TLDR - Deception can be palatable imo
Some here are understandably frustrated that they feel deceived by the good ETs and by their reluctance to simply come and rescue humanity. I have been mildly critical, but hope also kind to the rationale provided by Dr Brown in all these recent spotlights. . Khamia even had often talked about a sense that things are being held back and that some level of deception is involved. I think that frustration is real. If people are suffering and dying, then delayed rescue does not just feel mysterious. It can feel morally offensive.
Dr. Brown has tried to explain that delay by drawing from literature and the social sciences. Lately he has leaned hard on dating and love metaphors. Personally, I do not find those images very satisfying. Still, I think he is being earnest and doing his best to offer frameworks that a broad audience can grasp or even appreciate. He seems to be reaching for some way to explain why rescue might be delayed, why direct intervention might be limited, and why humanity is left to do so much of the work itself. That does not remove the pain of the question, but it does show that he is at least trying to give reasons rather than dismissing the concern.
Even so, the romanticism of the kin rescue plan still does not satisfy me. For my part, I do think we are being deceived, or at least not told the whole truth, by the good ETs. And I also think that can make moral sense, at least in principle. I know some here will strongly disagree, and that is fine. But I do not think every form of concealment or temporary misdirection is automatically malicious. I think there are older philosophical and religious frameworks that help explain why a benevolent power might withhold, stage manage, or partially veil the truth for the sake of a larger good.
The first framework in my mind is Plato’s political idea often called the noble lie. In the Republic, Socrates asks how the rulers might devise a “noble falsehood” that would persuade the city, and then gives the myth of the metals, where citizens are told that all are brothers, but that god mixed “gold” into some, “silver” into others, and “iron and brass” into farmers and craftsmen. The point is civic order. The myth gives people a story that binds the city together, stabilizes the whole, and teaches each person to accept a role within the common life. Plato’s version is political and paternal. It is a ruling strategy.
That is why Plato helps only up to a point. He gives us a category for beneficial deception, but his framework is about the good of the city as a whole, not mainly the dignity of each person addressed. The noble lie is not about full transparency to the hearer. It is about order. So if one used Plato here, the implication would be that a superior intelligence may at times use a useful falsehood to preserve the larger structure, even if individuals do not yet understand what is being done. That is coherent. But it is also unsettling.
Augustine sharpens the issue by refusing to let a good outcome justify falsehood so easily. He is much less willing than Plato to bless direct lying, even for a serious purpose. In On Lying, when discussing whether one may lie to protect someone, he asks, “Are you prepared to say, either, ‘He is not there,’ when you know him to be there; or, ‘I know not, and have not seen,’ what you know and hast seen?” Then he presses the point: “by holding your peace or professing that you will not tell, will you make up your mind to avoid both? Then why not do this … that you may shun the lie also?” In other words, Augustine allows concealment, silence, refusal, and withholding. What he resists is the direct speaking of falsehood as though a just end could baptize a lie.
At the same time, Augustine also recognizes that not everything that appears deceptive is therefore a lie. In Against Lying, he says, “it is no lie, but a mystery,” and again, “Yet true things, not false, are spoken; because true things, not false, are signified.” That matters. Augustine is not naïve. He knows truth may be veiled, figured, and hidden under signs. But for him this is still ordered to truth, not manipulation. So if I use Augustine here, the thought is not that benevolent beings may lie whenever the result is good. It is rather that concealment, symbol, partial disclosure, and protective silence may be morally legitimate in ways that direct falsehood is not.
The Buddhist idea of upāya, or skillful means, may be the closest parallel to what I think is happening. Here the concern is not political order, as in Plato, nor mainly the strict moral distinction between lying and concealment, as in Augustine. The concern is liberation. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, an awakened teacher may adapt the teaching to the hearer’s capacity, giving people not always the whole truth in its final form, but the medicine they are presently able to receive. The Lotus Sūtra makes this explicit. In the burning house parable, a father sees his children trapped in danger and says, “Let me therefore by some skilful means get the boys out of the house.” Afterward the text insists, “The Tathagata does the same, and he is without falsehood.” That is a remarkable claim. Surface level misdirection is presented as compatible with deeper truthfulness because the goal is rescue.
