The Lies We Live With Yet The Truths We Must Face

by Gary Null, PhD

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle

The Making of Heroes

Let me start with something that seems simple before it gets complicated. There was a time in this country — and I remember it the way you remember the smell of your grandmother’s kitchen — when the heroes we chose were people who had actually earned it. Not with a publicist. Not with a merchandise deal. Not with a curated Instagram grid. They earned it with discipline, with repetition, with the willingness to fail publicly and keep going anyway.

Bob Cousy played point guard for the Boston Celtics for thirteen years. Six-foot-one — which is practically a liability in basketball today — but he made more rebounds than a point guard had any business making, and he handled the ball like it was an extension of his nervous system. He didn’t need a brand deal to make you believe in something. You just watched him play, and for three hours in a drafty gymnasium somewhere in New England, you believed that human beings were capable of beauty.

Joe DiMaggio. Mickey Mantle. Babe Ruth. Willie Mays. Hank Aaron. Say those names out loud and even people who never watched a single game in their lives feel the weight of them. These men became icons not because a marketing team decided they should be, but because they had mastered something real — and mastery, when you see it with your own eyes, is one of the few things in this life that stops you cold and reminds you what we’re capable of.

And here is what we do not talk about enough: most of them stayed. They stayed in their neighborhoods. They knew exactly how fleeting it was. In football, the average career is approximately 3.3 years. You spend your whole childhood dreaming about it, your whole adolescence training for it, your twenties living it — and then it is gone, and you are in your mid twenties with bad knees, without a pension, possible brain damage, and the rest of your life to figure out who you are without sports. Most people are not aware of that. Ninety percent of players never make it to nine years in order to receive their pension. They get injured. They get cut. Nobody calls. Similarly, the length of an NBA career is only 4.5-4.8 years.

And yet many of those people became our role models anyway. Because they were real. They were flawed and funny and they genuinely seemed to care about people. There were no face guards back then, no padding that looked like military armor. They went out there with thin leather helmets and people breaking their noses in front of thirty thousand strangers, and they did it because competing was what they were here to do. That is not nothing. That is the closest thing to a secular religion most of us ever get.

What We Were Told We Could Be

I grew up in a small town in West Virginia. And if you grow up in a small town in America, you absorb something before you are old enough to question it — a belief so total and unexamined that it functions less like an opinion and more like the air you breathe. The belief is this: you can be anything. You can do anything. Anyone who works hard enough and dreams big enough will find their way to the life they deserve.

It is a beautiful lie. And I say that not to be cruel but to be honest, which is something I have spent most of my adult life trying to be, even when it costs me.

I remember being in a tavern with my father — there was a little pool hall in the back — and I was maybe fifteen years old. A man stood up. He was probably thirty, not much older, and he began to tell us about the last play of a Parkersburg High School football championship. It was down to the final snap, too far for a field goal, one chance left. He was the receiver. He went out, caught it, fell into the end zone, won the game. And everybody in that tavern went quiet. Not the kind of quiet that precedes something. The kind of quiet that follows something that cannot be added to.

I turned to my father and I said: I have heard this man tell this story a hundred times. I have heard everyone in here tell some version of the same story. Why?

My father looked at me the way he sometimes did when he thought I was close to understanding something important. He said: because they will live their entire lives knowing they did something that identifies them for their uniqueness. That man is thirty years old. He will live a normal life, respected in his community, but also acknowledged — by himself, more than anyone — for that one moment. And that is probably all the unique he is ever going to get.

Then he said something I have never forgotten: that is why I want you to leave this town when you graduate. Because here, your imagination will be seen as eccentric. As weird. As the black sheep who is always thinking about things nobody else can understand. But in a big city, you will find people like you. People who are open to other people’s imaginations.

Alexis de Tocqueville, traveling through America in the 1830s, noticed something that made him uneasy even then: that American democracy, for all its genuine freedoms, produced a peculiar social pressure — a tyranny of the majority, he called it, where conformity was enforced not by law but by relentless social expectation. Everyone was told they were equal, and yet anyone who dared to be genuinely different was quietly, systematically ground down. The yellow-bus kids from the country could dream all the way through high school. The moment they graduated, the dream ended and the farm waited. We told them they could be anything, and what we meant was: you can be anything, within the limits we have already decided for you.

