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Truth flies out the window

Reader question:

Please explain “truth flies out the window” in this sentence: Where emotions are high, truth flies out the window.

My comments:

When people get emotional, sometimes – make that often times, people are the way they are – they begin to throw tantrums and tell untruths, or half-truths or simply bare-faced lies. And if all people are like that in a room, truth has no place to go but go straight out of the window.

That’s speaking metaphorically, of course, meaning that if truth were a bird, it would flutter its wings and fly out of the room through the window. In other words, the room with its madding crowd is no place for truth to live.

Anyhow, when emotions are high, i.e. when people let emotions get the best of them, they may lose their cool along with all their sense of reason, logic and fair-mindedness. From that point on, they may begin to believe that if their voices were louder, then they would win the argument, or if their arms were bigger, they’d win the dispute.

In such an atmosphere, people no longer have use for adhering to truth and using persuasion to win the argument or settle the dispute.

Therefore, truth has to go, to get the heck out – from the window (all the doors are, needlessly to say, closed and locked).

Anyways, as a metaphor, if truth or something else good and treasurable, such as reason, morality, justice, etc. is said to go or fly out the window, it’s gone. It disappears. It ceases to exist. You don’t have it no more.