Truth ≠ victory (II)

So you said that victory and truth are inimical and yet before you have said that, for example, the Aryan spiritual code is “rather die than tell a lie”—so how does this square? In the first place, there is a difference between “the truth” and “not lying”—the nature of “the truth” is debatable. As Pilate said to Christ, “What is truth?” and he was right—it’s not clear what “truth” is, let alone “the truth”.

It is better in life to be reductive—it is better to eliminate people, debts, threats, and so on than to build a “positive vision of the truth”. If you can remove all those negative influences—which you never will, but ideally—what is left over is “the good”. It’s why there’s no point in putting forward a concrete plan for utopia—it’s unimaginable, as the name itself suggests. Meanwhile, in the real world, there are numerous actual problems that could be removed—and the removal of those problems requires concrete steps, often quite complex (enough to get on with, let alone “plans for utopia”).

So there’s no contradiction between the proposition “rather die than tell a lie” and “the truth doesn’t win” (except for the meta-truth that life is war—life is about camouflage and misdirection; and that is all garnished with firepower). Camouflage and misdirection are not the same as lies—these are more like illusions. In fact, to lie is not very useful in war—or life. To understand why, just consider a figure like Andrew Tate—he’s a bullshit artist, and he’s ruthless after a fashion (he’s a warrior, maybe—he practices life as war?); except bullshit is a sound short-term policy but a negative long-term policy (you end up in a Romanian jail).

If I make myself invisible to you, does that constitute a lie? I don’t think so. I think lies are to do with language and manipulation—it’s true people do lie in war, but the lies are rarely very effective. Camouflage is actually memesis, not a lie—if I become a tree in a wood, thanks to camouflage, and you cannot see me you cannot see me because “I am” the tree (the theriomorphic priest becomes the animal-god, the shaman becomes the animal).

So I don’t see a contradiction here. I do also think about the truth as the logos, and I conceptualise that as an invisible sound with an air shimmer round it that orders and creates the universe. Now, if that is what you mean by “the truth” then, yes, it will win in the end. However, by “truth” most people mean something like “verbal statements that correspond with reality” or “the facts that correspond to the actuality”—that’s what Carlyle means when he says “the truth will win in the end”. Yet I say “the truth” in that sense is not fated to win—the only truth fated to win is the meta-truth that life is war (we live in camouflage).