THE VIRTUE OF LYING

“Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” – Oscar Wilde

Maybe there’s something intrinsically invaluable after all about life having become blindly abstract, of living in a world of pure artifice. Maybe its about an enormous (apocalyptic) transposition of the lie becoming truth. The deeper the lies, the more consequential the truth which awaits us.

So, maybe some reverence should be lent to the proverbial lie. At least it’s worth exploring. In our postmodern dedication to facts and data, it seems that we’re all searching for something at the end of the rainbow, something which information alone cannot offer, since information rarely pursues anything beyond itself. We push it along almost as if to tease something out of it, to prove once and for all that the prescribed world was all bullshit. That it was one huge song & dance (of lies) signifying nothing – unless we pursued it differently.

Perhaps, just maybe, we haven’t teased it enough. Maybe we haven’t taken the lie far enough. Instead of reigning it in like we usually do, maybe we need to go forward with it. Maybe there’s a light at the end of this tunnel.

The artist engages in euphemisms on behalf of this (ig-)noble and timeless institution, but he substitutes words like “fantasy” and “imagination” instead. He’s the one society commissions to indulge the lie “artfully” and without offense. Jose Ortega y Gasset said, “”’Reality’ constantly waylays the artist to prevent his flight. Much cunning is needed to effect the sublime escape.”

No artist fulfilled this commission better than Oscar Wilde – acerbic wit, master contrarian and satirist. He turned facts in on themselves and toyed with them, as well as modernity itself, since the “new era” was mostly about dull and mundane “information glut.” Wilde then committed the ultimate heresy by exposing modernity for what it was not – not the conveyor of what we searched for most. In fact he jump-started his readers’ self-awareness into the future, to some future place where self-discovery was already fully disclosed.

There he said there were no answers and no questions, just the realization of what were real lies and what was the truth – or – toxic lies versus redeeming lies. He saw modernity as a repository for the worst lies of all – endless lies lying about lying. Hence, why not flip tragedy around with comedy? He insisted that what society really wanted was fantasy, active imagination, embellishment, and wild exaggeration as a way out. In other words, a final surrender to “art.” Intuitively we seemed to know that we do not/cannot exist without art. The tragedy is that we keep it peripheral to that other world of mere information (which becomes knowledge, which is mistaken for wisdom).

“Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until he sees its beauty. Then, and only then, does it come into existence.” This was Wilde speaking through his character Vivian in a dialogue with Cyril in a short play). Cyril says to Vivian, “Art expresses the temper of its age, the spirit of its time” to which Vivian replies, “Certainly not. Art never expresses anything but itself…. Art reveals her own perfection.” ^* Vivian then presents the principles of his “new aesthetics,” one of which is that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life…. Life is art’s best, art’s only pupil.”

Vivian preambles his manifesto with, “The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of facts; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.” “[N]ovels … are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability…. [It is about] our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.” “Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are usurping the domain of fancy….”

“Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.” “Life in fact is the mirror, and art the reality.” – This draws a familiar parallel to the ancient Chinese koan: like Zen itself, something beyond the dimensions of good and evil, light and dark, refusing all systems of thought, emphasizing the complete liberty of spirit, what T.S. Eliot called “the inner freedom from practical desire.” Life indeed is about catching up to it and mirroring/becoming it. Like an unexpected betrayal of logic (the domain of rational lies), it short-circuits the mind so it can’t ask anymore questions.

Compare this with the normative standards of information which evaluates art today. The value of a painting for instance is determined by a) how many people bid against each other to get it, and b) “provenance” – that is, who owned it before it went up for auction. Paintings today go for obscene prices (a Rothko for $72 million, a Rubin for $76 million, a Picasso for $106 million), and we have Kate Ganz (a New York art collector) saying, “Suddenly it’s not about the art anymore.”

Author and art critic Robert Hughes echoed the same sentiment, saying there are two ways to “wreck” art: One is to let the market dictate its values to the museum. The other is to convert it into an arena for battles that have to be fought – but fought in the sphere of politics. Only if it resists both can the museum continue with its task of helping us discover great but always partially lost civilization: our own.” – When he and Ms. Ganz speak about “wrecking” art, they’re addressing (perhaps unconsciously) the wrecking of the “pure lie” which cannot be measured or evaluated.

Vivian says, “Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything…. What we have to do… is to retrieve this old art of Lying.” He’s careful to emphasize that there are many kinds of lying (mostly for personal advantage). This is not what he means. “The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is Lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is … Lying in art.” He then lays out the other tenets of his “new aesthetics”: a) “art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.” (my italics).

By contrast to this, b) “all bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals…. The moment art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything.” And finally, again, c) “life imitates art.” “{T}he self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and art offers it…” He ends by saying, “The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”

At this level, lying has no purpose or agenda. Whenever it does and fills the world up, it too quickly becomes “facts” (masquerading as truth). Through a daily diet of white lies, half-truths, legal obfuscation, ulterior motives, innocent embellishments, faint praises, secrets, and “factual untruths,” we then begin killing ourselves. We teach our children not to believe anything. To this point, Wilde again: “You get to where you are not by what you believe but by what you don’t believe.”