I did eventually leave. I came to New York City with nothing. And what I found there changed me in ways I am still discovering. I found artists who were mastering things. A friend in the Metropolitan Opera. A dancer. A novelist. And what struck me — what I had never been able to see from inside a small town — was how much invisible labor goes into every beautiful thing. You pick up a book and you read it and you either like it or you don’t, but you never see the pages that got crumpled up and thrown in the wastebasket. You never see the three a.m. self-doubt, the years of false starts, the sheer stubbornness that separates the finished work from the abandoned one.

Henry David Thoreau wrote that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. He wrote that in 1854, and I would argue — sitting here in 2026, watching a generation of young people spend seven hours a day on their phones being fed algorithmic content designed by engineers who know more about their psychology than they know about themselves — that the desperation has gotten louder. A lot louder. It has just changed its costume.

The Man in the Airport

I want to tell you about a man I met in an airport in West Palm Beach, about thirty years ago. I had just finished filming a PBS special — one of the fundraising specials that were, I am not being modest here, among the biggest successes in the history of every PBS station that ran them. I was tired. I was sitting there waiting for the last flight back to New York, and this man came over and said: Did I just see you on television tonight?

I said yes.

He said: Man, you presented so much good information. My wife and I have seen you on Oprah. We’ve seen you in Chicago on PBS several times. And I don’t know why I said what I said next — maybe because I was tired enough to stop being careful — but I asked him: What part of my message have you used?

He stopped. He looked down for about three seconds, and then he looked me in the eyes, and he said: Gary, as long as you look the way you do and sound the way you do, we know there’s hope.

I said: Break that down for me.

And to his credit — and I say this with genuine affection for that man, wherever he is tonight — he did. He said: You’re right. I’m about seventy pounds overweight. I smoke. My wife is about a hundred pounds overweight. We’re in our late thirties. High blood pressure. Diabetes. She has AFib. And in one of your talks, you said we should not get comfortable with our dysfunction, because then we make our dysfunction normal. And you said we put more effort into excusing ourselves and excusing others for the wrong choices than we do in celebrating the right ones. I’ve never heard it said that way before. But it’s common sense. So I’m going to talk to my wife.

Then he told me what he did for work. He was a pharmaceutical sales representative, selling anti-arthritis medication. And he said, with a kind of quiet honesty that I found remarkable at midnight in an airport: I’m not happy about it. Because I’m legally allowed to give two hundred dollars per patient to doctors who put their patients on our medication. Oncologists can buy chemotherapy at cost and mark it up thousands of dollars — the insurance covers most of it, the patient pays the co-pay, and nobody calls that corruption because the law says it isn’t. His father had died of cancer. Took the full protocol. The treatment, he said, made his father worse, and when they said so, the doctors denied it.

So here was a man who could see clearly — clearly — the gap between what should be and what is. Who could articulate it in an airport at midnight to a stranger. Who said all the right things. And then what? He got on a plane to Chicago. And I have wondered, for thirty years, whether he ever had that conversation with his wife. Whether the articulation of the truth was itself the escape valve that allowed him to keep living unchanged.

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had a name for this. He called it mauvaise foi — bad faith. The act of telling yourself you had no choice when in fact you chose, deliberately and repeatedly, the path that brought you here. The flight back to Chicago is a choice. The next cigarette is a choice. The silence in the face of a system you know is corrupt is a choice. And what makes bad faith so insidious is that it does not feel like bad faith. It feels like realism. It feels like maturity. It feels like the reasonable understanding that the world is complicated and you are just one person.

Sartre would say: that is exactly what bad faith is supposed to feel like.

The Slogans We Believe

Just do it. Go for it. You can be anything. We are Americans. We embrace exceptionalism in all things. We are the best, the safest, the most honest nation in world history.

We repeat these things the way you might say a prayer — not because you have examined them and found them true, but because you were told them so young and so consistently that they stopped being statements and became atmosphere. You breathe exceptionalism without tasting it. And here is my question — the question I have been building toward my whole career: what happens when our words do not match our deeds?

What happens when the country that calls itself the defender of freedom has been involved in over seventy regime changes since World War II — at least those we know about — resulting in the deaths of more than twenty million human beings? Not soldiers. Not combatants. People. Families. Children sleeping in beds that were not in the wrong country until we decided they were. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. Yemen. Syria. Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi — whatever else you want to say about the man — had built the highest standard of living in Africa, and we turned it into a failed state that now has open-air slave markets. No one was ever held accountable. Not one person.

