It can be said that a lie creates truth, even if it is false in nature. In the past, this reality was called the “world”: that cruel, capricious, and domineering world represented by man’s disorderly passions and their consequences. José Jiménez Lozano in Los cuadernos de letra pequeños writes briefly on this question: “Just because something is a montage, a lie, an ens fictum does not mean it is not a terrible machine. The four tables of a pier may be sardine boxes covered with a black cloth; on the stool of a tyrant’s throne, there are four tables and are equally covered with red velvet; but they are a throne and a gallows, and they intimidate or are death’s stools. It doesn’t help much if we know that there are four tables and that even people with not recommended or very reducible qualities can move on these tables. And it is riveted by widening its gaze towards another inseparable field from the previous one: «This is what happens in cultural racketeering; it’s nothing and his image is often ridiculous and pathetic, but oh, it works; and cause terrorism. At least that’s what causes it, in my opinion.”
The lie builds the world of power because its purpose is control and domination. On the other hand, joy emanates from the truth. Classical Greek helps us illuminate this antinomy: The words joy and grace – as Enrique García-Máiquez reminds us in his recent Gracia de Cristo – share the same etymological root, so that when the angel appeared and declared to the shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem: I’m making a proclamation of joy!” What he really means is to give the good news that a great blessing is coming. Grace and joy are closely linked, just like lies and power or worldliness if you prefer, that’s what we’re talking about after all.
It should not come to anyone’s attention that election campaign politics are a lie. Maybe – I don’t know, Scandinavians? – there are countries that have a greater moral background and react with allergies depending on what discourses. This is not our case. Here, loud words are mixed with propaganda and, worse, create reality. Of course, you can lie even when the lie is true and becomes true. Then its effects are even more harmful, because the false sense of truth is consumed, and the person does not know how to distinguish the true from the false.
Does the moral discouragement of our political class reflect a similar degradation in citizenship or is it an earlier step? In other words, are the elites responsible for the situation we are in, or is it the people who push their leaders to certain attitudes? I lean towards the first option; but after a certain threshold one and the other are fed back. We were able to confirm this in the Catalan process, another example of a political fiction book. This is also the world of the story that political scientists applaud. Interestingly: the more political science, the worse the policies. In Spain, as the distance from the modern countries of northern Europe only increases, anger, resentment and resentment feed: the pleasant fruits of lies.