true lies and false truths

Is it a lie when someone tells you something you believe and you tell someone else, and then later you find out what you were told was wrong?

For example, where I work, we have contracted to complete a sports arena in Tulsa. I spoke to a man in Tulsa last week who wants to supply us some of the materials for this arena. He told me the arena had been designed by I. M. Pei. He dismissed Pei’s contribution offhand and acted as if Pei was just one of those liberal easterners (or perhaps far-easterners) and seemed to indicate to me that he was unimpressed.

I sort of expected the next thing he was going to say was that the arena “Was like a scar on the face of Tulsa,” much as Bezo Fache, the French police detective had dismissed Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre, in the book The Da Vinci Code.

Anyway, I went in and looked through the engineering drawings and thought the huge glass wall of the façade of the arena reminded me of the glass pyramid, so I told a couple of people that I had been told that Pei was the architect. No one seemed to know any different, so my lie took on a new verisimilitude.

I came home from work that night and started doing my research to see how many other projects we had in works that were designed by I. M. Pei. In doing my due diligence, I was somewhat surprised to find that what I had been told was dead wrong. The designer of the building was actually Cesar Pelli. Now, Pelli is no slouch. He designed the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malasia, which were briefly the tallest buildings in the world. It was necessary, however, for me to go back to work the next day and correct the error.

By the way, here is a picture of the events center. You can see why I believed it was designed by Pei if you look at the glass wall and entry. Click on the image once and the resulting picture is larger and clearer.





I guess the whole point of this rambling is that if we are told something and we believe it is true, then it stays true in our minds until someone comes along and corrects our error. Reality, as I say frequently, is only what it appears to be. If we believe something enough, then it is true—at least in our own minds. If no one ever comes along with the truth, we may go to our graves with “true lies” and believe them as solidly as we believe in the earth and the sky.

Reality is dynamic and we have to keep working on it until we get it right.

At least that is the goal, here in Jimbo’s world.