Hannah Arendt, covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, coined the phrase that has haunted political philosophy ever since: the banality of evil. Her point was not that Eichmann was a monster. Her point was that he was ordinary. He was a bureaucrat. He followed orders. He filed papers. He made sure the trains ran on schedule, and the trains ran to Auschwitz. The horror was not that he was exceptional. The horror was that he was not. And Arendt’s observation extends, uncomfortably and inevitably, to the rest of us: you do not need monsters to produce atrocity. You only need ordinary people — good family men and women, churchgoers, people who love their dogs and their neighbors — who have decided that the distance between their own conscience and their own comfort is a gap they can live with.

Barack Obama accepted a Nobel Peace Prize. Then he went into seven wars. He did not give back the prize. We did not ask him to. We moved on. We are a nation with a remarkable capacity for moving on, which would be a virtue if it were accompanied by wisdom and consequence, but it is not. It is accompanied by forgetting. And forgetting, as the philosopher George Santayana warned, is a sentence: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Thomas Jefferson spoke of manifest destiny with conviction, and in his mouth it described something almost spiritual — the sense that America was destined for greatness, that its expansion was divinely sanctioned. What he did not mention, because he did not have to, because it was so thoroughly assumed that it needed no mention, is that someone else had to lose for us to win. That every acre of manifest destiny was an acre that already belonged to someone. We have never reconciled that. We have never fully looked at it. We have sloganed our way past it, generation after generation, with the same cheerful amnesia.

Survival of the Fittest

Here is what I find most interesting — and I am using the word interesting the way a doctor uses it when looking at a scan that concerns them. We have taken the most brutal operating principle in nature — survival of the fittest, winner-takes-all, manifest destiny in every conceivable arena — and we have dressed it up in the language of aspiration. We have made it look like freedom. We have made ruthlessness look like drive, and greed look like ambition, and the annihilation of everything gentle and communal in us look like success.

Look at our athletes now. There was a time when the conversation around great athletes was about the game. About preparation. About what it takes to master something. Now? We know more about the companions of athletes than we know about the athletes. They all look the same — surgical-enhancement influencers who have discovered that proximity to a superstar is itself a career. The tabloid journalism that follows is endless: they’re up, they’re down, they’re happy, they’re sad. We track their movements like we’re running surveillance operations. And in the middle of all of this, the athletes themselves — the people who actually had talent, who actually put in the work — have been replaced in the public imagination by their own celebrity.

There is a documentary about basketball players — people who made millions of dollars in their careers — who are now broke. All of them. Because no one ever sat them down and said: you are about to become the subject of adulation, which is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a human being. Because adulation comes with an entourage. And an entourage, if you do not understand what it is, looks like love. It is not love. It is harvest. You want drugs? They have them. You want women sent to your hotel room? Done. You want to pay five hundred percent above market value for jewelry, because you can, because why not? Mr. Bling is there.

And then you are thirty-five, and your career is over, and the entourage disperses like smoke because smoke was always what it was. And you are sitting in a house you cannot afford and wondering where it all went.

This is not a sports story. This is the whole story. Elon Musk is the most powerful private individual in human history — a trillionaire, a man who has effectively purchased a branch of the federal government as a hobby — and I would argue, with all the compassion I can muster for a man who does not seem to need it, that his unmitigated accumulation is a symptom of profound insecurity, not confidence. Every empire in history — Byzantine, Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, British — was built on the same principle: if I can take it from you, I deserve it. Every single one of them fell. Not because they ran out of enemies. Because they ran out of themselves.

We are watching that collapse in real time, and we are calling it innovation.

The Selfishness We Deny

On how many occasions have we been presented the truth but refused to act on it in any meaningful way? I’ll give you a few of the thousands of examples that we have all faced to show the average person is living a delusional life.

This is not intended as a general condemnation of humanity, nor as an accusation that most people are malicious, indifferent, or lacking in conscience. On the contrary, most people are fundamentally decent. They are good friends, loving parents, loyal spouses, hardworking employees, and considerate neighbors. They strive to do the right thing and, in many respects, succeed. Yet there exists a profound difference between good intentions and the consequences of our actions. We seldom examine that difference because doing so forces us to confront the uncomfortable reality that much of what we say we value is contradicted by how we actually live.

For example, ask the average parent if they care about their children’s health, and virtually everyone will answer yes. No parent consciously wishes to harm a child, nor would they knowingly make choices that lead to disease or suffering. Yet we live in a society where childhood obesity, diabetes, asthma, autoimmune conditions, and even early heart disease have become commonplace. If love alone were sufficient, these epidemics would not exist. Somewhere between intention and outcome lies a series of decisions, habits, and beliefs that we rarely question because they have become normalized.

