Liar!

 

         We currently live in the throes of what I call a hermeneutic of paranoia or what a friend of mine has referred to as ‘malignant skepticism’. As educators, of course, we want to teach people to be skeptical, but it seems that something has gone seriously awry in this project. The skepticism we have sought to engender has, seemingly, consumed all standards of discourse and allowed conspiratorial, dangerous nonsense to proliferate. Skepticism has, seemingly, fulfilled the worst fears of critics of relativism and dissolved the very reason and public order on which a culture of intelligent critique rests. Worse, any return to older forms of dogmatism, whether religious or scientific, seems clumsy and forced, hopelessly compromised or even cringingly naïve. We can all see the effects of saying God, reason, or science in a louder voice to be null and, indeed, apt to breed their own kind of extremism. The result of all this is a world where greats swathes of people have lost any sense of trust in great swathes of other people. Especially, they have lost trust in public institutions. The further result is that many people assume we are living in the big lie and that the only problem is figuring out which lie it is and who is telling it. Of course, the people in conflict over this will turn on each other: YOUR big lie is lying about what the big lie is! I am not here to judge people over this however much I want to convince them that the big lie is, actually, believing there is a big lie. This is because I think there is a much bigger problem than simply a lack of critical thinking skills or judgment or a mere incapacity for faith and trust in others. Something else is going on and here I will try to put my finger on what this something else might be.   

People increasingly seem to live in a world governed by profound anxiety. One form this anxiety takes is the conviction that we are living in a web of universal deceit. EVERYONE is lying ALL THE TIME. Only a chosen few have seen through the universal lie and glimpsed the world outside the matrix. Sometimes this comes from a traditional place: the ongoing battle in the US between scientistic ideology and religious fundamentalism. There are people who think that the big lie is religion (in general) or that the big lie is Darwinism or secularism (those two notions seem fused in the minds of both parties). Pop atheists, for instance, hold to the notion of religion as a form of priest-craft. This means that anyone pushing back against their claims is practicing priest-craft and deceit on THEM. The enemy have been determined to be liars in advance and we must be on guard against ALL their wiles. This is so especially if one encounters a religious intellectual who is a PAID liar out to entwine me in a web of subtle sophistries. This is exactly what their Bible College Fundie counterparts think. The Devil rules this world and the devil is the father of lies. The intellectual, especially, is out to con you out of heaven presumably to feather his own nest. Integral to each position is the belief that the opposite position cannot be held sincerely. Either scientific or religious institutions, to the extent that they have a public face, are built on lies. This is coupled with the belief that whichever side of this binary I oppose controls everything and is an all pervasive, threatening presence. I, alas, am neither an atheist nor a U.S. protestant and thus a significant number of people in North America will have concluded I am a liar and prevaricator even before I say anything. They have framed me in advance as a liar and thus will interpret everything I say in that framing. Even if I say something plausible or true that will indicate nothing but the subtilty and depth of my will to deceive. This makes me perhaps the worst person to try and moderate what people say in such discussions. To either side I am not ME but one of THEM! The other, by the way, is always a token of a type and this type is an object of sectarian arrogance and contempt mingled with fear. At any rate, I have come to conclude that people in polarized groups would rather 'talk' to (or at) each other than to people outside their polarization. 

So it goes a for a raft of other people as well. If I fail to hate migrants in the right way then I am working, consciously and knowingly, for the global cabal that is using them to invade and subvert WASP countries that have earned their prosperity. If I say the wrong thing about fossil fuels I am an agent of the Chinese or perhaps a witch or warlock. Don’t get me started on what happens when I say I am fully vaccinated (hint hint I’m a Nazi). Add all these 'lies' together and we may well conclude that we live in a world of lying liars and the lies they tell. We swim in lies as in our native element. Culture, the world, runs on lies, often on ONE big lie. We are immersed in falsehood, and we scarcely know how far down this falsehood goes. Maybe it is lies all the way down! Of course, governments and churches do lie. Scientists do sometimes cheat and corporations really don’t have our best interests at heart. There is plenty of reason to take a skeptical attitude to institutions. Institutions fail constantly. Scandal is the most banal fact of human existence. Malignant skepticism though is a doctrine of total depravity (ALL errors are at bottom theological ones or, to put it another way, people make the same mistakes outside theology as in because there are only a small number of basic errors). Institutions don’t FALL into evil they ARE evil in their very conception and constitution. They exist over and against individuals in their immediate freedom and as such are an omnipresent threat.     

