At one point in Antonio García Ferreras' interview with President Pedro Sánchez (last Monday, on La Sexta), the dialogue entered an involuntarily deep dimension. To describe the chronic tensions with the PP and what he calls the fachosphere, the president claimed truth as a political value. “The truth is reality,” he stated with a solemn expression. Next, the dialogue returned to the loop of legal pettiness that, based on electoral failures, attempts to repair the damage caused by the most unworthy years of the process. The reference to the truth was half buried by the noise of the political and media battle. As the days go by, it becomes one of the few useful ideas in the conversation.
Sánchez's approach is more political than philosophical. Opportunism, in this case, takes precedence over conviction. It is understood that in the current context of omnipresence of spontaneous or organized lying, the vindication of truth as an irrefutable form of reality is not only transgressive but also subversive. The attempt to impose the idea of post-truth as a transitional subject to define the current historical moment failed. The euphemism understood as a hoax has been dismantled because, despite the propaganda, everyone has understood that post-truth is the lie of a lifetime. That, however, has not prevented the lie industry from being much more powerful than the truth industry. It's easy to explain. Lies do not need to be proven and have a supersonic, cheap and lethal speed of contagion. 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 become an arbitrary accumulation of lies. The paradox is that the prestige of the truth has been so degraded – the frivolity of the parties that define as a change of opinion what is only an opportunistic change of jacket has also contributed to this – that in situations of desperation or expropriation of a reason ineffective in the hands of populist vigor, reality, promiscuous by nature, has no problem embracing the cause – increasingly multitudinous – of lies. Without reliable certainties, one wants to take refuge in Stanislaw Jerzy Lec's aphorism: “A lie is no different from the truth; only that it is not true.” In a hypothetical imaginary fight to monopolize the throne of reality, if the candidates were truth and lies, which of the two do you think, by K.O or by points, would win the fight?