Likewise, ask teachers whether they believe they should replace parents in making moral decisions for children without the parents’ knowledge or consent, and most would reject such an idea. They would insist that their purpose is to educate, to foster critical thinking, and to prepare students for life. Yet increasing amounts of time and energy are devoted to ideological controversies while countless children struggling with anxiety, family instability, emotional distress, or learning difficulties are often deprived of the support they genuinely need. The mission of education itself has become blurred, and few seem willing to acknowledge how far we have drifted from the fundamentals.

The same contradiction exists in our relationship with institutions and the media. Ask people whether they trust the information they receive, and many will answer affirmatively, though their loyalty may vary depending upon which network, newspaper, podcast, or influencer they favor. Yet history repeatedly shows that institutions possessing enormous resources and influence are capable of being spectacularly wrong. More troubling still, those errors often carry grave consequences, while those responsible rarely acknowledge their failures, let alone accept accountability. If independent investigators and dissenting voices are capable of discovering truths that powerful institutions ignored or denied, then one must ask why we continue to extend trust without demanding honesty and transparency in return.

Nearly everyone claims to support women’s rights and human dignity, yet hundreds of millions of garments purchased each year are produced under conditions that many would consider exploitative. Women in impoverished nations frequently work exhausting hours for wages that scarcely sustain life so that consumers in wealthy countries can enjoy inexpensive clothing. If we genuinely cared about the welfare of these women, would we not insist upon fair wages and humane working conditions? Instead, convenience and affordability often triumph over principle.

The same pattern emerges in our relationship with the environment. Most people would say they care deeply about nature and the planet that sustains us. Yet plastics contaminate the oceans, pollute the food chain, and increasingly permeate our own bodies. Entire ecosystems suffer, marine life dies, and scientists continue to document the dangers with growing urgency. Nevertheless, many are unwilling to make even modest changes in their daily lives. Concern exists in theory, but sacrifice remains elusive.

Even our affection for animals reveals a troubling contradiction. Ask people whether they love their dogs, and they will enthusiastically say yes. Yet millions of companion animals are neglected, abandoned, or euthanized every year. Love, it would seem, often extends only so far as convenience permits. Responsibility, patience, and sacrifice are less appealing virtues than sentiment itself.

We speak passionately about peace and condemn the suffering of innocent people caught in war, yet military interventions continue decade after decade with little sustained opposition from the public. Trillions of dollars are consumed, untold lives are shattered, and enormous acts of waste and corruption proceed with minimal resistance. Citizens express outrage, but institutions remain untouched. We claim to despise corruption, but tolerate it. We claim to oppose injustice, but accommodate it. We claim to cherish truth, yet frequently prefer narratives that reassure us rather than facts that challenge us.

Corporate misconduct provides another example. Time and again companies have concealed dangers, manipulated science, and placed profits above human life. When they are finally exposed, penalties are imposed that amount to little more than a financial inconvenience. Victims suffer, families grieve, and society moves on. Justice becomes symbolic rather than meaningful, and accountability becomes merely another public relations exercise.

Meanwhile, millions of children remain food insecure, homeless, or trapped in conditions that deny them the opportunity to thrive. Everyone professes to care about children, yet the persistence of such suffering suggests otherwise. Individual acts of kindness certainly exist, and many people give generously of themselves, but the institutions that shape society often overwhelm the efforts of individuals, and far too many citizens resign themselves to believing that nothing can be done.

Perhaps, then, the question is not whether we care. Most people sincerely believe they do. The deeper question is whether our actions provide evidence for that belief. What have we actually done? Not what have we said, not what opinions have we expressed, not what virtues do we imagine ourselves to possess, but what sacrifices have we made, what causes have we supported, and what injustices have we challenged? The familiar excuse that one person cannot make a difference is contradicted by history itself, for every meaningful movement began with individuals who refused to accept that assumption.

