Subtle Substitutes

When someone sets out to deceive someone else, he is more likely to be successful if he deceives with similarities rather than with obvious differences. If falsehood were not sometimes so subtly like the truth, if limitations were not sometimes so skillfully like the real thing, it wouldn’t be so difficult to stamp out false philosophies and fictitious values. But the whole theory and practice and technique of deception is to play on likeness. The swindler, for example, doesn’t look like a swindler if he can help it. He tries to look like an honest man. The false money that the counterfeiter makes is not greatly different in appearance from the money the mint makes. If it were, it wouldn’t be accepted. Often, also, the amount of poison that makes food unfit for use may be so small that most men can’t tell the difference until it is too late. If poisoned food always looked like poisoned food, we wouldn’t need to worry. But the danger comes when poisoned food looks like any other food. Likewise with some false philosophies, it is similarities that are deceptive similarities to things that we have already accepted, but with differences that are dangerous. And often the subtle and sometimes sinister differences slip by unnoticed. Someone once said that the devil would tell a hundred truths in order to establish one lie. But no matter how great are the similarities between the true and the false, and no matter how small the differences, it isn’t safe to accept a falsehood simply because it comes in the same package with a hundred truths. And so beware of small deceptions. Beware of subtle substitutes, of things that are something like, but not just like what we are looking for. Beware of similarities that are used to cover dangerous differences. Beware of things that seem to be almost right, but which are just a little wrong.