As Dr. House would say – people they lie. For example, he diagnosed a venereal disease in one patient, but she steadfastly refused to admit to an extramarital affair. She lied. In order to save her life, Greg House, normally discreet in this matter, had to involve her husband in the case. My husband didn't like it too much. The patient survived, but her marriage did not. The bottom line is that people lie even when the lie goes against them or even when their lives are in danger because of the lie. Why is that? Dr. House couldn't answer this question either, but if we compare lying to makeup, we can offer a little theory that people value self-image more than the truth about themselves: it looks better if she hasn't slept with a man who isn't her husband (makeup) than if she admits she has (truth).
But that is a private lie. A lie told in public is something else. In the public space, a lie is uttered on behalf of a group, a collective, and it is often justified by a state reason (reason of state). Country is, therefore, such a serious matter that it is a sufficient reason to justify a lie, because - the assumption goes - a representative of the state who lies does so for the benefit and welfare of the same state. Unless he works for the benefit of the state, but for his own benefit. Then a problem arises, because the pursuit of private interest in the public sphere is called corruption. In that case, lie and corruption are twin sisters.
HOLY TRINITY OF DAMAGE
Truth and politics have never shown enthusiasm for each other, and somehow it has become self-evident that truth has no place in politics: politicians lie, and tell the truth only when it is useful to them. After all, as Hannah Arendt says, truthfulness has never been considered a political virtue. Does this mean, Arendt continues, that the essence of truth lies in its impotence, and the essence of politics in treachery? Well, if so, doesn't powerless truth deserve the same amount of contempt as power that doesn't care about truth? Machiavelli, for example, in his To the ruler to write that the ruler does not have to keep his word if it is in his interest, and those who, throughout history, since ancient times, tried to give dignity and effectiveness to the truth, were often subjected to ridicule, and sometimes to the effect of fire, poison, and cold or hot weapons.
The problem, however, arises when, in most cases, the connection between lies and violence is established: lies are used by rulers to justify violence by appealing to the state reason. Hitler, for example, lied that the Communists had set fire to the Reichstag. He set it on fire. But the lie served to start the pogrom of the opponents. When Vučić talks about the violence of the demonstrators, he is, of course, lying, but with that lie justice prevails over the citizens. Or, as the philosopher Andrea Perunović from the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade puts it, "the main characteristic of a public lie is that it is never as innocent as it can be in private". A private lie, Perunovć continues, "sometimes takes the form of phantasms and fantasizing, fables and afabulations that do no harm either to the one who formulates the lie or to the one to whom the lie is addressed." In contrast, "a public lie is always a matter of intentional deception, driven by political interests." And we would add: private interests as well.
When private and public become unrecognizable, it is corruption, and lies, now, together with violence and corruption, form the holy trinity of the downfall of every community. After all, where can we see this better than in Serbia, where the citizens allowed the country to become hostage to the private interests of a man who has not yet been determined to have spoken the truth, but because of that he made a state project out of corruption, and now defends that project with violence.
WHO DOESN'T LIE, IS NOT A BITCH
Although, along with Russia, Serbia is perhaps the most extreme nursery of lies in Europe, with authoritarian regimes and their lying language, the field of struggle is expanding.
"In the discourses of authoritarian, populist, right-wing and extreme right-wing regimes today," says Perunović, "we notice two predominant modes of lies: denial and renunciation. These two modes of lies are based on two psychological phenomena: denial and renunciation. Lies as denial are found in right-wing discourses at every corner - denial of climate change or denial of social inequality are only two very widespread examples that show that Freud's famous remark (paraphrasing) - 'when the patient tells you that the woman in his dream is not his mother, be sure, it is his mother' - analytically valuable and in the political discourse. Let's just remember the case of Rio Tinto: 'there will be no Jadar project', it meant exactly the opposite: there will be a Jadar project (for now, though, only on the level of intention)."
Denial, however, is even more prevalent in modern strategies of lies and lying. "Psychologically speaking", continues Perunović, "denial is a characteristic of psychotic epistemological structures in which the subject simply cuts off and removes a part of the Real that does not suit him. Most often, that part of the real is the pillar on which rests the entire symbolic order (and thus the truth). Denial can be summed up, approximately, in the following formula: I know very well how things are, but still... It is precisely this kind of psychotic structure of political subjectivity that allows Trump to talk about 'migrants who eat domestics' pets', to Kir Starmer 'that Britain has become an island of foreigners' and similar things, and that it has a political impact, even though it is a matter of notorious lies. So, a lie with a modus operandi receives a very specific type of immunity: and when it is recognized as a lie, it does not lose its effectiveness".
However, can the same model be applied to public spaces where there is not even the possibility of truth being opposed to lies? In America, the battle for public space is taking place, and even a compulsive liar like Trump is not doing well: he did not succeed in trying to cover up his connections with Harry Epstein and his preferences for very young women. Republican mechanisms are still functioning in Great Britain, and Keir Starmer and how he has to watch what he says. In other words, in European democracies, political lying is prohibited, so if a public official is caught in a lie, there is a way - free public space, media pressure, finally the judiciary - to expose it and, appropriately, punish it. However, there is nothing on the ruins of the Serbian republic. Lying is normalized. Lying has become an inviolable and recommendable virtue. Whoever does not lie is not with us (with them). He who does not lie is not a liar.
