The cosubstantial lie

Yes I'm aware "the English spelling is con-", but convention among ignoramuses doesn't establish correctness. There's a meaning and a point to these latin structures, you don't spell it "consubstantial" anymore than you go about writing "cotradiction".

I was discussing the occult communism article with a fellow. He, no spring chicken, deplored passionately the truthfullness of the description, basically that's why he called me, to scream his dolorous despair, and to find whence it comes, is it a manifestation of original sin, our Golgotha as human beings ? Yes, the fellow was in the Peasant's Partyⁱ and would like to still be, if there was a way, but that's a different topic.

Well, no. I don't think it's punishment and I don't think it's Golgotha. I think it's simply and entirely a manifestation of the lie cosubstantial to the human race.

Because the principal quality of man, as being and as species, is the ability to lie. No, not intelligence, banal tool of mendacity, not the only nor the best necessarily. No, not playⁱⁱ, no, not speechⁱⁱⁱ, no, not the ability of creating or using tools. All these are mere facets, mere gear, but methods in the lengthy, bottomless business of lying.

Which, to understand each other, is not in itself evil. Take now, for instance. The Winter's here, it's cold outside. Are you cold ? Oh, you aren't cold. Why not ? Ah, you've a heater.

You're not cold because you're lying. Outside it is cold, but in your room, a small, negligible space in which you go about, it's warm. That warmth's not some kind of truth, that warmth's some kind of lie. Truth awaits you outside, 10 degrees. Will you open the window to let truth in ? Maybe later, huh ?

A mouse lacks your ability to lie about the temperature, and therefore manages as best he can. For instace about this time of the year he is drawn towards your lies. The freedom of the field may have its uses, but in the Winter man's lies aren't entirely insufferable either. Ain't that a wonder. A box of chocolates has no ability to lie about the temperature, and as such manages as best it can : by not giving a shit. Ain't that another wonder.

Can man fly ? No, he can't, just like a mouse or a box of chocolates can't. But unlike the mouse, and unlike the box of chocolates, man can lie about flying. Dons a pair of wings, stuffs an engine up his butt and looky - he's now flying! But man's flight is no truth, man's flight is a lie. The truth's the shards of stone biting through the fallen fuselage. If flight weren't a lie, the fall wouldn't be possible. Looky that not flight, but stone's the truth. Flight is the lie.

Man lies everywhere and in all he does. He goes to get married ? He promises eternal love, but he knows not such a thing, as it hasn't happened yet. Every promise is a lie through its very structure, being about the future, and so in all you promise you lie.

Some lies end poorly, fallen and chewed up by the rock, swallowed by judges and lawyers, but not all. Man lies so much and has been lying for so long that he's built himself rules for lying. All technology, and all math and all physics and all law are naught else but the rules of lying. A guide : how to lie and get away with it. That's what automotive fiability^iv tests do : they let us check if we've lied convincingly enough. That's what material resistance calculations are, as well as any other engineering preoccupation : deploying lies in conditions of relative security. And science's altogether the business of producing lies, more or less applicable. Every mathematician and every physicist and every sane head can tell you that their science's no truth, but an approximation thereof. Which is to say : a lie.

There exist, rarely, those individuals who refuse to lie from the get-go. They won't swear, they won't promise, in the end hermitage is precisely a fight with this very simple basis of human nature, but a fight destined to failure, as any hermit can confirm for you. There's no water that won't flow even should it be currently stagnant, and just so there's no man who doesn't lie. If you think about it, what bothers you when your mate "cheated"^v isn't, as you might pretend, "the lies". It's the stupidity.

That is to say the poor quality of the lie, that's what annoys you - not the plane crashing but that apparently the imbecile imagined such a concoction of boogers and willow leaves had any hope of flying. And that's why you want to be rid of them, not because they "wounded you", but because you don't want to further deal with an idiot. Of course this whole reasoning is in practice covered up with "emotion", but they're lies as well, small simplified artefacts that have the advantage of saving the untrained mind the effort of understanding what's going on. Emotions are, if you will, the way in which your subconscious taps you condescendingly on the shoulder and tells you "don't you worry your pretty face with any of this".

