Hmmm … I think what you are writing poses some good problems, your reference to the allegory of Plato and Descartes’s as an insight into reality and truth is also nice. I think the questions being posed are pertinent, what I do not think adequate are the responses.

For example, just take your title “You Live a Lie, Neo” … if the questions of how the lie is part of the truth and reality is crucial, why not respond to the problems of truth,lie, and reality on their own terms? Not from the place of the person acting them out, but from the place of the language being used to explain and construct them? Not from the people used to act them out, i.e., the ‘YOU’, the ‘NEO’, the neurotics, the psychotics, the conspiracy theorists, CIA, Mr. Bones, Hitlers, the average person, liberals, conservatives, etc. Why all the personology? Again why not pose the response to questions of truth,lie, and reality on their own terms? i.e., from the language used to formulate the problems?

You begin to do so with the question of being able to call a fork a spoon, but then switch over to personological descriptions and imagining only sociopaths do this, when actually it is ordinary and anyone who has children knows they do this intuitively with language. But again, this arbitrariness is the folly of reasoning from the place of the mask, the person, instead of constructing the problem from the place of the language being used.

For example, to construct the problem of truth and lie from the place of language, one could begin with Rene Magritte who has shown us this in his infamous painting of ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’ Or more precisely Tarski’s truth convention states the problem as:

“A fork is a spoon” is true if and only if a fork is a spoon.

Which is a perfectly reasonable and true statement that is not a lie, sociopathic, or even infantile, but a proposition of logic.

Or a kid might say:

“ A dog goes meow meow”

which is a perfectly true statement, if one adds the condition:

if and only if a dog goes meow-meow.

These constructions of the conditions of truth are being made in language, not inside people, and I would claim it is a more just way to work with the truth and reality since it shows how the ‘lie’ can be both be introduced and excluded from a careful use of language. It is not about peopling the world with masks to dramatize the lie in an everyday and unreflective use of language. On the contrary, a ‘lie’ and scandals of language can be constructed quite banally in logic, at least since Tarski. In the lack of an adequate construction, that such lies would then become personalized in modes of defense called neurotic, psychotic, liberal, conservative, etc. goes without saying. But these masks and the lies they connote as reality, follow from the fixation of this truth predicate in language, not the other way around.

In short, what I am proposing is that by constructing the language-logic problems as primary, not the personology, many of the questions on reality and truth you pose do not have to be acted out or dramatized as lies, suspicion or psychopathology of individuals or groups. No doubt, the world then becomes more banal, less obscene, less paranoiac, and maybe even less ‘real’, but more tolerable and effective once the symbolic and imaginary dimensions of reality are taken seriously, i.e., constructed.

In any case, courage …

S

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