Prolonged observation of domestic and global politics reveals a world that is continually being shaped by radical contingency and surrounded by absurdity. Other conditions can be seen, but the two just mentioned are the regnant operational conditions.

An overstatement? Consider the assumptions and requirements of: nuclear deterrence; neoclassical economics and its progeny, neoliberalism; human-caused climate change denialism; ongoing strategies of genocide and the Trump presidency. Other conditions come to mind effortlessly, but my concern is not to indict the full schedule of the world’s political failings at this time.

These conditions are beyond Australia’s capabilities to solve; they are even beyond the great majority of Australians’ ability to understand if the current system of (mis)information, partial truths, deliberate lies and commentary is allowed to persist without challenge.

Truth, in public life, has always been used sparingly as though somehow the ethical theory and associated doctrine in moral theology — “the economy of truth” and its close relation, “mental reservation”, which recognise what is known as “the lie of necessity” — is applicable in everyday politics.

The casuists in politics could point to precedents: the 4th century Greek fathers of the Christian Church described the ways in which truth can be framed, told, or withheld completely through the concept of oikonomia – but this had to do with discussions of God.

Admittedly, Edmund Burke in the 18th century availed himself of it, but he was also adamant that neither falsehood nor the attempt to delude were allowed in any case whatsoever.

These examples are clearly a long transit from contemporary politics and a political class that does not regard truth, for its own sake, a virtue. Indeed, it is thought to be dispensable, or at best, something that is scarce and, therefore, not to be dispensed in full measure, with minimal amounts sufficing. What reigns instead is disciplined lying.

The paradox is that when the electorate reassures itself that its form of government is that honourable system bequeathed by ancient Greece — democracy — it forgets (it ever knew) that the legacy of ancient Greeks was more fulsome than casting a vote whenever invited to do so.

The challenge, then, is a proposal to establish a source of radical truth-telling. If this sounds hopelessly implausible, then it’s because the archaism of the proposition derives from the normalised corruption, and its acceptance in everyday politics, not the prior demand.

Such a source cannot be established in the traditional centres of scholarship, analysis, and commentary – the universities and think-tanks. While there are exceptions within both, in general they have demonstrated — frequently with perverse heroism — that they are, to greater or lesser extents, institutions of assignation in service to the imaginaries and interests that support them financially.

Something else is required. It would need to be staffed by specialists in areas of national public importance, with a proven record of both high analytical skills, who are uncontaminated by association with the interests and agencies noted above.

Who might these be? Learned or erudite people especially those who have a profound knowledge and understanding of a particular subject and selected with great care from those who have survived the decline and fall of the traditional sources of expertise.

They would include, but not exclusively, public intellectuals – those who express views, especially on popular and significant topics, based on critical thinking, reading, research and human self-reflection about society and which is intended to be accessible to a general audience.

There would be two distinguishing features of this source of radical truth-telling. First, it would be resourced in a manner analogous to the highest levels of the judiciary and held to the highest standards of professional ethics, accountability and responsibility associated with the judiciary.

Second, all of those appointed would be required to give voice, or present and perform, in the living spirit of what, in ancient Greece, was known as parrhēsia, a form of truth-telling in which the truth-teller (the parrhēsiastes) is communicating upward, which is to say from a decidedly inferior position of power and security.

If a summing up of this conflated definition is required, it is this: in the face of absurdity and contingency, the radical truth-teller affirms the strange form of love of the pursuit of truth that has always marked such people: Regis Debray describes them as those, “capable of living what [they] taught until it killed [them]".

The mode of expression is of singular importance. Within the full meaning of parrhēsia there is a duty of obedience to tell, or say everything, and to avoid “any kind of rhetorical form which would veil what [the parrhēsiastes] thinks”, no matter their inferior status relative to their audience.

Living according to this ancient Greek ideal is not an easy life because, as the French philosopher, Michel Foucault put it, “a person is nothing else but his relation to truth, and this relation to truth takes shape or is given form in his own life”. In sum, it is a life of risk — to reputation, relationships, and even to one’s life — and requires extraordinary courage.

