On Monday, at one point in Antonio García Ferreras’ interview with President Pedro Sánchez (La Sexta), the dialogue entered an unintentionally deep dimension. To describe the chronic tensions with the PP and with what he calls the f atxosfera, the president claimed the truth as a political value. “Truth is reality”, he affirmed with a solemn rictus. In the end, the dialogue returned to the legal pettiness that, as a copy of electoral breaches, tries to repair the cracks caused by the most unworthy years of the process. The reference to the truth was half-buried by the din of the political and media battle. After a few days, however, it emerges as one of the few usable ideas in the conversation.
Sánchez’s approach is more political than philosophical. Opportunism, in this case, comes before conviction. It is understood that in the current context of the omnipresence of spontaneous or organized lying, the claim of truth as an irrefutable form of reality is not only transgressive but subversive. The attempt to impose the idea of ??post-truth as a transitional subject to define the current historical moment has failed. The euphemism understood as a deception has been dismantled because, despite the bombardment of propaganda, everyone has understood that the post-truth is the lie of all life. This, however, has not prevented the industry of lies from being much more powerful than that of the truth. It’s easy to explain. Lies do not need to be proven and have supersonic, cheap and lethal contagion speed. Truths, on the other hand, are more debatable and require authentication processes – science, reason and such – and many costs – money, time, mental and emotional compromise – to prevail.
The present confirms that reality no longer depends on any hierarchy of principles and scruples. The truth can be reality, as Sánchez says. But at the same time, it can turn into an arbitrary accumulation of lies. The paradox is that the prestige of the truth has degraded so much – the frivolity of the parties that define as a change of opinion what is nothing more than an opportunistic change of jacket – has also contributed, that in situations of desperation or of expropriation of an ineffective reason at the hands of populist vigor, reality, promiscuous by nature, has no problem embracing the – increasingly multitudinous – cause of the lie. Without reliable certainties, it is tempting to take refuge in the aphorism of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec: “The lie does not differ in any way from the truth; only it’s not true”. In a hypothetical imaginary fight to monopolize the throne of reality, if the contenders were the truth and the lie, which of the two do you think would win the fight, by KO or by points?
