The art of lying: from being a sin to becoming a 'trending topic'

BarcelonaPerhaps because "everyone lies at one time or another" –as stated by Jean-Luc Nancy in La vérité du mensonge (Bayard, 2021)–, truth is in a permanent crisis. This crisis has been aggravated over the last decades by the end of the single narrative championed by postmodernity, the multiplication of the capacity for impact and the transmission of lies through social media, which have become one of the great trending topics of our present, and the worrying expansion of falsehoods that artificial intelligence can transmit.

"You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free": a lot has happened since this message from Jesus Christ recorded by John in his gospel at the end of the 1st century. If everything were a lie, the new essay by Sira Abenoza (Igualada, 1980) –which Arcàdia publishes on October 13th–, reconstructs the evolution of two concepts that have been studied in a very unequal way throughout history. "Philosophy has had a tendency to focus more on the study of truth for several reasons," comments Abenoza, philosopher, tenured professor at the department of society, politics and sustainability of ESADE (URL) and director of La Casa dels Clàssics. "Firstly, because of the type of people who have traditionally dedicated themselves to philosophy: the majority have been men subjected to notable pressure to establish the norm. The epiphenomenon of this type of thinker would be Immanuel Kant, someone incapable of living with uncertainty and the grays who needs absolute guidelines and to establish principles. Then there is a change in the approach of the discipline: Hellenistic philosophy was closely linked to life, but in later historical stages it became more speculative. In this sense, inquiring into truth is more interesting, because truth was there before us and will continue to be there when we are no longer here. The study of lies, on the other hand, is related more to human weaknesses and darkness," explains Abenoza.

Sira Abenoza is convinced that "inquiring into lying continues to be uncomfortable." "When we were little, we were told that lying was wrong and that it was a sin, and it is one of the first things we still ask of our children, not to lie," she continues. If Everything Were a Lie delves into the subject of the falling of the veil of ignorance: "It is when we realize that existence has something of a farce to it, that not all the people we love and who love us will always tell us the truth." From then on, one gets used to stopping the search for the truth with the same eagerness as before. "For some years now, I no longer ask to know the truth from my friends or my partner –writes Abenoza in the essay–. I never look, on my own initiative, at the evaluation surveys for the courses I teach. In general, I must say that I live much happier without knowing the truth about certain matters. I do not know if it has to do with the passage of time, with accumulated experience, and with realizing that, sometimes, truths hurt and are difficult to overcome."

If Everything Were a Lie begins with a revealing professional anecdote. "In 2015, in the second edition of a philosophy course for law students and prison inmates, we lived through a memorable scene that, more or less, has been repeated the rest of the years we have held it. An inmate, José Luis, said that in the reality of a prison, 80% is fiction, because many prisoners choose to put on a mask in front of the educator and promise her that they will behave well in exchange for permits to go out. When students and faculty enter the prison to take a course, we do so with prejudices: the inmates deserve to be there because they are bad, right? This is the general feeling. As time goes by, we all begin to connect and empathize with the inmates. We believe what they tell us until the day comes when a crack in the narrative occurs, like that time José Luis admitted that inside the prison everything was a farce.

The intelligence of false men

Starting from this first-hand experience, Sira Abenoza looks back with the goal of returning to the earliest philosophical reflections on lying, which is not exactly an antonym of truth, "because while one can exist on its own, the other requires someone to give it life." In one of Plato's Dialogues, Lesser Hippias –written in the 4th century BC and available in Catalan at the Fundació Bernat Metge thanks to the translation by Joan Crexells–, Socrates discusses with the sophist Hippias of Elis about what is better, a liar or an ignorant person. "Socrates maintains that false men are intelligent, have malice, and know what they are doing, while the ignorant cannot be false –she explains–. For Socrates, the liar is better than the ignorant person because to be able to be false in a subject, one must first have become learned. Socrates and Hippias reach this logical conclusion, even if they themselves are not fully convinced by it. What seems important to me about this dialogue is that it makes us see the importance that knowledge has for Socrates. We must strive to know; this is what should move us. The wise person will tend to choose good and not do evil, according to Socrates. In case they choose the lie, it will be a step towards improvement.".

One of the precursors to the "pragmatism of the lie" is Odysseus, the hero who stars in Homer's Odyssey. In this foundational text of the Western literary tradition set down in writing in the 8th century BC –which Pau Sabaté translated again a few months ago for the Bernat Metge Universal–, Odysseus "manages to win the Trojan War and, later, return home with his people thanks to lies –Abenoza asserts–. What he did to achieve the goals that make him a hero is relatively irrelevant. Seen from the 21st century, this strategy has a Machiavellian point, but in Ancient Greece, the word closest to lie was pseudos, which had a much broader semantic field; it was a catch-all that included different forms of dissociation between what we say and what we do. It was not just a deception, but it could also be an error, a cunning act, a fiction, and an illusion.".

