For the Spanish version, click here. Picture taken from the original article.
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A lot has been said about the truth or the truthfulness of things. The fact is that the truth will always be… relative. Like everything in life.
Sometimes you find yourself in the presence of the truth, biting your hand, jumping in front of you, making faces and you, however, only know that can’t be true, “It can’t be!” because it goes simply against everything that you hold as true.
The encounter with the truth not only means a discovery or a satisfaction in case this doesn’t conflict with your belief system, but it is also a critic moment in the life of a human being. Is not a simple act upon a discovery, which ever size it is, is an event in life that brings change, whether you like it or not.
When watching “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”, the truth and the encounter with it is questioned from the very first frame of the episode. I’m not really going to dig too deep into the whole “do I relieve in this or not” deal, this is not the objective of this micro dissertation, in reality, for me is more fascinating the fact that depending on your own motives, surroundings, actions, etc., the truth could be a flexible, ever changing and dynamic entity, that at the end could end up being completely different for each of the participants of that fact.
I’m sure I’m not splitting the atom here with these lines, but think about it. During the episode, a situation like the “kidnapping or abduction” of this couple is being studied for a person that, to begin with, doesn’t believe in the truth of his subjects of study or the people around them that try to find logic to it, in this case, Mulder and Scully.
In reality, if there’s such a thing, the episode might be based on the complete mistrust in the individual truths of each person, given that these truths challenge a value system to which each of us is attached to and by instinct, human practice, etc., each of us wants to protect. Is in fact what holds us together.
Let’s look at the couple, Harold Lamb and Chrissy Giorgio. Both of them were “kidnapped” by the same entities, in the same place. However, the way they both lived the same experience, this truth that they both faced, is completely different.
Not only their interpretation of the tangible facts that they lived changed due to their own interpretation systems, but it did too because of the interaction with external agents like their families, the FBI, doctors, etc., At the end, for this couple, the truth about what they lived is just a draft of what could had been, to the point that they themselves doubt their own experience.
Why? Because it never happened? Because the truth it self is in fact a way of denial? We may never know, but the truth may rely on the fact that it’s an experience that rattled their own foundations too much to risk losing grip of their own reality.
Then we could analyze Roky Crikenson as well, a witness to the “kidnapping” and a partial player of the event. This person not only faces the experience, but also the alleged presence of the “Men in Black” that are actually trying to dissuade him of believe his own experience, or the truth that he claims to have experienced, and that he claims to be true.
Not only is he facing his own mistrust and trying to adapt to his own version of the truth, that is comfortable to his belief system, but he also has to fight and defend that truth from a group that is threatening him on his most basic fears and pushes him to forget his experience, and with it block his own need to live and remember what he has registered and faced.
Crikenson has assumed that his truth is strong and powerful enough to not only preserve it for himself but also good enough to be proven and convince others that are not necessarily available to believe.
To what extent is his truth true or a fact, also will remain a mystery, but its curious how this man holds onto dear life to his beliefs, while others may find that task a lot harder.
I wondered what made him different… is it his age? His experience? The lack of dependency from others? Does he have anything else to lose if he were to defend this truth to the end?
Sometime the truth becomes just that, as we saw so much in the series, a matter of life and death and how far would you go to defend that truth. Would you risk everything if you were sure of the truth you know? How do you know that what you have in your hands is not an illusion created by your own mind in this effort to keep it together?
Then, we face Blaine Faulkner, the young man that wants to be abducted. He could very well have nothing to lose. He’s not only looking for the truth “out there” but he’s also running away of what should be his own truth, face the facts and the reality instead of creating it. For him, the non-truth is a truth preferable to the total truth.
The denial of his own truth not only brings him a total stall in his own life, but prevents him from being in touch with reality, if this should ever exist, and doesn’t allow him to evolve in the organic way that we all do, Discovery and progress. For everyone that doesn’t follow his or her own truth, in my opinion, gets locked in this useless search of road that leads to nowhere.
Maybe this is a very abstract concept, but in reality it applies perfectly.
Take for instant the conclusion of the episode; after all of the efforts of the author to publish a book in which he doesn’t even believe in, meaning he’s actually starting from a point where he’s the principal aggressor, denying the credibility of everyone’s truths, he gets an acknowledgement from Mulder, who identifies perfectly that the purpose of this book not only is wrong, but the consequences of its publication wouldn’t only mean no advance and also is going against the development of his own truth, of his purpose in life, and ultimately, is a book without an objective other than satisfy a monetary desire.
The truth, that is out there, everywhere, in reality, is inside every individual, because the truth is no other than the psychological interpretation of a fact. The truth is not a fact, the fact is the fact, and the truth is only the glass we use to look at the complex actions and experiences that become the fact.
At the end of the day, we all go to bed with our own version of the truth. I believe, reflecting on this, and looking at the series just from this episode, had Mulder ever hold the complete uncorrupted truth in his hands, or the facts that constructed then the truth, all of it, like any of us, we could had never been able to reason it, and at the end make it our own.
Avi Quijada
Sept. 2009. For the Jose Chung Month organized by ExpedientesX.ES
