Truth and Lies (subtitled: Leni’s Deceit) By Anthony Steyning We all burst out laughing as infamous leaders stop and look out over the utter devastation they’ve inflicted upon their subjects and themselves, calling this useless defeat a glorious day, a moment of blessed victory. We are rightfully scornful when, after finally having been put on trial, these same leaders manage to brand themselves victim or martyr, not one of those hundreds of thousands of poor, poor bastards they murdered in cold blood. In disbelief we take note of ‘Democratic People’s’ republics that are or were as ‘Democratic’ as a Gulag, and ‘of the People’ like the moon belongs to Freddie, down the block. On every day basis we listen incredulously as one breathtakingly useless product after another is publicly misrepresented for quick gain. The list goes on and on, in politics, in commerce, in religion, in sports, in the arts, in battle as in love: the chronic fib. It is a serious matter that goes beyond minor, social white lies. Lies and subterfuge can be seriously life-threatening, lying becoming so endemic in some societies that they have distorted their original national character. Areas where life had or has so little to offer that the aggressive/defensive lie became the only means of workable daily congress, or is it because of the pervasive lie that they’ve become unliveable? With streets in which what’s bad is called good, where what’s ugly is called beautiful and nothing’s true any more: where children lie to their elders because elders lie to their children, and men to women, or women to men, even women to women and so on, fed by a controlled press also prevaricating in the service of some sordid ideal: the stealing of mind, the theft of reality, all of it. Also a sure way of creating a living hell. Places where one must lie to get fed, in constant and despairing skirmish with smoked mirrors, fantasy and denial. Lying to survive only because everyone and everything around is doing the same, only pretending to be proud, happy to be alive, exhibiting gratefulness to the country by showing hatefulness, resentment and suspicion towards the outside, never inspiration by what is achieved elsewhere: everything a delusion. The neighbourhood furthermore where one must be grateful to a God who always sides with those already having so much more: all of it colloquially known as ‘kidding oneself’, but a phenomenon rather more ominous as during the last century it has become quite clear that the degree of a people’s suffering is directly proportionate to its ability to tolerate a lie. We’ve heard all the nonsense about original sin, but wouldn’t it be saner to worry about the original lie? About who told the very first one? Who it was that turned the world into evil, through lying? And got away with it! For it’s the original lie that is truly sinful, and repeating it over and over again merely imprudent and self-demolishing. Though some innocents might say, but I don’t know anymore what the truth is. Yet it’s all so very simple: the largest truth in the world is that lies exist, blind and dominate. And that whereas an absolute truth is transcendent, open and vast like space, lies are specific, narrow, calculated and strictly human in all its forms. Official lies, wishful lies, stupid lies, smart lies, ugly lies, it makes no difference: falling for them is proof of one’s own denial which in itself is a form of defeat, a lack of courage. Problem is highly organized lies pretend to protect, but are likely to end up killing you. That’s why they’re lies, you see. Unless you’re blind, in which case you qualify for a seeing-eye dog… who may smell that lie for you. Those instances of ultimate and out and out physical and moral betrayal, when laws are distorted, ideals poisoned and justice only condemns, never, ever acquits. When it has been proven over and over again that only equilibrium equates meaningful life for all, the sole place where justice resides. The way it is during the time between hunger and satiation, thirst and the quenching of it when man can truly live, in this beautifully balanced space however briefly spending his most shining hours. Yes, of course, truth’s fugacious, hard to catch sometimes, but only because it’s free; it’s the lie that holds out the false promise of immediacy and permanence. Certainly there exists natural injustice in the way that health, looks, and brains are distributed or that tsunamis strike indiscriminately, but surely gratuitous human injustice is the most perverted one of all, particularly as expressed through the insidious lie. A lie being nothing more than an impostor: a scorpion posing as a loving chameleon, changing colour all the time, but sooner than later striking out with long, swift, and deadly tongue. Only the truth delivers safety and legitimacy, simply because truth is, while lies are not. To illustrate how misrepresentation leads to misunderstanding and then quickly to hate and oppression by way of misshaped attitudes and irrationality, misusing terms brandished about in modern philosophy, it’s the lie, however promising, however tempting, not existence or one’s attitude towards it that could be deemed ‘nihilistic’ or ‘absurd’. If anything and to begin with because on their own terms there can be no real absurdity or nihilism, the negation of the truth of the here and the now, unless one crawls into a black hole and stays there forever to prove the point. Since the minute one asks for a glass of water, one no longer is a nihilist: can’t be a nihilist and take the eight o’clock bus, can’t have had breakfast with 2 fried eggs, afterwards be on one’s way some place. So that suggesting all of existence is no existence on grounds that it’s meaningless, is in itself an untruth: one doesn’t cease to exist for one minute and the fact that one begs for water, which all of us do, creates meaning in the fullest sense. Furthermore, poor are those who’ll misuse already fatuous terms like the ones cited by equating