Ordinary lies (and lying) in the post-truth age

"Language is the most dangerous of possessions given to man," said the famous German poet Hölderlin. Truly, we find our existence in language, we are positioned within language. We live within the realities we construct with language.

This characteristic of language is in fact made possible by people who speak the same language, who find an opportunity for exchange in the speaking of the same words, and who take part in this sharing.

What makes the word, or language, dangerous is that the word can fulfill its function without having to correspond one-to-one with reality. It is clear that a healthier human community forms through the sharing of a language that points to the truth. But the absence of this condition, the fact that a word that has come out of people's mouths emptily and gained the value of sharing and exchange can also build reality, is the opening that makes language dangerous. "It was, in the end, a word that came out of their mouths, but as it was pronounced, spoken and heard again and again, it grew and grew and turned into a reality (a perception of reality)," says the Glorious Qur'an (in meaning) about the idolatrous claims of the polytheists.

I think we see much better, in the age described as post-truth, that there is almost no limit before the word to break away completely from reality and create an entirely different reality.

On this occasion, let us also state that there is nothing post, that is, nothing new and original, about the age called post-truth. We can find from history a thousand and one kinds of examples of how the word, in its most dangerous aspect, can create a reality for itself without even coming near reality, and make people live inside that virtual reality.

While ideologies bring themselves into being through shared delusions, they also create this perception of reality for people. Today, in the age called post-truth, we may encounter perhaps different pronunciations, techniques and instruments of language, but despite all these techniques and instruments, the propaganda methods based on the most banal, crudest and most shameless distortion of reality have not been abandoned altogether.

Because this way, while the crudest, is the surest way of deceiving precisely because it is the most primitive. You will tell a big lie, and if no one believes it you will tell a bigger one, so that perhaps it becomes even easier for people to believe the smaller one, or more. People's motivations for believing a lie are never lacking. Every lie put up for sale has a willing buyer.

WHAT LANGUAGE GAMES CAN TURN THE TRUTH OF JULY 15 UPSIDE DOWN?

What we have heard recently from the mouths of CHP members or FETÖ members regarding July 15 are typical examples showing how unnecessary the distances between word and reality are. On the anniversary of July 15, CHP's Engin Özkoç was able to utter this: "While Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pushed the nation out into the streets on July 15 and he himself hid, the CHP Chairman and members of parliament had set out to go to the Grand National Assembly."

Never mind that this utterance makes those who were inside the process and lived through it laugh bitterly, that they find this word as absurd as can be. The word, in its most dangerous, most narcotic, most deceptive form, has already been sold to its buyer. There are masses, there are international circles that would give the world for such a lie. Do not say, what would they not give for the truth of this word; they are not even interested in the truth of it.

Frankly, no one could have expected that, relying on the atmosphere of consensus that emerged immediately after the July 15 incident, plain for all to see, which no one in the conditions of that day could object to, the maxim "nothing will ever be the same again" would remain valid forever. That consensus was directly proportional both to the violence of the event and to the actual force of the truth. But as time passed, political stances managed to assign themselves entirely different directions even from within such a magnificent, founding event.

Immediately after the dissolution of an environment in which all the crimes were in flagrante (meshud), the propaganda apparatuses, which began operating at full capacity, started writing entirely different stories about the event. They began to narrate otherwise the events that people had lived through in person, in flesh and blood. The content produced by FETÖ members on social media, in Turkish or in other languages, found the audacity to narrate otherwise events that took place before the eyes of the world on the July 15 Martyrs Bridge and that retained no hidden side. They have no qualms at all about anyone denying them, or about the hundreds of thousands of witnesses, documents and videos that could refute them.

IF THERE WAS NO SYRIAN IN THE INCIDENT, WRITE THE SYRIAN INTO THE INCIDENT

Once you rely on the concealing, reality-constructing illusion of the word, and once the veil of shame has been torn, there is no verse that cannot be denied, no word that cannot be distorted, no reality that cannot be turned upside down, no slander that cannot be hurled.

For example, the mine-head (mayın kafa), who has fixated on the oppressed refugees and is looking for a way to produce heroism out of racist rancor and hatred toward them, upon failing to find the bad examples, crimes and violations he hoped for from Syrian refugees, has fallen into a rush to attribute every violation he hears of to Syrian refugees. One day he presents a squabble among children somewhere, in which one child threw acid at another, as "a Syrian child threw acid in the face of a Turkish child"; another day, from an ordinary argument at a housing complex's pool, he makes a sensational report: "15 Syrians tried to get into a housing complex's pool, beat up the residents who objected and fled." If you ask about the facts of the incident, you have already fallen into the trap of the word-acrobat mine-head. The incident itself is contrary to the very nature of what is called an incident. In the investigation conducted, it was understood that no incident like the one described had taken place, and that there was no Syrian in what did take place.

You can disperse; the mine-head is on duty anyway, and will continue, as a full-fledged informer, to incite, and to produce the reality you desire with a barker's spokesmanship and put it at your service.

They say post-truth, but that sounds too fancy. This is, in its most primitive, most archaic form, plain dirty lying.