"Just the facts, ma'am"

     Sergeant Joe Friday (aka Jack Webb) of the Los Angeles P.D. on the long-ago tv program Dragnet immortalized the expression, "Just the facts, ma'am".   

   I find definitions helpful; so, from some on-line dictionaries:
FACT: "a thing that is indisputably the case"; "something that has actual existence"; "a piece of information that has objective reality" about which there would be unanimous agreement.  By contrast, OPINION is "a view or judgment about something not necessarily based on fact of knowledge"; "... it may deal with subjective matters"; "a belief or conclusion held with confidence but not substantiated by positive knowledge or proof"; "opinions are beliefs not necessarily based on facts."  

    In my counseling office, I regularly hear opinions expressed as if such were fact.  As a very elementary exercise in identifying the  difference, I sometimes point to a lamp on a side table and indicate that we can agree that the object is indeed a lamp.  Then I continue by insisting that we can agree that it is a beautiful lamp. (Actually, in my opinion it is not; but that is another matter.)

    Beyond those differences, I believe that FACTS have to do with another huge matter: TRUTH: "that which is in accordance with fact."  In a courtroom, the bailiff charges the witness to "tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."  Over time, I have learned that this phrase is not a redundancy but a continuum, necessitating each component. Deliberately omitting or over-emphasizing either one can produce a caricature of Truth. Then, there are LIES : "Intentional false statements."  The Reverend Doctor Richard Lischer in a recent sermon in Duke University Chapel (January 15, 2017) said of lies, "their persistence and perversity can wear you down."

     Currently, a fact and what makes something such is a   hot-button political debate with expressions such as alternative facts and fake news having entered the public vocabulary. Recently, a counselor to the President, acknowledging that he tells falsehoods, nonetheless said that those were less important than the many things he says that are true.  Expressing opinion or lies as if they were incontrovertible fact demanding universal agreement ---whether done consciously from whatever motivation or done without awareness --- forms the base of much controversy and/or damage,  whether in the realm of politics or personal relationships.

   Recently I read something to the effect that knowing how to counter falsehoods means knowing how lies benefit those  telling them. Or, as Edwin Friedman, an eminent therapist once  observed . . . we cannot  replace by data, opinions that were not created by data in the first place.

   Truth-telling can be dangerous and unpopular. To tell the truth, Lischer noted, can be "when the trouble starts. . . . When I was a kid, my mother always told me what your mothers told you: 'As long as you tell the truth, you won't get in trouble.' Our mothers lied. . . . You see, it's just the opposite. Tell the truth and that's when the trouble starts."  Just ask John the Baptist or Jesus.

     And, that's just a fact.

         Satchel