When Telling The Truth Demands Courage

This piece was originally published in Volume 1 of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College.

Truthtelling is often very unpleasant when it contradicts the opinion of the majority. Telling the truth can easily lead to a minority position and exposes the truth-teller to the pressure of the majority. To resist this pressure demands courage. Therefore, courage is not only the virtue of political action par excellence, but also quite evidently the virtue of truthtelling. To tell an inconvenient truth is not only a statement, but also an action.

To say what is — to oppose truth to lies or to corruption, dissent to conformism, a scandal to the silence of an indifferent or a hostile majority, transparency to censorship, and diversity to dictatorship — all that requires civic courage, which is interpreted as provocation or treason and does not find consent or admiration from the majority.

There are two ways to tell the truth of facts: first, by telling of the action of courageous men and women, in public or in politics; and second, through the reports of a spectator.

In what follows I will analyze these two forms of truthtelling. First, I will discuss the actor by presenting some examples of courageous truthtellers in dictatorship and democracy and asking after the source of their courage. Then, I will discuss narrators by presenting two narratives about the same topic that are talking about the same reality, but in quite…