“Not that you lied to me, but that I no longer believe in you, has shaken me”, Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, §183.
Lies are fascinating for the way they expose the paramount role of language in the social construction of reality. Lying and its effects are a powerful negative proof, or tacit acknowledgment, of the individual’s role in the construction of reality, and the experience of reality as something shared. The liar is someone who becomes cognizant of his ability to shape the reality of others with his words, and who is subsequently won over by the power this technique offers. For what is power over another other than the ability to control their reality? I suspect that most humans today discovered the affordance of lying as children in response to fear; faced with parental fury, they readily broke with the as yet perhaps not fully internalized social contract of reality in order to protect themselves. This is sad but not bad, for to know the good we must have some knowledge of evil, and there are many things which when done by children are instructive but when done by adults, destructive. This is because adults tend to have wider or more powerful spheres of influence.
As ways of intentionally meddling with other people’s experience of reality, lies can be thought of as “hacking”. Hacking has at least two meanings relevant here. On the one hand there is the cyberspace idea of gaining unauthorized access to a system or network by manipulating computer code, and which by extension gives “hacking” wider colloquial connotations of gaining advantage through some sort of ingenious “cheat”. On the other hand, we have also the straightforward meaning of to chop or cut up roughly. A lie is a hack in that the liar manipulates codes (not just words, but the whole constellation of values and norms in which our language lives and which charts our tacit social contract of shared reality) in order to rewire a part of our network, our reality. It is also a hack in the sense that the lie/liar splits reality, and the price to pay for lying is thus alienation: both of the liar, who splits his own reality into two; and of the victim of the lie, who is sent down an ontological cul-de-sac, or condemned without consent or even knowledge to a sort of reality reservation.
A lie in this regard can therefore be seen as an act of dividing something that ought never to have been split: of partitioning, enclosing, privatizing a part of the most fundamental structuring commons of our human existence. And privatization in this sphere – as in any other – entails an enormous responsibility, because once you claim ownership of a piece of existence you have to take responsibility for everything about it, not just the revenue it may provide. And this is far more than any individual human is capable of. This is probably why early humans were more than happy to shirk ownership in favor of the divine – to believe that this world and everything in it must have been made by someone or something else, because to do otherwise would mean a heck of a lot of sense-making labor. Presumably though there were eras even before religion in which humans naturally clubbed together in doing that work of sense making, as yet ignorant of the absurdist perspective from which that work takes on an individualist caste. (I would argue that that perspective was the result of the first ever lie, but I’ll spare the reader further crackpot historical speculation, at least for now).
The trouble with most acts of enclosure and privatization is that the self-styled owners of what they have enclosed only take “ownership” in so far as money is concerned. By boiling the complexity of life down to money, they radically simplify their own responsibility. But this reduction is a farce, and the crows of ignored duties will always come home to roost as misery, suffering, and eventually violence. Privatizers are not insensible to this latter eventuality – why else do you think that since the dawn of history they have tended to live in larger, more easily defensible buildings, often remote from the people, and have often gone to the trouble of gaining some sort of monopoly on violence: from the baron in his castle with his knights, high on a hill above the village, to the presidents and their palaces and military commands, and the billionaires on their security-fortress islands.
All these liars live fat on the inheritance of an ancient lie, a primeval fracture willfully made into the landscape of social reality and fiercely defended ever since: the lie of mine and thine. And this is something we have to bear in mind when it comes to distinguishing truth from lies: the amount and nature of the effort it takes to sustain them. For example, if I choose to lie to you about the color of the sky, and to say that it is orange, and then chose to double down on that lie and make it so that you believe it, I will have to expend a huge amount of energy (in the form of information campaigns, educational programs, and possibly a vigilante and violent secret police to “correct” you from time to time), and I will have to use coercive methods in order to enlist all that energy into the service of my lie. But how much energy does it take to keep our truth that the sky is blue going? Very little. Not because it is objectively true (it objectively is not – the sky is frequently blue, but just as frequently it is gray, brown, purple, pink, yellow, black, whatever – credit to Milkman by Anna Burns). But “the sky is blue” is true because we all think it, and so in other words the burden of truth is well distributed across the community. Private enterprise spends tremendous sums of money and burns immense amounts of resources in order to mimic this kind of truth distribution. “Market capture” (note the word) statistics about number of customers, number of users, viewers, etc., is all about this: how many people have we convinced, how many people have we brought over to our way of viewing things.