All of the above may in part be grounded in a certain egalitarian bias. Truth cannot be esoteric. What ever it is it must be open and available to all. Truth must be accessible to ‘common sense’ for instance. This means, surely, that there can be no real disagreements. If we disagree on vaccines, the Liberal Party or the existence of God this CANNOT be a function of the question being difficult or the truth being hard to access. If we disagree ONE OF US must be lying. Plus, whoever is lying it is not ME. It must be YOU unless, of course, YOU are a blithering idiot. This, I am told, is how paranoid schizophrenics think. Their ideas are the same to them as observations and so everyone who disputes or challenges them MUST be crazy themselves or part of a malign conspiracy. How can they not see the self-evident reality of tin hats and space lizards? This, however, may only be an extreme example of a common cognitive bias. We tend to think that all things being equal, the other should perceive things as we do. Disagreement entails a cognitive problem in one of the parties to the disagreement for truth is one, universal and objective. We see this when a group has to deal with a conversion of one of its members to a rival group. When a Christian becomes an atheist, the response is that he or she was never a real Christian. Just today I was reading that progressives who take right wing turns were never really progressives! A change from truth to falsehood must be explained away by some incentive or bias or by moral or cognitive decline. It can’t simply result from normal thought processes of differently situated individuals. Thus, a perfectly natural bias towards our own perceptions may lie behind a tendency to attribute some kind of moral blind-spot or dishonesty to those who do not see things as we do. That, or, like Mr. Woodhouse in Emma, we simply decline to think that others could see the health benefits of gruel or the deadly peril of drafts in any different light than we do.

However, in our current environment I think we are dealing with something more than a natural and comparatively innocent bias to our own thoughts as to our own children. The lies of the other are a projection of our fear of the other. The other is a threat as the ‘meme-sphere’ is Hobbesian and the stakes of the game power and status. Thoughts, ideas, perceptions generated from the other are a threat to the authenticity of the self. They are a threat to my personal narrative which is my own free self-creation. I am the author of my facts and my truth. If my truth is my authentic selfhood then it is treason to myself to admit its contrary. The other has failed to achieve the authentic self-existence I have otherwise he would be me! The very self-hood of the other is a big lie. The other is a liar in the very act of being the other. The narrative self is a self under constant threat from various alterities. This, of course, is exacerbated by all kinds of external factors. Selfhood is a precarious achievement under our current economic and political institutions which involve insane competition to meet increasingly abstract and arbitrary quantitative metrics. A great many people, for instance, are reduced daily to a unit of potential labor output or a ‘human resource’. This means that narratives of the self will be clung to all the more fiercely and asserted all the more violently. Further, we are at the mercy of institutions that determine all aspect of our lives with little accountability. The narrative self is a little island of freedom and a precious space that must be defended at all costs for the world is out to crush it. I was told of a certain student who, on being forbidden to use the first-person pronoun in an essay, concluded that education was a conspiracy to destroy his individuality. This is silly yet oddly revealing. The ‘I’ of this student perceived itself as threatened under any conditions of institutional life (which always, as Hegel teaches us, has some element of the impersonal). This impersonality was here perceived as ‘depersonalization’ and our flat earthers and anti-vaxxers and religious fanatics are, surely, asserting themselves against the forces that erase the self in the most direct way: stubborn, baffling, irrational resistance.