“Do you choose to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”. This particular statement would be commonly heard in a law court, and the person who is required to respond to this would have some kind of ornament or document representative of the person’s faith or beliefs. The expectation here is that, even if the person would lie under most circumstances, the person or persons would be expected to tell the truth considering that they are swearing on their utmost faith.

However, in society today, the common practice is that swearing to tell the truth based on a persons faith has morphed into some sort of formality, something that one just does and gets it over with; lacking any form of solemnity or obligation.

This was my major take away from this movie. It appears to reveal the godlessness associated with the big corporates with regards to their insatiable need for profits even at the expense of human lives. The seven dwarfs, in this movie, were the seven CEOs of the big tobacco companies. All seven CEOs were willing to swear before congress that cigarette smoking had zero health risks. The tobacco companies were willing to sue a news network that threatened to release information that would prove that cigarette smoking was dangerous to people’s health; even going as far as threatening and ruining the life of the whistleblower.

The issue here are not the corporations who are bent on making money at all cost, the issue here is with what means will one be able to illicit truth since a public display of someone holding a religious ornament and swearing infers that the person is about to speak the truth.

Many years ago, there used to be this program titled “one on one” that would show sometime around noon on NTA 2 Channel 5 in Lagos. I cannot forget this guest that came on the show and insisted that politicians should not swear with the Bible or any other religion, but rather, they should swear on the local gods, like Sango, Amadioha, and the like. This sounded very outrageous to me at the time but as I grew older and started to observe the total disregard people had for the taking of oaths. It’s pretty easy to swear an oath and break it when you know that there really are no consequences, or if there will be any consequence, it will be in the afterlife. Or better still, if you do not want to suffer any consequence in the afterlife; you can swear, then go ahead and lie, and then ask for forgiveness. Isn’t it convenient to know that you can repeat this cycle anytime you really need to lie? Since this seems to be a win-win situation with a readily available exit path to a reset, do we honestly deem a system set up to make people swear to tell the truth to be effective?

The Insider is a good example of a total disregard to the life of the human populace; tobacco companies willing to lie about the dangers of cigarette smoking. Amidst the current questions that have been asked about vaping, who can trust in any CEO or company representative who presents himself as a talking head on a news network with claims that vaping is as safe as drinking pure water.

I am not against any company making products or selling them, but I think that if certain products can cause harm to people, it is only fair that it should be made public. Hey! but that’s me. That was just a company selling cancer to people, what about governments that allow their citizens to die amidst a pandemic, sending the people mixed and confusing messages, ready to boost coffin productions in the name of saving an economy.