Tag: History

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

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

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 Real Nightmare Begins When You Wake Up

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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.

Ungovernment: Mirroring the Presupposition that the Governed Are Evil

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

Since governments presuppose that humans are (or have the capacity to do) evil,1 the governed must reciprocate by presupposing all government forms to possess dystopian potentialities. The governed must take this position because those who govern are also human, therefore deserving of the same presupposition. However, even if the government is not run by humans, the governed individual’s position must remain the same. All governments, especially the ones that are run by non-humans (i.e., artificial intelligence), are control, control-optimization, control-maximization systems. All governments have (hidden) utopian tendencies, which are, of course, sublimations of dystopian drives.

Governments, by (their artificial) nature, work to increase order. More externally imposed order means less freedom for the individual, and Absolute Order equals zero freedom. When the needle moves towards Absolute Order, roboticization of humans takes place; when the needle moves towards Absolute Chaos, animalization of humans takes place. In the former, man is treated as a machine; in the latter, as an animal. Both are forms of dehumanization. The good government, therefore, is the one which is able to hold the needle right in the middle; however, governments, being what they are, are built to pull the needle towards Absolute Order. That is why we need something we’ll call ungovernment (for now), which is an institution (or a yet undefined thing) whose role is to remove unnecessary control and restore agency, responsibility, and decision-making to individuals. [Note: the ungovernment is nested within the government like anti-production is nested within production in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.]

Similar to systems of order (or negentropy) like governments, we need systems of chaos (or entropy) like ungovernments. We can imagine these two systems running simultaneously in every city (or country) against one another, keeping the balance between order (a safe unfreedom) and chaos (an unsafe freedom). Unfortunately, no such thing as ungovernment exists yet; therefore, when order (crosses the red line and) becomes unfreedom, the governed must rebel even if life has become more comfortable under the tyranny of utopian dreams.

The governed, of course, need the government for society to exist, but they also always need a failsafe: they must retain the capability to rebel against and overthrow any government when its governing methods (or results) become unbearable, unbearably comfortable, or simply unacceptable. [How can we forget the opening sentence of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man? “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”] Whatever the system, there must be a failsafe, some prospect of (manually initiated) anarchy; otherwise, humanity is doomed.

The ideal government must, in theory, be invincible — at least, aim to be invincible — against law breakers and enemies, yet it must remain vulnerable to the will to freedom of its people. To repeat: The government must have the power to protect its citizens from each other and from others AND provide space for freedom, i.e., chaos. To repeat again: Even though the government is preferably seen (and, in ideal scenarios, even is) invincible against its enemies, it is crucial for it to have that Achilles’ heel: It must be vulnerable to the will to freedom of its citizens. Otherwise, it is an evil government.

All that has been said so far requires an impossible balancing act. It’s an eternal game of tug of war. On one side, we have the government; on the other side, we have the governed (or the ungovernment). If any of the sides loses or gives up pulling on the rope, the game of civilization ends.

Today’s governments will not openly admit that their systems presuppose men are evil, that you, the governed citizen, are evil. At the same time, however, any reasonable person understands that governments cannot operate effectively without taking this reality into consideration. Governments need to presuppose that humans are (or have the capacity to do) evil. To have order, the problematic human nature (codes of entropy) needs to be contained by laws (codes of negentropy); otherwise, there will be chaos. Governments are primarily there, therefore, to bring the (potentially chaotic) freedom in man under control and impede entropy. But even if this is, in general, a good thing, the governed must always keep an eye on the government… because as soon as the governed individuals stop pulling on the rope, as soon as they let the government do what it does best, they will find illusory peace and comfort but gradually (and surely) lose their freedom.

[1] Let us quickly confirm that a majority of political thinkers align on the idea that men carry the seed of ruin in them, that they are wicked when left unchecked.

That is our first step: to prove that, according to governments, man is a body of potential evil deeds (who, if governed properly, can be turned into a productive machine). We can do this swiftly by quoting a few influential political thinkers I happen have on my desk right now (who, in turn, have summarized the views of the greats who came before them).

In The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt writes:

What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being. This can be easily documented in the works of every specific political thinker.

In Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli writes:

As all those who write about civic matters show and as all history proves by a multitude of examples, whoever organizes a state and establishes its laws must assume that all men are wicked and will act wickedly whenever they have the chance to do so.

And without getting carried away, and to have a little fun, we can also quote the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. In his collection of essays called On Human Nature: Essays in Ethics and Politics, we read:

Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast. We know it, if only in the business of taming and restraining him which we call civilization. Hence it is that we are terrified if now and then his nature breaks out. Wherever and whenever the locks and chains of law and order fall off and give place to anarchy, he shows himself for what he is.

Of course, these aren’t the only quotes found. One can easily quote from Hobbes’s Leviathan, too, where without a common power to keep people “in awe” every man is at war with every man.

That should be enough. But since we’re already here, we can also take a moment to go back further in time and see what Plato had to say in The Republic. In Book II, Glaucon tells the story Gyges to show Socrates that “all men who practice justice do so against their will, of necessity, but not as good.” In the story, Gyges, who was a shepherd, finds a ring that could turn him invisible whenever he wanted. Since, as Glaucon argued, “no man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked,” Gyges goes and slays the king and takes over the kingdom. Glaucon then adds, “If you could imagine anyone obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot.”

Long story short, the idea that man is wicked when left unchecked is as old as civilization.

This piece was first published on my Substack on April 17, 2026.