After-Truth

Human beings, after all, provide for each other the most ingenious obstacles to what partial knowledge and minimal rationality they can hope to command.

—Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life

Romantic lie

We tend to have a romantic view of liars, or rather of those who lie, and of how and of why they and we lie. A romantic view in the sense in which Girard uses that term in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, whose French title was Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, that is, "Romantic lie and novelistic truth." Our common paradigm of the lie is willful deceit. We think the liar knows the truth, but he or she willfully hides it. The liar misrepresents what is the case to manipulate others to his or her own advantage. The liar knows something that we do not know; otherwise, he could not deceive us, for we would know the truth. Or she successfully claims an authority that she does not have, to trick us and declare that what we know is false. In short, the liar exerts his power over us and we are his victims. He is autonomous, not only in the sense that he is in control, but the liar is also autonomous, it seems, in relation to truth itself. First, in that truth does not constrain her any more than she allows it to, any more than submitting to the truth suits her; second, in that the liar has the power to make truth inoperative, so to speak, to neutralize its force and evidence. The liar so conceived is the romantic self, the autonomous hero who fascinates us, Machiavelli's prince or Dostoyevsky's Stavrogin in The Demons. The liar, unlike us his hapless victims, is powerful, independent, and in control.

This conception of lying and the liar illustrates clearly what Girard analyzed in his early works as the romantic lie: the spontaneous belief that others—in this case, liars—enjoy an autonomy that we do not have and the desire to remedy that failure and inferiority, both by denying the superiority of the other and by claiming for ourselves the autonomy and power that we resent in him or her. Our classical conception of liars and lying reflects this ambivalent relation to those we denounce, condemn, and secretly admire. On the one hand, we see lying as a failure and a sign of weakness, and on the other we see it as a sign of the independence and of the freedom of those who dare, and sometimes we even tend to consider that lying and deceit are a normal, nearly natural attribute of all those who are rich and powerful. We idolize the liars that we denounce. We grant them extraordinary, nearly suprahuman powers, as do those who believe—for I think many of them do believe—that mass shootings are elaborate mise-en-scène, staged for the benefit of the anti-gun lobby, and that the victims are but actors hired to trick and deceive us. Those who accept such conspiracy theories are in fact saying: "It is mind-boggling what great power have those who are trying to deceive us!"

The mirror image of the romantic liar is provided by those who are so convinced that they possess a fundamental truth—either political, religious, or otherwise—that they view themselves as entirely justified to lie, to dissimulate, and to mislead others in order to defend or promote the absolute truth or superior knowledge of which they think themselves the depository. As Sissela Bok writes: "They may perpetrate so-called pious frauds to convert the unbelieving or strengthen the conviction of the faithful. They see nothing wrong in telling untruths for what they regard as a much 'higher' truth."¹ They delude and trick us for our own good, they say, a good of which we are unaware, but these abuses, they think, are no fault and can do no harm for they who resort to them are invested with the truth. Such is, for example, the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's The Brother Karamazov, who hides the truth from...