In this, the parrhēsiastes shares with a commitment found in many other callings whose daily life places them in potentially mortal danger – from first responders to the police, to the military, to the medical and nursing professions, just to name a few.

Implicit in this is that parrhēsia is born both of duty within a life of political freedoms, and of engaged critical citizenship. Neither, however, is sufficient without the recognition extended by other citizens that parrhēsiastes are worth listening to because they possess specific moral qualities which entitle them to be heard.

By extension, not to speak — to commit ou-rhēsia, silence entailing blind subjection — is a step, first, to self-imposed withdrawal from political life, and then to the erosion of democracy. The problem is that democracy — if simply defined for current purposes as the rule of the majority — is not necessarily always convivial to parrhēsia for two reasons.

First, power expressed as government in general, including democratic power, frequently finds truth unwelcome; in fact, in certain circumstances, it may very well have no use for it whatsoever. And here the paradox of the situation is clear inasmuch that, where the parrhēsiastes risks everything to tell the truth, power, habitually, is risk-averse with respect to truth.

Second, truth can threaten the majority to such an extent that the parrhēsiastes risks being silenced in one way or another by discharging the duty to speak. The parrhēsiastes, then, is defined not so much by sincerity of belief (albeit that this is an important consideration), but by the courage which is required to profess the truth in the face of danger.

The parrhēsiastes — be they a scholar, intellectual, critic — is, therefore, a secular insurgent against the status quo, worships no gods in the popular pantheon, and might well, depending on circumstance, consider the conventions of saying and acting to be dispensable, even worthless.

In the here and now, the parrhēsiastes is brought face-to-face with not just absurdity and contingency, but national passions, hatreds, illusions and obsessions in such a way that they create a crisis of purpose. Thomas Keneally (Season In Purgatory) describes the plight of his character, Pelham, which, if the pronouns were changed, is as applicable now as it was during World War II in the Balkans:

In his bloodstream were two simple propositions: that the savagery of the Germans did not excuse the savagery of the partisans: that the savagery of the partisans did not excuse the savagery of the Germans. That the masters of the ideologies, even the bland ideology of democracy, were blood-crazed. That at the core of their political fervour, there stood a desire to punish with death anyone who hankered for other systems than those approved.

To persist with parrhēsia, nevertheless, involves holding a mirror up to society, policy and strategy — nuclear deterrence and its credible threat of nuclear annihilation, for example — which in unmistakable terms will impart a vision of terror and accusation of evil and yet not produce a Reformation moment.

Parrhēsia potential is to provide those moments of intellectual clarity which Ivan Illich describes as “the moment of understanding when we abandon our ‘solutions’ as we let go of the illusions which made them necessary".

Beyond the opprobrium of being seen as an intellectual outlaw, the two most obvious consequences that flow from a life of parrhēsia can be identified: first, it is, essentially, a lonely condition, and second, going back to Keneally’s Pelham, one given to marginality-induced despondency.

What the parrhēsiastes is concerned to effect is the analytical collapse of dangerous illusions — alliances, balance of power, nuclear deterrence, neoliberal economic regimes, etc — on the grounds that, when investigated, they reflect a cognitive bias based on what Julie Reshe refers to as “unrealistically favourable ideas about ourselves”, which include illusions of control, unfounded optimism and illusory superiority.

In Reshe’s formulation, Keneally’s Pelham lives in a normal state: yes, while jettisoning unrealistic thinking could well lead to despondency, depression and anxiety, there is an advantage to the traverse: it not only is the truest, normal state of humanity but also provides a superior perspective for developing clarity.

Although the genesis and evolution of this theory is to be found in the works of Schopenhauer, Freud, and Heidegger, and emerges as what is known as — Depressive Realism — the research of Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson in the United States and Joseph Forgas in Australia strongly suggests that sadness reinforces critical thinking. “Depressive rumination” we should understand is a problem-solving mechanism which promotes analysis and, far from being a disorder, acts as a “disillusioning explosion”.

So oriented and engaged, there is no argument against Said’s depiction that such people will neither “make . . . friends in high places nor win . . . official honours". But they might incur the respect and gratitude of the nation.