Students of Friedrich Nietzsche, or those who consort with such dubious people, will recognize the source of my title. It is the English version of the title Nietzsche employed for his early, unfinished essay Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne (1873).
The essay made a splash among pampered graduate students who endeavored to relieve the boredom of their humdrum lives with dreams of derring-do. Consider the essay’s opening:
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.
Cozy, armchair nihilists just love that sort of thing. They repeat such slogans to themselves while primping before first dates, seldom wondering why there never seems to be a second.
Cosmological angst was not Nietzsche’s only sweetmeat on offer in this essay, though. Even more popular were his epistemological-moral musings. This is the key passage:
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
In short, says Nietzsche, “to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors.” From a moral perspective, he concludes, “to tell the truth” is “the duty to lie according to a fixed convention.”
Such observations are like catnip to aspiring relativists. Who knew that Kamala Harris, vice president of the United States, was a deacon in this church of cosmic futility?
Well, I am not sure that Harris herself is a paid-up member of this cynical coven. But her stage managers and stunt doubles certainly are.
When it comes to lying “according to a fixed convention” and calling the result “truth,” Harris is an inveterate if febrile purveyor of the fodder she is fed. Her debate with Donald Trump last week on ABC was, from one point of view, a dog’s breakfast, but, from another, it was a mesmerizing exercise in vertiginous, pseudo-Nietzschean legerdemain.
As has become widely recognized, the debate was really a sort of ambush in which the execrable immoderators blatantly took sides, constantly “fact-checking” Trump with erroneous objections while letting Harris slide with a steady stream of lies emitted according to the fixed convention of Democratic talking points. As I said at the time, the real loser in that exchange was ABC News, whose credibility is now in the gutter.
Various public-spirited people, from media stars like Laura Ingraham to ordinary citizens with an X account, have come forward to provide inventories of Harris’s—and the moderators’—lies. One of the most complete was provided by @BelannF, who posted this useful inventory in paratactic summary:
Project 2025 – Lie
National abortion ban – Lie
“Very fine people” hoax – Lie
Will be a Dictator – Lie
Blaming Trump for Afghanistan- Lie
Racism and division by Trump – Lie
Never said she will ban fracking – Lie
Rally goers leaving early – Lie
“I will go over my plan” – Lie
Police died on Jan 6th – Lie
“Bloodbath” comment – Lie
Trumps stance on IVF – Lie
Won’t take guns – Lie
Trump weak on foreign policy – Lie
Trump friends with Putin, Un – Lie
Trump inciting Jan 6. – Lie
No military in combat zones – Lie
She provides no sources for these assertions, but you can look them up in a nonce. I’ll go first with three to get you started. Early on in the evening, Harris angrily recycled one of the most thoroughly “debunked” (i.e., refuted) claims: that Trump said there were “very fine people” on both sides at the neo-Nazi demonstration at Charlottesville. Here’s a video clip of his remarks. Far from describing the thugs as “very fine people,” he castigated them in the strongest terms. Then why is this lie so frequently recycled? Perhaps it is a political application of the old adage repititio mater memoriae: “Repetition is the mother of memory.” If you repeat a lie often enough people come to believe it, or half believe, or at least wonder about the veracity of its contrary.
Harris also claimed that Trump said there would be a “bloodbath” if he were not elected. But what he actually said was that the auto industry would face a financial bloodbath if the Biden-Harris administration’s climate policies were enacted. And so they would.
Perhaps my favorite lie was her claim that there were no active-duty American military personnel in a war zone at present. Anyone who reads the news knows that is not true, as these American soldiers testified with refreshing candor.
What has been fascinating to watch is how the post-debate consensus has evolved. At first, many commentators, while lamenting ABC’s abysmal and unprofessional performance, thought that Harris got the better of Trump. As the days passed, however, that view began to collapse before the mounting evidence that, outside the echo chambers of the media, Trump was widely considered to have won. The great Hugh Hewitt briefly outlined the common evolution from “Trump-lost-to-you-know-what,-Trump-won” on his show.
Then there was the equally great Scott Adams, whose trajectory closely tracked Hugh Hewitt’s: “I’m revising my debate scoring,” Adams said on X. My first impression was a tie, which I called a Harris victory.” Then he changed his mind. Why? It was because of the meme that is sweeping the internet even as I write.
But the only thing I recall about the debate today is “They’re eating the dogs.”
