In a famous phrase about semiotics, a very strong field of study in the 20th century, Umberto Eco shows that Manichaeism, a recent trend in history (if we think about it in millennia) has no legitimate place in technology or ethics. He is a deviation from the culture. I remember the statement. "Semiotics is in principle the discipline that studies everything that can be used to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, it cannot be moved to tell the truth: in fact, it cannot be used to 'tell' a thing "I think that the definition of a 'theory of lies' should be taken as an excellent comprehensive program for a general semiotics." (1). Truths and lies are learned, they expand after inhabiting the language of each individual, group, city, country. Wittgenstein considers lying "a language game that needs to be learned like any other". As a philosopher he says that "language disguises thought" (2).
In recent debates about the fake news, the aspects defined by Eco or Wittgenstein have been neglected. A lot of writing resumes, nolente volente, the Manichaean behavior according to which truthfulness is found entirely in a sect – ideological, religious, political – and mendacious practice would have its place in someone else’s field. Similar fanaticism generated intolerance that massacred millions in the modern age. "Good ethics" would only reside in those who share the same beliefs, the same gestures, the same words. Anyone who does not follow the same symbolic, linguistic or aesthetic codes is an enemy. This source nourished an ocean of doctrines, including Carl Schmitt's: the other is the enemy, a basic lesson of fascism (3).
It is worth remembering a hermeneutist who observed, in the role of victim, Nazi propaganda and perceived in it traces of an opposite movement, the Enlightenment. In the same impulse as Theodor Adorno and his peers, he identified elements in the writing of the Enlightenment that require maximum caution. This is Erich Auerbach. When discussing Voltaire's style, he talks about a common propaganda trick. The coup consists of "excessively illuminating a small part of a large and complex context, leaving in the dark everything else that could explain or organize that part, and which would perhaps serve as a counterweight to what is highlighted; in such a way it is apparently said to truth, since what is said is indisputable, but everything is still falsified, since the whole truth is part of the truth, as well as the correct connection of its parts" (4).
Perhaps the notion used by Auerbach has its origins in Hegel. It is customary to remember the Hegelian saying, in Phenomenology of Spirit, about the parts and the whole, in capturing the truth. Few remember that in the philosopher truth is described as the delirium of the bacchantes, a crazy wheel in which the intoxicated parts dissolve when extracted from the whole. This is where we have the origin of the Marxist passage about "what is solid dissolves". Everything is resolved into new, broader and more complex totalities. The real thing is the movement of life and death, never a one-sided experience. Other loci Hegelian explains the difference between the concrete and the abstract. Concrete is the organic whole. As in the case of a tree: its truth is constituted by soil, air, water, heat – it is important to reread Empedocles to follow the first steps of Hegel and companions, such as Hölderlin – roots, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, fruits . Separating some moments or portions is the task of abstraction. Hegel shows that the All is fleeting, never a final given in the process of searching for truth. In clashes between people, abstract is the speech that attacks subjectivities, removing them from the whole in which they move. It is characteristic of bad faith (a fascinating topic, worked on in another sense by Jean Paul Sartre) to separate the subjective, placing it as the sole target, without going through what surrounds it. A hilarious Hegelian text shows the extent of the hypocrisy that operates with such abstractions (Cf. Who thinks abstractly?, 1807).
Let us return to the critic Auerbach. The propaganda trick is easy to discover "but the people or the public lack, in times of tension, the serious will to do so; when a form of life or a human group has served its time or lost prestige and tolerance, every injustice that propaganda commits against them is received, despite having a semi-awareness of its unfair nature, with sadistic joy". Voltaire's rapid style, propaganda of the capitalist system and related institutions, against the Old Regime, serves as a platform for bourgeois thought from the 18th century onwards. To destroy the enemy, especially with ridicule, mastery of time in writing is essential . The quick time serves Voltaire to mercilessly mock "those who deserve it". Temporal management, says Auerbach, in recent days has brought "the most atrocious blooms." 20th-century propaganda speeds up the pace of messaging to crowds and also shrinks the scope of analysis. The intense use of slogans and fulminating sayings in the service of the sale and purchase of goods, and human beings, acquired the air of decisive victory from the Cold War onwards. It's the era of "I like Ike" and presidential names in abbreviation, JFK in the USA, JK in Brazil. Vocabulary brevity imposes names and messages. At the same time, in the press the number of words per article and material decreased drastically. After the Liliput operation, in the written press, came the temporal shrinkage on radio and TV. We live in Voltairean times and in it the quicker ridicule is applied to enemies, the greater cohesion in sects, the more effectiveness in slogans and slogans.
