“You can’t handle the truth!” You know the line. The movie, “A Few Good Men” seems to be on one of the cable networks at least once a month. And I’ll stop to watch it, well, the last part of it anyway. While the whole movie is good, it’s the ending that makes it memorable, thanks to the performance of the great actor, Jack Nicholson.

“A Few Good Men” is the 1992 military courtroom drama starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore. Cruise, assisted by Moore, is a Navy lawyer, defending two Marines, accused in the hazing murder of Santiago, another Marine. The defense for the accused Marines was that they were ordered to do the hazing, called a Code Red, by their superiors. Nicholson played the Marine colonel in charge. The climax of the movie is a dramatic courtroom scene where Cruise confronts Nicholson on the witness stand as to whether the Marine colonel ordered the Code Red, which led to the death of Santiago. The dialogue from the movie goes as follows:

Col. Jessup (Nicholson): You want answers? Kaffee (Cruise): I think I’m entitled to. Col. Jessup: You want answers? Kaffee: I want the truth! Col. Jessup: You can’t handle the truth!

“You can’t handle the truth!” It may be a line from a movie, but it sticks with you because of Nicholson’s great acting. But it also sticks because we know that the truth is often hard to handle. Truth demands a response, and sometimes that response is not easy.

So, then how do you handle the truth? In his interesting book about the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, “Win Bigly,” Scott Adams writes about the truth and us. Adams, who also authors the Dilbert comic strip, predicted Trump would win in 2016. It was not because of Trump’s politics, but because of the way Trump communicated. Adams called Trump a “master persuader.”

The subtitle for the book explains it all — “Persuasion in a world where facts don’t matter.” We often choose to deny or ignore truth. Adams describes the concept which is called cognitive dissonance. Simply, facts, or truth, don’t fit the narrative we desire. So we rationalize and come up with reasons to dispute the facts. You know, “My aunt lived into her nineties and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. I’ll get by with smoking.” Or, “I don’t believe it. It’s all fake news.”

The other concept that Adams describes that affects how ineffectively we handle truth is confirmation bias. He writes, “Confirmation bias is the human reflex to interpret any new information as being supportive of the opinions we already hold.” In other words, rather than letting facts form our beliefs, we find facts that support our opinions and ignore those that don’t.

The most obvious example are the cable news networks. How many times, especially in the past two years, has a news event been interpreted one way on Fox and completely different on MSNBC? Both networks have a certain worldview that caters to people who already have particular opinions. Then the networks present facts, or don’t present facts, supporting that worldview.

I drink coffee. (I’m drinking a cup while writing this.) Some people may think I probably drink too much coffee. That’s their opinion. There are studies that list the risks of caffeine. But I can remember reading something not so long ago that said that coffee is not harmful, and actually may have some health benefits.

The familiar verse in the Bible states that “you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32) But, like Jack Nicholson said, the truth is so often hard to handle. So we consciously and unconsciously try to avoid it. We try to avoid the thing that is ultimately good for us. That’s something to think about. I think I’ll go and fix another cup while I ponder it.

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By Mac McPhail

Contributing columnist

Mac McPhail, raised in Sampson County, lives in Clinton and can be reached at [email protected].