another tenet, atheism, not only with this ‘nihilism’ and ‘absurdity’, but with evil, thus hate, while actually probably creating it. Therefore please don’t listen to those who maintain this stance and always remember that only factual truth, not a stated truth liberates and that whereas bodily man is not a lie, his hopeless fantasies, not to mention his strange definitions, correlations and ambitions, all too often are. On the main these represent the nihil, are very often quite absurd, mostly self-serving and nearly always harmful. And speaking of factual good and evil, of truth and lies or what may be dangerous use of words, a case in question is the Czech Republic where I visited recently. Sixty three per cent of the people there are said to be atheist by choice and conviction, though one won’t easily find a more gifted and balanced populace. Next door, in Poland, religiosity is about one hundred and ten per cent, also with mainly excellent people but no more decent than others. Plus, all have that glass of water, that breakfast in the morning, so what difference do all those earlier classifications, descriptions and accusations in real terms make, except to note again that these hide the real truth, may get out of hand, instigate hatred and by their very intent should be our concern? Atheism then shouldn’t be equated to something that doesn’t really exist, in general the notion of nihilism best forgotten, the very idea less than true and all because of those fried eggs! Life without God is not absurd to all and the notion that an atheist cannot be good is a gross exaggeration as much as the news of Mark Twain’s death was, at one point. Because the atheist can be just as forgiving and generous as the believer and if you don’t believe that you must go to Prague where good men like Kafka, Hasek and Havel demonstrated it, opening huge windows, huge doors to light, borrowing a leaf or two from Gogol in expressing their despair at the lack of goodness, the lack of truth, the tyranny of the ongoing, the living Ubu-esque lie of their world while not exactly pining for God but, in the latter’s case, for an ordinary man named Zappa. Finally, by yet another yardstick there cannot be a degree to truth as it’s absolute, but there are degrees to lies. Some lies worse than others, especially mechanical ones, ones of wanton moral laziness, of ennui or criminal indifference, the sort that has reduced some to become inhuman, that is, though breathing and wheezing, unconscionably robot-èsque. Like Eichmann in the way that Hannah Arendt justly described him, hence her reference to the matter-of-factness of his evil. But here it seems we’re running out of language, for as Eichmann was still a man, it suddenly signifies how under certain influences, bewitched by tragic lies, it appears to be all too human… for someone to become inhuman. Verbal penury at its most tragic perhaps, but no less a truth, the advent of the holocaust yet again exposing the connection between the cold lie (of superiority in this case) and all the evil it can produce plus the fact that a culture prohibiting real truth, ultimately dooms itself to insignificance. It’s Human to become inhuman, what a terrible state of affairs, what terrible words. Just like the term the ethics of the lie would be, for lack of a better term describing the condition whereby any idea or notion naturally murders the previous one (making us both master and slave of ourselves, as Camus pointed out), a description itself too contradictory to be acceptable. But let’s keep it simple, let’s not stray and get lost in semantics, only grant that some evil is too big for mere words and that at the same time words are the favourite tool of evil. Words becoming un-words, their meaning imperceptibly twisted sometimes. That nothing can be relatively true, anymore than that proverbial girl could be a little bit pregnant: was she or was she not!? That only the lie has shadings, one always leading up and into the next, ever intensifying, making slaves out of masters, bad masters out of slaves and so on and all over again, and that modern history has shown conclusively how pernicious for absolutely all of us it is not to strangle all these shadings at birth. Deriding them, walking out on those who’ll use them to triumph. What a gas, the best gas of all, imagine people strutting out on Hitler at Nuremberg, laughing him off that ridiculous Riefenstahl stage in the very city where much later and not by accident the first international war-crimes tribunal would be convened! A stage taken after a Hollywood production number, or was it Hollywood copying her? Who cares! A Triumf of Wasser, Adolf in an Esther Williams routine, on water skis, troops floating alongside, arm up in stiff salute, all frozen smile, flashed ivories midst stretches and jets of magnificent blue. Palms, flags, banners, bright lights, the awful geometrics of it, the deliberate symmetry of it, the dreadful uniformity of it, the fulminating artificiality of it, moving lines, everything linear right down to the moustache, nothing round, no loose ends, all of it moving like a flat, straight clockwork, even paced, suggesting progress, beauty, safety, order, but in reality an illusion going absolutely nowhere. In other words staged, idiotic fantasy, including angular bulges in dated swimming suits, probably rectangular chopped Idaho potatoes, good thing they sat up front, and oh what stunning bathing caps, cut just like helmets: all effects incredibly similar! Ah, what a monumental sense of humour the madding crowd would have expressed by howling him off. Too bad it wasn’t quite like that, that those in attendance didn’t see him that way, didn’t take him for what he was: a bad, bad, actor in a horrible movie, suddenly looking like a mutant Oliver Hardy had he worn a bowler hat. Readying the cruel dunce not for celebration, but for getting cut like all that wasted celluloid he occupied. Unedited December,2005,draft www.anthonysteyning.com