The "double heart" of the liar

Two later philosophers "with an extreme view on lying", and very influential, were Augustine of Hippo and Immanuel Kant. In the treatise On Lying, written at the end of the 4th century, Saint Augustine denounces the "double heart" of the liar. "On one hand, he keeps silent about what he knows or believes to be true, and on the other, he says what he thinks or knows to be false," we read in If Everything Were a Lie. For the Christian theologian and philosopher, lying is a sin that must be condemned. "The cleavage or discordance between the head and the lips is what characterizes lying—says Abenoza—. One part remains opaque and the other is externalized. This notion of Saint Augustine is the one that has most marked the later tradition and the way we have conceived lying in the West".

Sira Abenoza considers that the theologian and philosopher "has a savage hardness towards himself and a terrible self-hatred" that translate into "the obsession with purity" that allows him to "consider, incomprehensibly, that the least serious lie is the one you tell to avoid physical humiliation, over the lie that is told to save someone's life". Kant also, at the end of the 18th century, pulls the string on the impossibility of accepting any lie. "He proposes a principle that is incompatible with life, because he says that lying is not justifiable in any case –explains Abenoza–. In Kant's eyes, lying is a rejection and the annihilation of the dignity of man himself because communicating to other people the opposite of what we think, without warning them that we think the opposite, goes directly against the purpose of communicating thoughts and, consequently, is a renunciation of one's own personality".

Benjamin Constant introduces in On Political Reactions (1797) a crack in Kant's implacability. "In the essay, he asks whether it is legitimate to lie to save someone's life –recalls Abenoza–. For Kant, if a murderer enters someone's house looking for an enemy and asks you where he is hiding, if you know where he is you must tell him, even if by telling him the truth you could lead to the injustice of someone's death. Benjamin Constant, on the other hand, expresses that someone who wants to do harm does not have the right to know the truth".

Nietzsche's hammer

Already in the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche used his philosophical hammer to shatter the notion of truth. "For Nietzsche, reality is the elements," comments the author of If Everything Were a Lie—. "We pretend there are truths, but that is not the case, or at the very least, we cannot transmit them with certainty because we communicate them through language, which is essentially metaphorical." The forcefulness of Nietzsche not only made an impact among the thinkers of the time, but also permeates the work of novelists like Fyodor M. Dostoevsky with nihilism. In Crime and Punishment (1866; in Catalan in the Bernat Metge Universal collection, translated by Miquel Cabal Guarro), the Russian writer is capable of having one of the book's characters say: "Lie by lie, one arrives at the truth!". "Nietzsche questions truth as a category: what is relevant to him is who has the most strength to create an idea and impose it," says Abenoza.

In this sense, Nietzsche connects with the notion of the lie that would later be praised by the thinker from Mollerussa Josep Torres Tribó in Elogi de la mentida (1928; recovered by Cal·lígraf in 2022) and also with the concept of the "modern lie" that Hannah Arendt exposes in the essay Truth and politics (1967). "Arendt delves into the lie from the dimension of political manipulation," says Abenoza. "At the end of the history she was witnessing, humanity had not reached absolute knowledge, but had instead evolved toward the absolute lie. Totalitarian regimes monopolized truth and lies, but they were not the only ones: democratic states did so as well.".

From modern lying to post-truth

If in the 20th century a modern lie abounded "that wanted to substitute reality for a false and fictitious narrative", the 21st century has seen the consolidation of a new reality, "the constant bombardment by lies of all kinds". "The current post-lie would be the pandemic of the lie –affirms Sira Abenoza–. There are lies that obey economic interests and others that are told for political causes. There are small groups or collectives more or less organized like flat-earthers and deniers of all kinds: of climate change, of evolution, of the Holocaust or of genocides, the anti-vaccine movement, QAnon, Pizzagate, the manosphere...". All these narratives and counter-narratives proclaimed "with a myriad of intentions and arbitrariness that make it have neither order nor concert" are received by a "liquid or absent subject", the author reminds us, and often end up becoming trending topic, before being replaced by the next wave of falsehoods.

Lately, artificial intelligence has instigated the circulation of some lies, errors and glitches that are "followed by many people and can be amplified through the network". The capacity to lie, which until now was exclusively human, has already been adopted by machines that know how to reproduce our intelligence. Perhaps it is, as has been commented during the last weeks, with the ultimate will to exterminate us as a species. "Artificial intelligence could kill us all by the end of this decade", asserted Jacob Coxon, an engineer at Anthropic who had previously worked for OpenAI, in his resignation letter. It could also be the case that these and other alarmist declarations contribute to enlarging a little more the tsunami of the post-lie, which threatens to erase the few certainties that remain in society.