DEER STAND LYING – By Lawrence Doe
I was sitting in my deer stand when my eyes lined up a bobbing twig, a cluster of rustling leaves, and a far tree stump. Belief in my monocular world view allowed my brain to interpret what my eyes saw as a deer. My boredom turned to excitement. My hunting skills verified. My half-empty freezer was readied. I raised my rifle and fired. When I walked over to the shattered tree stump, I muttered to myself, “I know a deer stood here.”
On my way home, in a confusing mix of emotions, I wandered through my woods hoping to see another deer. I really needed to fix my mistake. I knew family would have heard the gunfire and their questions would need an answer. How was I going to explain my shot? Upon entering the house, my relatives excitedly asked if that was me shooting. Lack of humility forced my response. “Yes, I saw one.” “Did you hit it?” they asked. A modicum of humility could have said, “I missed,” but instead I said, “I hit it, but lost its trail in the woods. No snow to track was the problem. The wolves or coyotes will eat tonight”.
This scenario illustrates several major problems in modern life. Monocular worldview, a single way of seeing the world, prevents us from getting outside of ourselves. Small falsehoods or misunderstandings line up to create a siloed fiction that must be defended. In my deer stand, if I had stepped aside of my seated position to get an alternate viewpoint, the twig, leaf cluster, and stump would have come out of alignment to reveal themselves as separate features in the forest community. Each would have been understandable in their physical truth.
Hubris rather than humility is held in high esteem in our modern political, economic, and religious systems. This makes a vulnerability out of admitting a mistake, even when mistakes are the pathways to discovery, development, and success. Mistakes originating in hubris beget lying. In societies based on oral traditions, lying is a great flaw. Oral traditions rely on the accurate re-telling of knowledge. To challenge those truths is damaging to society and a great shame on the liar. These societies would ostracize the liar sometimes to the point of banishment.
Our modern world has invented new ways to lie. Mass and social media often present only one perspective, so the twig, leaves, and stump align into “deerness”. Electronics can falsify voiced images of anyone doing anything to benefit or discredit. “Virtual reality” is beginning to eclipse the physical world in which we actually live, robbing us of biological perceptions of our biological world. Worse is that amoral and immoral competition for power and profit make it advantageous to lie. Lying damages trust, social cohesion, and relationships, which puts our society and democracy in great peril.
It is imperative to our future generations that we reach beyond our individualistic position and perspective. Achieving and maintaining a sustainable, beneficial reality for all of us is a dynamic activity. No easy task, but our future generations will hold us accountable for what we do now.
A good start for me would be to go back to my family and tell them I shot a stump. Made a mistake and feel a little foolish about it. I am confident they would understand. It appears to take less effort to speak truly than to maintain lies.
(PS. This deer stand tale was inspired by a real event while hunting in the hills of South Dakota with a close friend. I spotted something across the canyon unfamiliar to me, so I raised my scoped rifle to see what it was. My hunting partner, without raising his scope, said flatly, “It’s a cow pie, Lawrence.” “Oh,” I responded. After enduring his laughter, I thought that was the end of it. However, that evening’s dinner was a large community gathering. It was quickly apparent to me they all heard the story of the eastern flat-lander shooting cow pies. What a lesson in jocular humility as my hunting partner sat in the corner smiling at me. But I swear I did not pull the trigger. Good Times!)
