 Truth is cheap. Not in the sense that it is worthless. But quite literally, it just is there. All that an understanding of truth requires is our ability to comprehend the world; to see how things are connected to each other, how they exist in various processes, and how they always carry within them opposing tendencies, upon whose interaction, movement is produced. Our spontaneous interaction with the world is always-already embedded in a view that sees how things are constantly changing and affecting everything else around them. It is in the schools where we learn how to disconnect things from their time and place. And this action of abstract thought, although helpful to obtain certain forms of detailed knowledge of particulars, corrupts our spontaneous awareness of the dynamic integration of reality. This is not to say that truth is simple. After all, once we are developed enough to ask the question, the bias towards disconnection and staticity would’ve already been inserted in our minds by the dominant institutions. A process of “brain washing” our “brain washing” is necessary. But nonetheless, truth is always readily available. To acquire truth there is no need to massage reality. The way the world is, is sufficient. Truth does not require makeup crews. It is. Lies, however, have a high cost of maintenance. To lie is to fabricate. To lie is to distort. It requires effort. The lie, unlike the truth, is not just there. The presence of the lie presupposes its absence. The lie is there because it wasn’t. The lie is there because the way the world was, was insufficient for the men and institutions who lie. Lies are costly. They require the wholesale creation of new worlds, based disingenuously on the world. To lie is, as Michael Parenti would say, to invent reality. The liar, which includes men and their historically determined institutions, is the demiurgos of a new universe. From the matter of the world, they provide form to a new one. But this is costly. The lie is haunted by the ever-present reality of change. Change presents the real possibility for fissures to arise in the invented world. The lie clings hopelessly on to the purity of the first moment, the moment when it fooled fools into entering its invented world. The liar must operate, out of necessity, with a purity fetish. They must resist the desecration of the sanctity of their invented world by the developments in the real world. Truth is in the attunement of our understanding of the world and the real changes in it. Lies long for Parmenidean permanence. In a real world where nothing is permanent and fixed, lies, the invented world, is constantly in an existential struggle against reality. Reality wears it out; it increases, in time, the costliness of the invented world’s survival. The lovers of purity are, consciously or not, lovers of lies. Lies are not only based on purity, that is, the pure moment when the invented world obtains followers, its own beings-in-the-world. Purity itself is a lie. They are partners in a crime against the real world, against truth. The final crack will be dealt by those who were thrown into the invented world. Their own followers will be their headsmen. It is popular to say that a “lie has no legs.” It would be more correct to say that a lie’s legs are as capable as the pocketbooks that secure the prosthetics. Billions are needed, for instance, to sustain the Zionist entity’s Hasbara program. Only a phone, a universal object in the modern world, is needed to record the truth. With millions of phones that have recorded and shared the genocide, truth has pierced, for many, the invented worlds of imperialist lies. The costly resources forwarded to sustain lies-based new worlds are no guarantee of the long-term survival of these worlds. The prosthetic, expensive though it might be, could break with constant stress. That is what the truth, the world, provides lies, the invented worlds. It provides it with a constant stress, a haunting ever-presence that looms over the invented world. At nodal points it cracks it, and like Shiva, becomes a destroyer of worlds. José Martí held that a lie can run for a hundred years, but the truth can catch up to it in a minute. In that hundred years of running, the lie felt the truth breathing down its neck, like a shadow which becomes a striking shade when the moment is right. Today the invented world of the imperialists is seeing the stress fractures of the evermore-visible truth. No amount of money will fix the prosthetic legs of their lies, of their invented worlds. The question, today, is not whether it will crack, but when. AuthorCarlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism(2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview(2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo’s Western Marxism (2024) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives November 2024
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