WHERE DOMINANCE LIES FROM?
The lie prevails because of a twentieth-century invention that, it is true, has received the deserved and due attention, but not the antidote: the organized lie. Before totalitarian regimes, the idea that a lie could prevail was unthinkable. Georges Clemenceau, one of the presidents of the French government during the First World War, not yet knowing, as Hannah Arendt says, "about the art of rewriting history", could imagine and assume the darkest lies, but not that factual truths - such as the statement: "Germany attacked Belgium in August 1914" - could be bypassed. That, Clemenceau declared, would forever remain true. Except he won't.
In a system of organized lies, such as the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, the truth is not worth a penny. The truth is simply not important. "Truth lies", however, it is. If a leader says something, let's say 150.000 people took to the streets to support him, it doesn't matter if it's 7000: the leader's version, regardless of the fact that it's an outright lie, has to be converted into the truth. It is precisely from the experience of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century that disturbing conclusions can be drawn: neither is the truth such a solid quantity, nor is a lie inferior to the truth.
"If lies prevail today in the public, i.e., political space", says Andrea Perunović, "there are conditions for this that do not only concern politics or specific political circumstances, but a fundamental paradigm shift in the way we believe and learn about the world around us and the opportunities in it. If the era from the Enlightenment to modernism was marked by (good) faith in (scientific, factual) Truth, and postmodernism brought the deconstruction of great narratives about Truth and the possibility of the existence of multitudes interpretative truths, things are completely different today. If truth was once a matter of widespread faith in firmly established facts, or later the result of critical observations of facts, today truth has become a phenomenon that relies exclusively on the faith and belief of the subject who advocates for it."
In other words, faith in the facts has been shaken. The factual statement "Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914" derived its strength from the fact that it needed no context to be true: nothing could happen to make the statement false. It is valid always and everywhere. But the world has stepped into the age of post-truth, that is - one might say - the age of interpretation, which erased the border between truth and lies. How did that happen? Well, the totalitarian orders of the twentieth century were a good preparation for what we live today. The media pressure is so great - on the one hand, well controlled, as in Serbia, on the other hand, left to the Internet overabundance in which there are no landmarks - that, simply, there is not enough good and safe space for the truth. The petty contradictions that caught up with anti-vaxxers at the time of corona - he got seriously ill because he did not receive the vaccine for reasons only available to him, but he inevitably seeks the help of doctors, modern medicine and science - such contradictions, therefore, do not excite disoriented people.
HOW TO FIGHT AGAINST LIES?
With the flood and normalization of lies, not only the relationship between truth and lies is called into question, but the entire infrastructure that rests on truth and is called reality. A lie, therefore, claims to be what it is not. Or that it is not what it is. The lie itself is therefore a nihilistic gesture: it cancels reality.
"In order to establish the truth, it is no longer necessary to turn to some external reality and its rules," says Perunović, "but the 'truth' is supposedly always already 'within us.' for whom deception has become a paradigm of political action, lying is not morally problematic. In a political arena in which everyone, or almost everyone, intentionally and unscrupulously deceives, the value of false statements is equated with the value of true ones."
If the lie is legitimized, it means that there is no space in which the lie and the truth would face each other, or that space - the free public space - is being destroyed in all possible ways. There is no free public space in Serbia. It doesn't even exist in Russia, for example. Not even in China. In America, Trump turned with all his might to the "public cause", the republic. And that is expected. Because the stronghold of truth is precisely the free public space. No one can be forbidden to lie, just as no one can be forbidden to tell the truth. But the truth can be buried with lies - the example of the Serbian assembly, for example, where the loud majority drowns out every voice of truth.
"You can fight against lies", says the interlocutor of "Vremen", today you can only fight with paresian practice, that is, speaking the truth in the face of power.
However, in order for this struggle to be truly purposeful and effective, it must be part of the broader struggle for radical democratic values, among which the primacy of disagreement is the main determinant of political life. So, when we stop looking at consensus (agreement) as the only measure of the effectiveness of political action (even if it is a negative consensus, as is most often the case today), when we abandon the logic of trust/distrust as the dominant matrix of political reasoning and return the possibility of thoughts and opinions, reflection and resonance to the public space, we will also return the possibility of returning the truth to the public space. So, democratic, horizontal agonism, against authoritarian, dogmatic antagonism".
In other words, it is possible to lie in a free public space, but it is also possible to counter lies with the truth. Diplomatic games of deception, precise and imprecise wording, distortion of the truth, or open lying - all of this is part of the game that in free countries ends up taking place in the public space. That is why representatives of democratic orders are careful what they say. Non-free countries, like Serbia, do not have that filter. This is why, after all, dictatorships destroy public space. Without a free public space, without a republic, lies prevail.
