sets some concepts and activities (strategy, strategic) apart from others. The leaders’ work is to make sure that the soldier is in the right place at the right time, ideally well-fed and fit to undertake the core activities of warfare (killing and destruction). The soldiers’ work is to kill and destroy. (Soldiers can do other things as well, but that doesn’t change their core tasks.)
The schema is meant to ensure that everyone is doing the right work. Soldiers stick bayonets into enemy soldiers’ livers. Generals combine ways and means to achieve policy results. Ministers make policy. Telling a government minister to stick a bayonet into somebody’s liver is unlikely to be effective. Looking to a government minister for strategy is even more unlikely to be effective. I have an indelible image in my mind of an army general saying that he expected government ministers to provide strategy, and a former government minister, literally jumping up and down, bright red, saying that as a professional politician he was utterly unqualified to make strategy.
The schema works, but only so long as it is closely aligned to reality. Without authenticity, without truth, the schema can be worse than useless. The schema can become dangerous.
Scheming and schema
Not every schema conveys an understanding that is close to the truth, but that doesn’t make them any less durable.
Conspiracy is a schema, and it helps people to make sense of the world around them. For the small proportion of phenomena that are actually the product of conspiracy, these theories are actually productive. The Watergate coverup was arguably a conspiracy, and viewing those events in those terms helps us understand what happened. That is, when the schema helps us bring our understanding close to a 1:1 relationship to reality—when conspiracy is the truth—the schema is useful.
When I made a television programme a few years ago in which I disagreed with conspiracy theories, I was attacked for my disagreement. Some of the attacks were sharp indeed. For the people who wrote to me or posted about me on social media, I was attacking their understanding of reality, and they responded with harsh counter-attacks. By suggesting (as I did) that the conspiracy theories were far from truthful—that their relationship with reality was a long way from 1:1—I was not only talking nonsense, I was talking dangerous nonsense.
Some people accused me of being party to these conspiracies. This has the effect of fitting my ideas into the conspiracy schema. Rather than my words pushing against the conspiracy theory, my disagreement neatly made me part of the theory. One correspondent wrote me a letter in which he made it clear that I must know these conspiracy theories to be true, and that the only reason I would go on television to say otherwise was because I am ‘an attention whore’. In his estimation, only my own pathological need for attention could induce me to speak out publicly against the schema which helped him to understand the world.
Of course, he might be right.
Strategy and Truth
Strategy documents are ineffective as a replacement for strategy process because they generally lack authenticity.
This is not to say that creating a document that explains a strategy or set of strategies is a bad idea. The National Security Strategies of the United Kingdom that I worked on were useful statements, and they were designed to be used to guide operations and actions. Rigorously developed strategy processes need to be recorded and communicated to stakeholders. Sometimes a strategy document on glossy white paper with professional photos and expensive ink is the right way to record and communicate strategy.
Mostly, however, strategy documents on glossy white paper with professional photos and expensive ink are expressing an aspiration to work strategically. They express strategic goals, and set out sets of actions which are associated with the goals.
Again, there is nothing wrong with aspiring to work strategically, and nothing wrong with expressing that aspiration to stakeholders. Difficulty arises when an organisation mistakes an aspirational statement of strategy, often developed with an external provider, for developing an understanding of the organisation’s required future state, and marshalling ways and means to achieving that state.
The difference between a strategy document and functioning strategically is a difference in level of authenticity. An inauthentic strategy document can make sense, can be durable, can guide operations, and be utterly counterproductive.