On Lying

Agamben

About the liar who doesn't know he's lying

“Stalin and his subordinates always lie, at all times, under all circumstances; and since they always lie, they don't even know they are lying anymore. And when everyone lies, no one lies anymore by lying». I would like to reflect on this sentence by Boris Souvarine from his book on Stalin, because it concerns us closely. There have always been lies on the part of governments and their media and collaborators, but the consideration that Souvarine adds to his diagnosis seems to me to be decisive: lying can reach such an extreme degree that liars no longer know they are lying and, while continuing to lie, no one lies anymore.
This is what we have experienced and are still experiencing in the last three years and this is what makes the present situation in Italy not only serious and oppressive, but such that it is possible for it to get out of control and end up in an unprecedented disaster. In fact, nothing is more dangerous than a liar who does not know he is lying, because his actions lose all contact with reality. Truth and falsehood, good faith and bad faith are confused in his mind until they become indiscernible. Thus in the years of Covid, the ministers, doctors and experts who lied ended up believing their lies to such an extent that, losing all awareness of the truth, they were able to trample on the most elementary principles of humanity without any scruple. A society that loses all awareness of the threshold that separates the true from the false literally becomes capable of anything, even of destroying itself. This is what is happening for the war in Ukraine, regarding which only false news is spread. The risk here is that governments that lie, no longer knowing that they are lying, can unleash an atomic war that they thought they didn't want, but that their own lies now oblige them to believe they do.

February 22, 2023
Giorgio Agamben