In the 18th century, ridicule kills. The sovereign market of our days fattens foolishness and takes advantage of it. For example, the Freudian and childish accents of someone who now occupies the White House. In war against democracy and the enemies (Arabs and Latins above all) of the USA, that individual had no doubts when replying to the ruler of North Korea who had claimed to have a button to impose deaths on the dominant country: "mine is bigger". Boy talk at 11 years old. But could there be greater ridicule than the statement “Trump president?” I only know one other no sense: "Fear president." As a Brazilian politician said the other day: “we don’t have a president, but a hostage”. The American sponsor of reality show worsens the revenue. When talking to parliamentarians about immigration, he said that candidates to enter the US come from countries that would be shithole countries (5). Ridiculousness and lies have been united since the human spring. But the result of that union is tragic. We laugh with Rabelais, Erasmus and Voltaire, we mourn with Hitler and propaganda in the style of fast time, Blitzkrieg ideological.
From Plato with the "noble lie" to Goebbels (reader of Greek philosophy, especially Republic) and Oliver North, the general in the Iran Contra affair who lied to the American government and people, defending such a "right" for himself (6), heading towards the ineffable Trump, lies and truth are, in politics and religious assemblies, weapons of individual and mass destruction. In the international order, lies and ridicule are part of the military and diplomatic panoply (7). In intersubjective war cases (a state that we never abandoned, with due respect to Hobbes) truth took on a new nickname, after Rousseau. Anyone who uses true one-sidedness to destroy others is "sincere". The "social networks" inhabited by "sincere". Almost everyone there tells "the truth" about their enemies, and receives equivalent payback.
Sincerity is a treacherous and covert way of deadly attack. It is neither in fact true nor false. In the folds of effectiveness and delirium, she finds her comfort. How fat and ugly you are! Sorry, I'm being sincere.... How bad your university is... how pitiful your country is, how corrupt your people are.... sorry, I'm being sincere! Under the mask of sincerity, the slanderer, the envious person, the pure fascist move. Oh, I forgot to say, sincerity wants the honors of patriotism, morality, ethics. Trump is sincere and his voters share this attitude. Every fascist is sincere, until the time when, unfortunately for them, the Nuremberg Tribunal arrives. The sincere is the hypocrite who followed the strongest armies. Such is his excuse, whose odor is of death.
-----------------------------------------------
(1) Eco, Humberto: A theory of semiotics, Indiana University Press, 1976.
(2) In the English translation (Philosophical Investigations I, Basil Blackwell, 1958): Are we perhaps over-hasty in our assumption that the smile of an unweaned infant is not a pretense? —And on what experience is our assumption based? (Lying is a language-game that needs to be learned like any other one). Victoria Camps, The lie as I assume in El discourse de la lie, CC Del Pino (Ed/), Madrid, Alianza, 1988.Schmitt, C. La notion de politique, théorie du partisan (Paris, Flammarion, 1992
(3) We have a lot to ponder about the notion of enemy, with the wave of hatred against Arab immigration in the world and in Europe. In The roots of Brazil we find a strange link between the national historian and the jurist. Cf. Márcio Seligman Silva: “On the transition from cordiality to hostility: the Paul Celan –Claire Goll case” in the Magazine Letters number 32, volume on Ethics and Cordiality, 13/05/2007
(4) Mimesis, The representation of Reality in Western Literature, Doubleday, 1957.
(5) The Washington Post, 12/01/2018.
(6) Jon Hesk, Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens, Cambridge, 2000.
(7) John J. Mearsheimer: Why leadres Lie (Oxford, 2011). Bush and his allies' noses rose with the falsehoods (believed by the North American and international press) about Saddam Hussein's “weapons of mass destruction”.
