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Lying leads to our self-destruction




According to St. Augustine, lying is above all an intention of the soul and does not depend on the thing-in-itself. Ex animi enim sui sententia, non ex rerum ipsarum veritate vel falsitate mentiens aut non mentiens iudicandus est [1]

Augustine's observations are valid because they are made with reference to conscience, that is, to what enunciates an indication in order to distinguish what is good and what is bad.

But what is going to happens when this medium of reference vanishes and consciousness as such, in-itself, is missing, because the reference values that signal what is good or bad are vanished, evaporated?

The very tenet of Augustine that in order to lie there must be the intention to lie has become invalid. Because whoever lies, living in an environment, in a society in which lying is the very foundation of that society, becomes part of that constant and paroxysmal reiterated system of lies yo such extent that he lies in a so constant exasperated and extreme way that in the end he doesn't even know perceive and acknowledges any longer he's lying [2].

Giorgio Agamben in an entry on his blog [3] explains it well with an example: "in the years of Covid, the ministers, doctors and experts who lied ended up believing their lies to such an extent that they completely lost conscience of the truth, and therefore they have been able to trample, without any scruple, on the most elementary principles of humanity. A society that loses its entire awareness of the threshold that separates the true from the false literally becomes capable of anything, even of destroying itself.


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[1] DE MENDACIO LIBER UNUS 3,3 "From what one's soul proclaims, and not from the truth or falsehood of the thing-in-itself one must judge who lies or who does not"

[2] Giorgio Agamben Sul mentitore che non sa di mentire: "Stalin and his subordinates always lie, in every moment, in every circumstance; and since they always lie, they don't even know they're lying anymore. And when everyone lies, no one lies anymore by lying "

[3] Ibid.

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