What About The Lying..

March 11, 2017 Jerry King Comments 0 Comment

The comment heightened my awareness. “What about the lying…?”—-a query with a tone of uncertainty, a Freudian slip, — concluding after thought by a Trump supporter. The interview was coming to an end, and the resident of Charlotte had just spoken his full-throated support for the president. And then came the hint of doubt.

Nietzsche offers some insight into the matter of lying.

…the history of an individual science finds a clue in it’s development
for understanding the common processes of all “knowledge and cognition.”
It’s the rash hypothesis, the fictions, the good dumb will to “believe,”
the lack of distrust and patience that are developed first.
Our senses learn only late, and never learn entirely,
to be subtle, faithful, and cautious organs of cognition.
Our eye finds it more comfortable to respond
to a given stimulus by reproducing once more an image
that it has produced many times before,
instead of registering what is different and new
in an impression.
The latter would require more strength,
more “morality.”

Hearing something new
is embarrassing and difficult for the ear.
Foreign music we do not hear well.
When we hear another language we try
involuntarily to form sounds into words
more familiar and more like home to us.
What is new finds our senses, too,
hostile and reluctant.
Even in the “simplest” processes of sensation
The affects dominate,
such as fear, love, hatred,
including the passive affects of laziness.

Just as little do we see a tree exactly.
—with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form.
It is so very much easier for us to simply to improvise
some approximation of a tree.
We make up the major part of the experience
and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate
some event as its “inventors.”

All this means: basically and from time immemorial
we are — accustomed to lying.
Or to put it more virtuously
and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly:
One is much more of an artist
than one knows.