Foundation for Mind-Being Research Editorial

<< OATH >>

There has been a great deal of attention lately on the oath one takes in court “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” What most impresses me about it is the impossibility of fulfilling it!

Consider the first clause, “to tell the truth.” At best you can only tell what you think to be the truth and people do get fooled by circumstances! Also, words carry with them shades of meaning far beyond their dictionary content. When I speak what I think is the truth, does my hearer understand exactly what I meant? If not, truth has not been communicated. Was it told? Was the oath obeyed?

The next clause, to “tell the whole truth,” is even more difficult. In fact, it verges on the outrageous. In the first place, you are not allowed to do so, at least as a witness in court. You are only permitted to answer questions put to you by the lawyers or the judge. Any persistent, personal effort to tell what you consider to be a relevant part of the whole truth can get you cited for contempt. Furthermore, even the lawyers are not allowed to ask all possibly relevant questions but are bound by the rules of evidence and what the judge decides is relevant. As a extreme example, the rules generally prohibit any mention of a defendant’s criminal record. You may know this record as a fact and believe it an important part of the “whole truth,” but you are silenced. Again, you risk contempt if you tell it.

On the larger scale, of course, the idea of telling anything even close to the “whole truth” is ridiculous. The clause does not say “the whole relevant truth.” It puts no boundaries around what it means by the “whole truth.” It does not say that the current phase of the moon is not required as part of the “whole truth.” Anyone attempting to tell the whole truth has no place to stop. This is one reason for the rules of evidence. In general, those rules define what the court is to consider relevant and permissible. Yet it is clear these rules not only exclude what is deemed irrelevant, they may also ban what really is relevant.

The final clause, “nothing but the truth,” is also ridiculous. Many studies have shown that eye-witness accounts of traumatic events can be quite unreliable. On the other hand, who remembers all the details of events which are not traumatic but are merely incidental to life? Can you remember the exact words you used talking to somebody even a short time ago? Yet in court you can be required to recall details of events which happened months or years ago. How can you avoid giving answers which are to some extent false? The discrepancy may be trivial and its impact on the court’s judgment unimportant. Still, you will have violated your oath! Yet, if you try to qualify your answer accordingly, you may be accused of being evasive and again subject to contempt.

So why do we stick with an oath so full of pitfalls? According to my dictionary, the “voluntary violation of an oath” is perjury. Are we then all perjurers? Over the years the courts have narrowed that definition to make the oath useful and practical in the legal actions. This is fine, it allows the legal system to function. But I wonder what it does to the rest of our lives. The oath is so central to our culture that it essentially defines “truth”. In this it makes a fundamental feature of our culture into an illusion. I wonder what would be the impact we all were able to stay conscious of the difficulty of actually being truthful even in our ordinary dealings.

Marshall Pease , January 1999

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Updated 1 Jan, 2003.