Given this fundamental understanding, let's regard two practical considerations. The man, whether his name's Marin or Liviu, goes out for drinks with other people. With his friends, or with some guy who used to be angry for running into his wife fucking this guy but in the end they patched it up and went for drinks, with his father, with his son, with his brother, with some stranger going through town or a classmate from junior high. As such, he forms a familiarity with other people, he's drunk beer with a thousand or two or five or ten, understands people, feels them, empathizes. Yet he never went out for drinks with money, just like he's never had drinks with a box of chocolates, or a mouse.

As such, it's really difficult for him to understand that money, these things like mice or boxes of chocolates, set the rules, and the people, those he takes out for drinks, and understands and feels and with whom he empathizes must obey. It's simply difficult, it's counterintuitive.

On the other hand, communism is a common and adequate state in many cases. If three of us go to the restaurant, nobody's going to count how much salad and how much mineral water each drank. The bill's gonna come a few hundred, we'll split it three ways if we're not likely to meet again or one picks it up if we are and that's that. The rankest communism. Me and the girls in the harem, you and your wife plus the children if you have them live in the plainest communism. We don't fine the girls 10 coins every time they leave the toilet seat down after they use it, just like they don't demand something every time we interrupt their watching the game. We don't pay for soup by the spoon nor do we charge for carrots by the stick.

Same at work, in an office of ten people or a production floor of a hundred, same at whatever amusement, a bar or a sports game, everyone's equal and simply people, whose preferences matter equally and whose opinions form hierarchies by how much sense they make, not by who emits them. Man's life is mostly spent in small groups, and consequently man mostly lives in communism.

It is therefore very difficult to intuit that what can be done in a family of two or in a harem of five or in a team of 11 or in a city-state of a thousand can not be done, never and no matter what, in a country of a million or ten or a hundred.

As it happens, the aggregate intelligence of a group of people scales logarithmically with the headcount, while the aggregate intelligence of money scales exponentially with the count. Money's like those rats in Baldur's Gate, negligible in small groups, but capable of high level spellcasting when gathered in larger groups.

Both these ideas, somewhat similar but nevertheless distinct are inadherent to human mind, they're both counter-intuitive. Only a vast experience and a far seeing analytical eye allows someone to understand why the lie of communism as a social order is impossible nonsense, whereas the lie of the household or the sports team is not just possible, but even optimal, depending on context.

This is why communism as an idea of political theory doesn't die, and will never die. And this is why it always finds supporters and proponents, dudes who discovered warm water yesterday and erroneous extrapolation^vi today. It's not a curse, it's not a sin, it's naught else than the normal if naive manifestation of humans in humanity.^vii

1. This is a Romanian artefact entirely unfit for brief explanation. It was a political party in the 19th and early 20th century, as well as a social movement and philosophical conception of reality (not principally social reality, either). They were outshined by the local fascists, especially in the late stages, but it was a hollow, cribsheet-powered sort of superiority. In modern terms they'd perhaps sound mostly centrist, like the christian-democrat gargle of "the civilised world", I guess. That's the direction the "official" club of reenactors tried to go after 1989, at least. I was and remain broadly unconvinced it can be expressed in any meaningful sense in the system of ideal objects prevalent after the war. They'd have voted for Alf Landon, most likely (which is why they're not around anymore).

   If you are curious - this is a piece from their official gazette for the county of Arad (approximately, the equivalent of the Republican Wisconsin paper sort of thing), August 1929 (with benefits). [↩]

2. The original contains the adnotation "Hiclal" in paranthesis. Much to my dismay, I have no fucking idea what this is supposed to mean. It is the first time in eight years of Trilema that I run across this distressing situation, a heavy portent of sad things to come. [↩]
3. Given man to hide his thoughts (it's a Persian reference). [↩]
4. Apparently this word is unknown in English. That's unfortunate - it's still a word. [↩]
5. In Romanian this is rendered as "a insela", literally to trick, to deceive, to lie. [↩]
6. What, you thought "global warming" and "hockey stick patterns" were some sort of novel nonsense ? If only. [↩]
7. On which topic see also And they won't fucking yield. [↩]