The Interpretation of Lies (Part One): Neither True Nor False

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Lying has been an indispensable skill in politics since the beginning of time. In The Republic, Plato writes:

If anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good.

We see here how, from the beginning, philosophers saw that politicians should be allowed to lie. (Today, most of us accept this intuitively.) However, it is also important to note that double standards are employed. In the following paragraph, Plato writes that if the ruler catches anybody other than himself lying, that person must be punished. (We can also add to this that when a person exposes one of the Big Lies told by the government, he will be regarded as a traitor…)

Everything a politician says simultaneously conveys a lie and a truth, whether he is aware of it or not. Those who oppose him will hear the lie; those who support him will hear the truth. But neither of them will be right. Only a skilled (and well-equipped) political analyst will be able to absorb the whole, the truth and the lie together.

When a politician speaks, he is directing his words to friends and enemies at once. He is addressing supporters and non-supporters, and he needs to ensure, consciously or unconsciously, that the message delivered (and interpreted) is just right for all sides. This is especially true in a time when everything ends up online and is accessible to everyone. One is always potentially speaking to everyone on the planet. A politician who is fully transparent with his people, then, is a politician who is fully transparent with his enemies. Such a politician is bound to fail. There is no possibility of addressing his friends separately and his enemies separately. So, if one wants to have a successful career in politics, mastering the art of lying is necessary and required.

Accordingly, since the possibility of a lie is always there, then the following statement is a very reasonable one to accept: that a politician’s words are neither true nor false and are always simultaneously conveying lies and truths.

In (21st century) politics, especially because it is accessible by anyone from anywhere, every political statement is the mother of many interpretations, all of them as real (as true and as false) as the other. Retrospectively (re)visited, the meaning of each statement is different (even if it appears to have remained the same) due to parallax. Looking at an event (or a political statement) from different spacetime coordinates changes its meaning. (The meaning is not in the object itself, which in this case is the event or political statement; the meaning is the subject’s relationship with the object.)

[History, as a true historian would tell you, is not static. New evidence, whether true or fabricated, can change the whole story. How we perceive the past is the past. Historical revisionism, therefore, is an attempt to change the past into a more favorable past. And the same goes for the future. The future is not static either. Both past and future are interpreted, edited, and moderated by the present forces that control the narrative. As for the present, although it may seem like an either/or reality, it almost never is. The moment lived will be revisited and changed later depending on the political needs of the future.]

To understand politics, one must accept the simple fact that all coins are two-sided. While the supporters and their opponents argue which side of the coin holds the real value of the coin (and even try to split it), the skilled analyst knows there’s no one-sided coin and there can never be. The side of the coin that depicts the truth and the side that depicts the lie cannot be split from one another.

Moreover, the side of the coin that depicts the truth according to the supporting party is the side that depicts the lie according to the opposing party, and the side that depicts the lie according to the supporting party is the side that depicts the truth according to the opposing party. Therefore, we can say that each side of the coin has (at least) two contradictory interpretations. This means that every word uttered by a politician has two opposing sides, and each of these opposing sides has at least two interpretations.

It gets even worse when you realize that the political agendas and manifestos that are made public follow the same rules we mentioned above. They can neither be a collection of true intentions nor a collection of lies. So, the political party you are a member of may or may not align with your beliefs behind the scenes, even if on the surface it looks like you’re exactly where you belong. In fact, although this might complicate things further, we can even add that your beliefs are mere echoes of political ideologies that you have inherited or adopted over the years… You know what this means: Nothing is true, politically speaking, and worst of all, nothing is a lie.

So, how can we interpret today’s politics?

This piece was originally published on my Substack on July 26, 2025.

The Outsourcing of Thought

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We can now outsource thinking.

For those who have never thought a single thought in their whole lives, this means they finally have access to convenient, hassle-free thinking. But even if thinking is now commodified (or made absolutely free), it’s safe to assume that a significant percentage of people will still not make use of it. Whether it’s an organic mind or an artificial one, it doesn’t matter because they intend to use neither. For these individuals, thinking is like a tool forgotten in a toolbox forgotten on a dusty shelf in the garage. It’s enough for them to know that it’s there somewhere if they ever need it, (but as long as nothing is broken, no fixing will be done). These individuals were never meant to produce thoughts, and (honestly) (by the end of the day) that’s absolutely fine. We were not all born to become theoretical physicists or philosophers. Why pretend? Nevertheless, there’s a problematic category of idiots we do need to talk about (albeit briefly) before we tackle the more substantive matters. This category of [self-made?] idiots includes the ones enjoying their newfound access to thinking, and we see them producing and sharing generic thoughts they are proud of on every online platform imaginable. What they’re sharing, however, is thought pollution, aka AI slop. And although there isn’t much we can do about it, this type of (tasteless) (public) “thinking” isn’t fine at all. These garbage producers have filled the digital universe with platitudes. Because of them, going online has become like being sucked into an intellectually sterile black hole, from which nothing escapes, not even [thoughts?]. And as a fisherman of exotic thoughts, I am bothered by this very deeply. It has become excruciatingly hard to find thinking creatures that produce original thoughts.

