Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Falls from the Narrow Neck near the Eastern Headland of the Outlet
(1865)

We cannot maintain anything like a society of, by, or even for the people, if those people, We The People, are not absolutely committed to pursuing truth together.

EndDays prominently feature Erosion. Whether Erosion causes EndDays or EndDays encourages erosion, I can’t say. Both contribute. This snake eats its own tail. It seems certain that once EndDays appear, Erosion increases, just as if some critical mass had been exceeded and gravity simply proceeded doing what she’d always done, only ever so much more so. Truth might have been the first stalwart to go, for it had always been essential and irreplaceable. Once truth starts slipping, a long, inexorable slide appears. There was never any way back from there. Then the end does more than just seem to be growing nearer.

Cynicism might be the concerted lack of belief in truth’s beneficience. Any erosion of this simplest faith, that truth—even when not entirely whole or nothing but—preserves all other faiths, lessens us. We need truth to uphold our faith in self-regulation, in our fellow man, even that entrope will eventually render us back into sand. Societies hum along on the simplest fuel and turn cruel when they lack it. The belief that truth matters most matters most. Those who don’t hold this one belief to be supremely self-evident are the very soul of deviant. They seem supremely unserious, not the sort of person one should ever consider electing to any important position in any government, down to and definitely including dog catcher. Those cursed with an unserious chief executive come to know Erosion firsthand, as their civilization starts slipping through their fingers like so much sand.

Each dawn brings a feeling that less will be greeting me that morning. I cannot tell, as the sun rises, which pieces of the picture might show up missing that morning; I am learning to expect a few holes in my experience. The sense of security that used to greet me might be absent some morning. That abiding sense of well-being might also be missing from my usual role call roster. My precious sense of potential, of genuine possibility, might also seem to abandon me. These are each and all evidence of Erosion having her way with the quality of my experience. The Centers for Disease Control sure seem to lack control since the son of a bitch with little respect for scientific truth possesses it. Without truth regulating, our military, traditionally serving to defend against enemies, foreign and domestic, becomes the principal antagonist in the world, picking fights for the apparent purpose of picking fights, eroding the distinction between the good guys and the bad. That’s Erosion in the first degree with an oak leaf clusterfuck!

Those who proclaim that truth doesn’t matter, the same ones who natter on about non-existent controversies on social media, encourage Erosion they ultimately will prove unable to control. They seem unlikely to survive repeated encounters. They seem dependent upon undermining to animate their beings. Who would they have to become to cheer on civilization? They willingly volunteer their services to support the ash cans of history, past tenses, even in their presence, irrelevancies.

Contrary to popular misconception, truth doesn’t necessarily hurt. It hurts much less, for instance, than does the tenacious insistence that truth doesn’t much matter. Those who live to take this sort of advantage of the gullible earn themselves a truly special place in their own DIY Hell. They try to drag decent people down with them, for their own amusement, I suspect, but never for the betterment of even themselves. The absence of truth hurts more and more reliably than even the rawest, most unprocessed truth could manage. The stories I sometimes tell myself when I’d rather not be completely candid with myself reliably undermine my own serenity. I’m still learning to be brutally honest with myself because anything less introduces a whole other level of brutality. Ultimately, truth hurts less than the alternatives, especially once the inevitable Erosion kicks in. We cannot maintain anything like a society of, by, or even for the people, if those people, We The People, are not absolutely committed to pursuing truth together.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz