Truth and Lies in HBO's Chernobyl and Cat's Cradle
To continue the theme of what I am now calling my nuclear summer (see last week’s post on HBO’s Chernobyl), this past week I read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.
Cat’s Cradle is a story about many things. Ostensibly it’s a story about ice-nine — a form of water that is solid at room temperature and which, if it came into contact with any sufficiently large body of water, would cause the freezing of all oceans and the cessation of all life on Earth as we know it — the equivalent of a nuclear war.
But more fundamentally, it’s about the value of truth, and offers a viewpoint that HBO’s Chernobyl, and perhaps myself, don’t agree with.
So let’s dig in!
HBO’s Chernobyl
I loved HBO’s Chernobyl. It was one of the best told stories that I’ve watched, listened to, or read in the last year. But as I mentioned in my post last week, the show was not from perfect, and I found the occasional lack of historical accuracy most disturbing.
The last line in the show is:
“where I once would fear the cost of truth, I only ask”—the screen dramatically fades out to black—“what is the cost of lies?”
Chernobyl’s key message — a commentary on the current global war on truth, and socialism’s ills vs democracy’s boons — is that that lies have an unenviable cost. In this case it’s of inevitable disaster, emergency evacuations, and ultimately, death.
But where the show falls short is in it’s own commitment to the truth. It misrepresents the unknown danger inherent in the reactor (truth: it was known and documented, and indeed US reactors occasionally used similar designs), the deaths on the bridge (truth: these are fictional, an urban legend), the size of the second steam explosion (truth: it would have been much smaller1), and much else.
Nonetheless, we hear the director’s message as it is, and take their logic one step further to their inevitable conclusion: that truth is the solution to our ills, the antidote to any poison.
Cat’s Cradle
In contrast, Cat’s Cradle offers the exact opposite message: that the unguarded truth leads to unfathomable terror, and that lies are necessary to make it through life.
Truth
Vonnegut’s belief that the truth is innately harmful is beautifully shown through the characters of his story and their attitudes in life.
No one exemplifies this more than the one of the central characters — Felix Honikker, a fictional dual of Robert Oppenheimer, who built the atomic bomb used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In contrast to Oppenheimer, who felt some regret in his guiding role in delivering the atrocity, Honikker is placid. He had no care for his role in developing the bomb; his only interest is in discovering the truth:
[in science] men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward no end but that.
Dr. Asa Breed, Honikker’s colleage
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
Dr. Asa Breed, Honikker’s colleage
I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.
Marvin Breed, a fierce critic of Honikker
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
Bokonon, in the Book of Bokonon
Vonnegut served in WII and survived the Dresden fire-bombing as a prisoner of war by hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse. Upon leaving, he saw the city completely destroyed. He was tasked with finding bodies in the rubble, a task he referred to as “terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt”, and developed a unyielding sense for the rest of his life that war is unjust, in any form.
Vonnegut’s belief here is clear: that the truth, and any pursuit of it2, is dangerous and harmful.
Lies
Vonnegut’s thoughts on lies is best told through his fictional religion, Bokononism.
It’s a fascinating religion, full of hilarious behaviours and quotes, but his core point is that the point of the religion isn’t to discover truth, but to offer people a story to guide their life:
Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
Bokonon, in the Book of Bokonon
Bokononism is able to provide purpose and contentment for it’s followers that government cannot, whether it’s the despotic and inept regime of San Lorenzo3, a fictional state, or the granfaloon (a meaningless association of people) of superpowers such as the United States.
Indeed, Bokononism doesn’t make any qualms about it’s falsity:
Don't be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma [harmless lies]!
Bokonon, in the Book of Bokonon
Knowing his deceit, Bokonon guides his followers to generally be good to one another, follow meaningless rituals, and simply just live — because, in Vonnegut’s view, life has no meaning or fundamental basis, and any form of organisation whether it is religion or government, should only serve to make life bearable.
Vonnegut believes that we too often look for the truth and meaning of life, but really it’s a tangled mess — a Cat’s Cradle.
Understanding your purpose in this mess is nigh on impossible and it’s too easy to follow and get sucked into the wrong thing. But even if you do discover something, humans are stupid enough to build machines of their own destruction. So instead of searching for the harmful truth, why not be kind and let things simply be instead?
Again, Vonnegut’s belief is clear: lies and arbitrary purpose are important — they make life bearable.
My reckoning
So, what’s my take on all this?
I really enjoyed Cat’s Cradle. It’s a hilarious story that is waiting for it’s big-screen adaptation, and offers us a compelling and critical view of 1960s America, commenting on it’s new religion of war (notably in Vietnam), increasing inequality, fight against socialism, and the innate stupidity of mankind.
But I do think discovering truth is important, more so than Vonnegut, but less so than HBO’s Chernobyl. I also believe that problems that arise from the truth aren’t an innate property of truth, but of it’s executors — human beings, like ourselves.
But this post is already getting long, and I think I’ll save those thoughts for another piece.
Till next time!
Stay frosty 🧊
In the case of WII, the truth in question is the supremacy of one nation state over another — Vonnegut sees this as a pointless question to pose.
The government in San Lorenzo obtains it’s legitimacy only through it’s fight against and suppression of Bokononism. Without it, the government would be unable to exist, as it is unable to provide material prosperity for it’s citizens. Vonnegut believes that all governments find something to fight against, and if it’s not the Bokonist religion as in the case of San Lorenzo, it’s each other.