Visual. Scary. Viral. Memorable. Repeatable. And directionally correct in terms of unchecked immigration risk.
It’s the strongest play of the election.
Trump won the debate.
I gotta stop underestimating his game. Trump had no base hits in the debate but his long ball is still rising. Incredible.
Harris may be an accomplished liar. I’d wager Trump would win plaudits from Nietzsche for his visceral rhetorical skill.
The very first impression I had after the debate is that the viewers were dealing with another Jussie Smollett. Harris is a fabrication. She would turn both Nietzsche and Ayn Rand inside out and upside down. Where can she be pigeonholed in terms of epistemology? In fact I immediately mentioned Smollett after the debate and posted that thought because it was so obvious. Nietzsche and Rand are on opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. I agree with Rand because biology sets the limits on tolerable behavior for a society so that it reproduces successfully. You cannot disavow magnetism and gravity and neither can you disavow what an individual, the smallest element of a species, requires to survive and prosper. Jefferson got it from Locke and Rand makes it clear in “The Virtue of Selfishness” when she states that the pursuit of life and happiness are not two separate issues. It is why mankind needs a code of ethics. Love of anything is to exercise value. If a being existed, such as a computer or robot, that is unaffected by anything and everything, including its choices, which would not effect whether it survives or perishes then ethics could not possible be of value. Human beings are susceptible to misery and death. They do not live their lives based, totally, on automaticity. They must make choices and those choices often determine whether they survive and prosper or perish. If we randomly exercise value as some of these existential philosophers, such as Nietzsche, suggests we would soon perish as a species.
Look carefully at this election. It is about a selection. It is what the corporate world, NGOs and the Democrat Party Machine are attempting to achieve. They will sacrifice everyone so that their profit margin is improved. That is where the money is. Karmala Harris is their choice. The Democratic Party lost its way. I contend it never was the party of the people despite what it ran on but, nevertheless, that is how they get their politicians elected… now it should be obvious. That is all everyone needs to know and the last place they will get to realize what they need to know is from America’s main stream media. P.T. Barnum is famous for saying “There’s a sucker born every minute”. The MSM and their corporate masters are attempting to make, from whole cloth, “an entire nation of suckers” and they used two debates. The first was designed to take out the gross, detestable obvious lier and the second was designed to advance a bigger lier that is being made to appear not so obvious.
There is a very odd thing missing in this election back-and-forth between Trump and Kama Sutra; the forced vaccinations and mask wearing which is 100% the burden of Biden and Harris.
Yes, Trump did order a shutdown, but it was brief and nothing remotely like the draconian edict of forced vaccination by an experimental prophylactic (which we have learned had-statistically speaking–astronomically high adverse reactions), or the compulsory mandate of wearing utterly useless masks, enforced through social ostracization by an army of Karen’s and Orwellian scolds, shrill hectoring by flight attendants, brusque treatment by badge heavy law enforcement, and arbitrary sanctions imposed by local, state and federal bureaucrats suddenly conferred with god-like authority.
Perhaps Trump thinks opening up that can of worms could backfire, but all he needs to do is remind the American people that while he is responsible for getting Covid vaccines through regulatory hurdles, he did NOT (and would not) ever force anyone to take them, nor would he have forced ridiculous mask-wearing. All of that is on Biden-Harris.
Or maybe American memories really are that short. Sigh…
There will be mass misinformation deceptions until people are smart enough to see through it. The flip side is that propaganda isn’t that smart, to begin with, and the smartest are often smart enough to not use it. Once people assumed to be Maoist zombies had the guns removed from their collective heads, they didn’t bat an eye as they moved collectively toward Capitalism, albeit an odd form of it with Chinese characteristics. But even as dumb as propaganda often is, Democrats’ version is easily outclassed by the world’s biggest purveyors, past and present. Why else would anyone stage a one-sided street fight masquerading as a debate, believing it would persuade? Democrats’ other Achilles’ heel, besides their wishful thinking, is the utter lack of anything plausible about their policies. The debate demonstrated that they want lies to fill this chasm after four years of the Biden Disaster. So, one of its architects smilingly says she has a plan to deal with it, without offering specifics, and unaware that most viewers see her duplicitous smile as the only thing credible about her. The biggest truth to come out of the debate is that Democrats aren’t as accomplished in the art of propaganda as they need to be to be Democrats. But what is a Democrat to do when election fraud becomes less effective and far too dangerous?