This is where upāya goes beyond Augustine. Augustine remains deeply suspicious of intentional falsehood. But in Mahāyāna sources, skillful means can include provisional teachings, staged disclosure, and even something that looks like broken promise or pedagogical trickery if it leads beings out of danger and toward awakening. That does not mean Buddhism simply approves of lying. In the earlier Buddhist tradition, truthfulness remains a serious moral norm. In MN 61, the Buddha warns that when someone feels no shame in telling a deliberate lie, there is no evil he will not do, and he tells Rāhula not to tell a deliberate lie even in jest. So upāya is not a blank check for manipulation. It is a narrow claim that compassionate, liberating pedagogy may sometimes require partial truth, provisional truth, or truth given in forms that the hearer can actually bear.
I also think of Bonhoeffer here. He pushes past a shallow rule based account of truth telling and treats truth as something bound to responsible relation, vocation, and the protection of the neighbor. One common summary of his view is that it can be “worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie.” That does not mean truth no longer matters. It means bare factual disclosure is not always the highest form of fidelity. In some circumstances, protecting another person from the violent misuse of truth can itself be part of what responsible truthfulness requires. That is not identical to Augustine, and it is certainly not casual dishonesty, but it does widen the moral frame. (read his the parable of protecting the drunk father).
Then there is the deeper point about truth itself. Lao Tzu opens the Tao Te Ching with the line, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” Thomas Aquinas, after his final mystical experience in 1273, reportedly said, “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.” Those are very different traditions, but both are circling the same edge. They suggest that the highest reality may exceed ordinary speech, ordinary concepts, and ordinary mental capacity.
This good ET question, along with the phenomenon more broadly, has something of that ring to me. Even if the good ETs gave us the whole truth, it may be like staring into a black hole. We might neither really see it nor understand it within our present condition and limited ability to comprehend. Even if they laid out alien treaties, cosmic constraints, memory structures, or some larger metaphysical order that would make sense of the deceptive situation, most humans still might not be able to process it. Unless you are one of the rare people who can fully unlock memory and mind in this captive life, the full explanation might simply outrun your capacity.
So where does that leave me. I still do not like not having all the information. I do not like the feeling of being managed. I do not like the possibility that some plan may involve concealment while humans suffer and die. But I can at least understand the frameworks. Plato gives a political rationale for beneficial myth. Augustine gives a moral rationale for concealment without surrendering truth. Upāya gives a liberation centered rationale for partial disclosure and even what may feel like expedient deceit. Bonhoeffer suggests that truth telling is bound to responsible action toward the neighbor, not just to blunt factual release. Lao Tzu and Aquinas remind us that ultimate reality may exceed speech itself. None of these removes the sting. But they do show that concealment is not always the same thing as malice.
For me, then, the real question is not whether benevolent powers might ever use concealment, delay, or calibrated deception. Philosophy and religion both suggest that they might. The real question is whether we trust these good ETs enough to grant them that right over us, especially when we do not understand the full picture and perhaps cannot remember enough for the picture to make sense. That is where judgment enters. Each person will have to decide that for himself or herself.
My own judgment, at least for now, is this. Breadcrumbs are all that I can digest for now. That does not mean we stop asking for more. In fact, I think of the Canaanite woman in Scripture, who keeps pressing and asking. So I am not against demanding more. But if more is given, wonderful. If it takes time, then for now that is what it takes. In the meantime, I may simply be living inside a situation of expedient deception because that is all I can presently handle. It is a harsh reality. It is not comfortable. But for now, I am at least uneasily comfortable with it.
(FYI, i usually don’t use AI assistance here, but this time i wrote a meaty outline and let AI compile and write the final draft and look a a few quotes i didn’t have time to look up again since it’s been years since i have read some of this stuff)