In his book Lying, Sam Harris writes, “The liar often imagines that he does no harm so long as his lies go undetected.” I submit that, given the manifesto just rendered to us, the opposite is true; that is, when “[facts] go undetected.” What he hides from others is what he thinks is the truth, when it isn’t. And what makes this most tragic is that this confusion is systemic. It’s like whole communities fighting and dying for fools gold (or real gold for that matter), a pet rock, or religion.

The proof of our collective attrition, our desire to give up the fight, is seen in the futilities which end up working against us. As just one small example, take the new institution of “political correctness” – censoring virtually everything so that no one ever gets hurt – i.e., suffering anguish, embarrassment, humiliation – by a “betrayal of meanings.” “PC” protects and preserves the preferred lie to the offensive lie. There is a social contract to be rigidly observed about this, and personal offense can easily occur when one is threatened, harassed, bothered, or irritated by the reminder of what isn’t true.

This is how small and petty a universe of rules (presumed facts) takes us to the brink of insanity as we fight over the wrong problems – verbal offense instead of words and their meanings. We’re immersed in so many “facts” that it ends up causing “undesirable behaviors,” partly because of the pressure of so many rules, but also because we know that the rules are lying to us. Even the “good guys” aren’t telling the truth.

We won’t get into the problems of semiology and signs. Suffice it to say here that the problem of meaning gets down to language itself. Signifiers are mere sounds indicating other sounds (signifieds) – symbols indicating symbols. George Lakoff wrote that “Our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” The world is basically “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” Everything is a metaphor for something else. Roland Barthes said that “mythology” not only participates in making up the world, “man … is at every turn plunged into a false Nature, it attempts to find again … the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept.” In other words, everything is mythical (on top of metaphorical). It all forces the question, “Does language unveil anything?” “Does perception unveil anything?” – It’s at this level that the lie encroaches upon the mind unconsciously and thoroughly alters our thinking. And we’re forced to ignore it – that is, lie about it.

The “glut” of information is not just about too much information, it’s about too much lying concealed as truth, which becomes our existential dilemma. It tells us nothing in terms of what we want and need. We end up with, quoting Robert Hughes, “a polity obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; skeptical of authority and prey to superstition; its political language corroded by fake pity and euphemism.” Everything becomes empty and without meaning.

Are facts the same as reasoning? Are they related? No!! Reasoning can garner facts, but that’s all. Reasoning can also lead us to the irrational fantasies and illogical conclusions (even higher intelligence than bargained for). It is merely a tool to entertain whatever one wishes to entertain. Alas, one often conflates the two, since we live in an age that requires high levels of both. And both are retained to guard against the very same “evils” – superstition, unfounded revelations and fantasy. In other words, what logic calls the wrong kind of lying.

Superstition is actually lying with an agenda. But “pure lying” uses reason while avoiding the entrapment of “inviolable” facts. Reason navigates around ideas and imaginings (which can be factual) but that’s all. Facts alone kill the imagination by saying “there is no reason to investigate any further.” And this becomes the new political correctness. It’s static, stale, dull, and kills the spirit of movement. Facts become debilitating and fatal. We’re caught between the toxic lie and an unbelievable fact – and we want out! There is no “purity” allowed in that equation.

We read and study less because we trust facts less. Hence we rely on “personal expression” and “feelings” instead which finally become the only position left to fall back on. But then the PC-Police show up because feelings tell us to take offense when someone disagrees with us. “I feel threatened by your rejection of my views.”

Quoting Robert Hughes again on the “culture of complaint” which is really a complaint about our existential condition: “When feelings and attitudes are the main referents of argument, to attack any position is automatically to insult its holder, or even to assail his or her perceived ‘rights’; every argumentum becomes ad hominem, approaching the condition of harassment, if not quite rape.” – This is the extent to which the distrust of information and questionable knowledge has led us to an almost impossible impasse.

So, again, we return to Oscar Wilde and the supreme Art of lying – the need to liberate it with unbridled abandon and delight. It is not to literally abandon facts and data altogether, which would be stupid. It’s simply to permit more fantasy, imagination, freedom for the absurd, the a-rational notions which offend us most – with greater humor, flexibility, and moral restraint.

The world is all about lying – one enormous cosmic lie – wrapped in what Alan Watts once called the “cosmic giggle.” Don’t take it too seriously, or else you’ll get caught in Herman Hesse’s “glass bead game.” So, it’s best to treat it as such. Then the lies told to us will slowly translate differently – to a theater of masks and pantomime – to be enjoyed and quickly forgotten. Upon leaving the theater it might just dawn on us that there is no ultimate truth anyway, no final theme or plot, just lots of scenes, scripts, and performers.

Now we know the meaning of the old Roman adage, fiat justitia – ruat caelum: “Do justice, and let the skies fall.”

*This reminds me of Gibran’s assertion about love: “Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love…. Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.”

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