“In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the cost incurred by the recipient. It is not enough to know how much it costs to produce and transmit information; we must also know how much it costs, in terms of scarce attention, to receive it.”1 In other words, as the readers (or the consumers of content), we are the ones paying the real price. We have limited attention-credits. And as the number of formulaic and hackneyed posts on the internet increases exponentially, our precious (and finite) attention is wasted on addictive, trite, platitudinous garbage. Of course, we know there are still original posts out there somewhere (and sometimes we really want to find them), but our optimism of actually finding them keeps dying a little more every day. For instance, is it worth reading hours of empty prose until we find one good essay, story, or article? (Is infinite scrolling anything more than “attention gambling” where we gamble our attention until we come across something really worth our attention? Let us remember, fellow gamblers, that the house always wins. Life is too short to have an average screen time that exceeds two hours a day.) “Hence,” as we can see and feel, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information that might consume it.”2 Ideally, a considerate algorithm would filter the garbage and give us the gold; however, the reality is disappointing: what the algorithm thinks is gold is the garbage, and what the algorithm thinks is unworthy of our attention is more likely to be gold than what it thinks is gold. Our best option, therefore, is to limit our time online, but doing that may slowly phase us out of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the culture industry. So, it’s a catch-22.

In Schopenhauer’s time, a big but disordered library was not as useful as a small but well-arranged one because “only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”3 Today’s world, however, is a little different. All of us have access to the biggest (and also well-arranged) library. Like a knowledge genie who lives in your pocket, an LLM can give you whatever answer you desire (as long as you prompt it properly). At the workplace, for example, your “organic” knowledge no longer has real value; what is valuable is your knowledge-retrieving skills. If you have the skills that allow you to retrieve the right information at the right time or prompt the right action at the right time, then you are, for the time being, in a really good place. Nonetheless, Schopenhauer is not only speaking about the organization of books (aka knowledge), but about how we engage with knowledge itself. The act of thinking breaks down, stress-tests, undermines, translates, and, most importantly, records its traces in your mind, so that by the time you’re done learning, the knowledge stays with you (not as mere information, but also as a tool, which means you can now use it outside the field it was born in). Conversely, if you are merely retrieving thoughts (or information) and copy-pasting them elsewhere, the thinking process, and therefore the spirit of thought, is not being recorded in your mind. What you have, then, is a simulation of thought. “Thinking has to be kindled, as a fire is by a draught, and kept going by some kind of interest in its object, which may be an objective interest or merely a subjective one.”4 Thinking is a subject that is held in the mind and constantly revisited (until it is consumed and transformed). To outsource thinking is to give up exactly this “process”. You cease being a thinking entity and turn into an entity that merely retrieves, receives, and transmits information. Simply put, you become a body through which information passes and nothing more. At best, the information that passes through you prompts you to take certain actions and rewards you when you complete those actions. Traditionally, we used to call this mind control.

[1] Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 41.

[2] Ibid. 40-41.

[3] Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 68

[4] Ibid. 68.

This piece was first published on my Substack on March 23, 2026.

The Real Nightmare Begins When You Wake Up

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

You don’t wake up from a nightmare; you wake into one. This is one of the first things we learn from reading Franz Kafka’s works.

In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up from a nightmare to find himself in one far worse than the one he was dreaming: he discovers that he has metamorphosed into a monstrous insect. In The Trial, Joseph K. wakes up to find himself arrested without committing a crime or doing anything wrong. In The Castle, K. is woken by a young man who, out of nowhere, tells him that he needs permission from the Castle to sleep where he is already sleeping because everything, including the inn, belongs to the Castle.

When you scratch the surface of (the experienced) reality, the Kafkaesque is what you’ll get. The Kafkaesque is this ridiculously complex and illogical universe that the simulation (i.e., world) we’re in is based on. Everything in the simulation is logical and can be explained to a five-year-old until you look at the code.

The simulation we’re in is the experienced reality but not reality itself, (and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a computer simulation). As Kant would put it, it is the phenomenon but not the noumenon. The simulation hides the nightmarish qualities of the Kafkaesque, which lies beneath the surface of the experienced reality and is where what doesn’t make sense doesn’t make sense again.

In the world of our experienced reality, we live as if everything makes sense, but we’re just not thinking about it at the moment, when, in reality, experienced reality will collapse as soon as we start thinking about it. That’s how you scratch its surface, by THINKING. “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined,” Albert Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus. When we start to think (to doubt), we will find ourselves standing next to Descartes, losing our minds (actually, losing everything but our minds) in a world created by some evil genius. “I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this evil genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity,” writes Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy.

When what doesn’t make sense doesn’t make sense again, that’s when we know we’re on our way to (re)discover the [what?].

Between experienced reality and reality itself, there is the Kafkaesque. All those who “exit” the simulation find themselves in it. Waking up in the Kafkaesque, however, does not mean you’re fully awake. The first time you wake up, you enter the nightmare. But the journey doesn’t end there. Beyond the nightmare, another world awaits…

Unfortunately, like Kafka’s protagonists, we eventually always choose to continue living as usual even in the nightmare, as if the status quo was never disturbed, as if everything unquestionably makes sense, as if “it’s just the way the world works”, as if “this is life”, as if there are no other ways to live than default living. That’s what makes the Kafkaesque truly Kafkaesque, living ordinarily even when we find ourselves in the extraordinary.

And just as a captive who in sleep enjoys an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that his liberty is but a dream, fears to awaken, and conspires with these agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged, so insensibly of my own accord I fall back into my former opinions, and I dread awakening from this slumber…

— Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

This piece was first published on my Substack on March 25, 2026.