If we are to claim compassion, integrity, and moral responsibility, then our conduct must reflect those values. Otherwise, we are merely comforting ourselves with noble sentiments while tolerating the very conditions we claim to oppose. And perhaps the greatest deception is not the lies told by governments, corporations, or institutions, but the lies we tell ourselves when we confuse what we believe with what we are willing to do.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Barack Obama had full congressional approval to distribute over twenty-three trillion dollars in bailouts and guarantees to the institutions that caused the crisis. Not one of the executives responsible was prosecuted. Not one. The companies that engineered liar loans, that put mortgage applications in front of people making forty thousand dollars a year and wrote down one hundred and fifty thousand dollars so the numbers would work — they were rewarded. And over seven million homes were foreclosed on. Twenty million people lost their housing. The president of the United States could have issued a moratorium on foreclosure. Could have said: you will not receive another dollar of federal subsidy if you take a single home. Could have structured repayment at fifteen percent of income, so that a person living on seven hundred dollars a month in Social Security could at least keep a roof over their head while paying something back. He did not.

The entire Congress — all five hundred and thirty-five members — and both of their parties, with their tens of millions of loyal supporters, did nothing. Nothing. That is not a mistake. That is a policy. And the policy is: survival of the fittest.

We voted for it. We continue to vote for it. We voted against Ralph Nader, who would have put us on a completely different trajectory — no manufactured wars, no captured regulatory agencies, actual environmental protection, actual support for working families. We would not elect Martin Luther King Jr. if he were alive and running. We would not elect Gandhi. They frightened us — not because they were perfect, because they were not — but because you cannot control the outcome of a person of genuine integrity. You can absolutely control the outcome of a narcissist, because you know exactly what they want and you can give it to them in exchange for what you want. And so we keep producing exactly the leaders we deserve, which is to say, exactly the leaders that the most powerful among us have purchased.

The Neighbor Behind the Blinds

I was producing my documentary, Poverty, Inc., and we were filming in a neighborhood — a real neighborhood, not a theoretical one — when a family was evicted. A mother, a father, two daughters. They had lived there for years. Their neighbors had been their friends for years. They had gone on vacations together, the kind of easy, intimate friendship that takes a decade to build.

And when the sheriff’s deputies arrived with the eviction notice — you have one hour to vacate, the property is no longer yours — I watched the blinds part in every single surrounding house. Everyone was watching. Everyone saw what was happening. Two daughters crying. Parents yelling, not at each other, just into the air, the way people yell when there is nothing left to do but yell. One hour to pack a life.

Nobody came out. Not one neighbor. Not one person walked across the street and said: can we help you move? Can we call someone? Is there anything we can do? I spoke to those neighbors afterward. They said: oh yes, we’ve been close with them for years. Good friends.

Hannah Arendt understood this too. The capacity to know and to not act — to stand at the window and watch and feel terrible about it and then go back to your life — is not a failure of conscience. It is a form of it. It is conscience that has been trained, over years, to mistake witnessing for participation. To mistake feeling bad for doing something. We have become a nation of expert witnesses to our own tragedy.

I want to be clear: there are still communities in this country where people are genuinely noble. Genuinely selfless. Where the neighbor does come across the street. I have seen them, and they have broken my heart with their beauty, and I want to honor them here, because I am not interested in a despair that exempts us from responsibility. I am interested in a clear-eyed account of where we are so that we can decide, consciously and deliberately, whether this is who we want to be.

A Quiet Reckoning

We have become, whether we intended to or not, a nation of dopamine management. We have allowed ourselves to be culturally enslaved to serotonin and dopamine manipulation, to platforms that profit from our outrage and our loneliness and our inability to sit still. We no longer believe that merit matters as much as visibility. We have teenagers going into malls and beating strangers, and we think: well, it’s not in my neighborhood, so I’m fine. It will be in your neighborhood. It is already everywhere we have decided not to look.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. He wrote that in 1841, and I think about it every time I watch another person choose performance over presence, image over substance, the slogan over the truth. The slogans are seductive precisely because they are easier than the examination. Just do it is easier than: am I doing the right thing, and why am I doing it, and for whom, and at what cost?

Here is what I am asking. Not a revolution — I am past believing that revolutions, as conventionally understood, solve the problems that matter most. I am asking for a moment of quiet reflection. Without your phone. Without the television. Without the manufactured urgency of whatever crisis is trending today. Just a moment of sitting with one question:

How many of the slogans I have lived by should I have questioned?

That is the beginning. That is, as Marcus Aurelius put it in his Meditations — a book written by a Roman emperor for nobody but himself, because he understood that the most important conversations happen in the space between who you are and who you pretend to be — that is the beginning of a life that is actually yours.

Until we can sit with that question without flinching, we will remain what we have been: a nation of extraordinary slogans and ordinary deeds, living under the control of people we have never elected and never challenged, surviving the fittest, and calling it freedom.