So, one test we can submit any claim that is vying for “truth” status to – apart from the age-old “who benefits?” – is, funnily enough, what is it going to cost? For, to be accepted as true, I submit that the burden implicated by any claim must be one capable of being shouldered equally across society. If it is not, or cannot be, then the claim has exposed itself as nothing other than naked ambition: the liar’s attempt to hack our reality for private purposes. (Frankly, I would argue that all private enterprise boils down to hacking the reality commons for personal gain, but again, I won’t go on about that.)
The question of lies and lying also takes on a different significance when we flip it and ask what is going on when we lie to ourselves? Because language is very clear on this point: “to lie to oneself” is a well-known phrase, and as such must signify an experience which by repetition and consensus has come to be included within our conceptual scheme of reality. If lying to another is to take control of their experience of reality, what does it mean to lie to oneself?
One answer is that to lie to oneself is to be in denial: to ignore the consensus or social construction of reality when it comes knocking. In this respect, one who lies to oneself is a sort of inversion of the liar who lies to another. The latter casts a new reality with themselves as director; the former refuses to leave the dressing room. Both however do a similar harm to the reality commons – both ignore their duty as members of the human community to attend to that part of reality within their experience. A fun analogy therefore emerges between the moral human who is a member of a global community, which is sustained through a reality that is socially constructed, and the so-called wikiGnome, who, by making anonymous ad hoc corrective edits as it traverses the Wikiverse and makes use of its resources, is the epitome of a good wikiCitizen.
A conclusion also stems from this definition of lying to oneself, which is that, as an adult, in order to lie to others (to seek to [take] control [of] their experience of reality), one must first be in denial about the moral universe – I mean the social construction of reality and the moral responsibility this state of affairs confers. Either that, or one is actually _unaware_ of the existence of the moral universe – in which case one is not an adult but a child, and in which case toys too big for children (like money or data centers) should be taken out of their hands.
Since the merchants of Big Tech and the political Right are all biological adults, we must assume that their ignorance of their moral responsibility to stewarding an equitable reality commons is willful, and that the promise of personal gain (of money, power, status, whatever) has corrupted them. Consider the blithe statements of Big Tech execs to the effect that “AI” will wipe out white collar jobs. (First also consider the fact that “white collar jobs” is a euphemism or rather a metonymy for “the middle class”, and let that sucker sink in.) Why and how is it that “AI” should radically restructure the future of work, without restructuring the future of billionaires? Statements such as these are attempts to make the existence of billionaires as natural as the sky above, in all its putative blueness. If “AI” is going to put the foundations of our society through the ringer, why on earth should those who created this technology be spared a re-evaluation report? The fact that the proclaimed impact of “AI” does not fall equally on all people is an indicator that this claim is a lie. They are trying to put one over on us. There’s not much else to it than that.
Consider also – because they are not unconnected – the hissy fits of right-wing intellectuals who have finally realized that universities are not safe for them anymore. Recently a law professor at Leiden in the Netherlands (the most conformist, establishment faculty at the most conformist, establishment university in a country whose unofficial motto is “doe normaal”, i.e. “be normal” or “conform!”), Andreas Kinneging, bewailed the fact that no one wants to hear his right-wing opinions anymore, and that students with right-wing sympathies felt uncomfortable sharing them. He argues that the failure to make room for right-wing opinions means that universities are failing in their duty to diversity. This is a man in denial. The library of any good university – even Leiden – is going to be chockablock with right-wing opinions, because these are the ones that have held sway for most of human history: might makes right, mine and thine, white power, Euro-centrism, women in the kitchen, hands-off-my-land-which-I-just-discovered, and so on. While the university has been likened to a mirror of society, the library has been called the heart of the university. The fact that the administrators of academic libraries across the Anglo-sphere (a geopolitical terrain marked also by the flourishing of Silicon Valley style start-up scam culture, as well as a sort of “right flight”) are locking in to a trend of dumping their collections is in this respect of deep concern not just to academic communities but to the democracies they serve.
Also, if the university can indeed be described as a mirror of society, bear in mind that in a reflection everything is reversed – it is thus a surprising sign of the health of our tertiary educational institutions that the rampant advance of right-wing and fascistic views in society at large is being met with an opposite swing within university communities.) To go back to Kinneging, his demand for a diverse university is really just a plea for one in which he is a member of the dominant consensus. The discomfort among his right-wing students is also nothing to write home about. Students _should_ feel uncomfortable expressing their opinions: this friction is essential for forming a strong sense of self and forming opinions that one can stand by even under scrutiny. Kinneging’s lament, and that of every other reactionary academic including Harvard’s James Hankins and Cambridge’s David Abulafia, is ultimately just that they can no longer count on using the university to groom students for the right-wing establishment, but must contend with the unpalatable truths of social responsibility, communal sense making, and mutual aid.
I have been told that sometimes these essays end too abruptly and I am working on it.
