Silence the Lie

The fallen world is a world full of lies, and the one who follows the way of this fallen world can metaphorically be said to be a son of the devil. He is a liar and a murderer – the two are connected together, because through lies, the world is destroyed, and people’s lives are lost. And those who lose their lives, those who find themselves utterly ruined by the evil around them find all kinds of lies used to justify their annihilation. Through lies, the truth with the goodness and beauty it brings is lost and is replaced with an imitation that cannot sustain the world. It is no wonder Jesus responded to some of his critics with these harsh words, because he knew if their way was to be followed, the truth would never be allowed to manifest itself in the world: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44 RSV).

It is no wonder so many people will see the world at large as illusory – for the world with all of its lies makes one question everything, even that which should not be questioned. Is there truth? Is there something behind all of the lies? It is only because there is that there can be a lie; it is only out of the good that evil comes from, not because the good creates the evil, but because the evil lives off the good as a kind of parasite. Evil has no life, no existence, of its own, though it saps it from the good so as to look like it does; it lies about its existence, turning existence itself to appear as a lie. A lie is believable because it bases itself on some truth and warps it – the trouble is to find that truth and to release it from the illusion which has bound it.

Can anti-info have a life of its own? The problem of spurious info. The lie – look at the level it’s raised to. It’s pure death – but where does it originate? Does it have its own ‘radio station’? Yes – that’s the first thing I picked up. It yammers at us all the time. We are the battlefield.[1]

Philip K Dick has noted that the connection between the lie and death; the lie, in order to appear to be true, has to “yammer,” it has to constantly surround us with its noise in order to make us believe in it. The truth which lies underneath the lie requires us to silence the lie – especially within ourselves – if we want to find it. The kingdom of God lies within – the kingdom of God grants us life, eternal life, while the kingdom of the lie which is all around us only brings us death. The society of death is the society of the lie, the society of pure propaganda. We must be led to the slaughter, to freely accept it – for once we do, the lie can then promote itself as the proper end of all choice, when all it does it enslave us and remove us from the possibility of making any real choice. The black iron prison of the self is also the black iron prison we superimpose upon the world, and once it is out in the world it is as if it has a life of its own. The android, the replicant, we create is let loose and then it seeks to turn us into its own image or to kill us if we do not succumb to its ways.

The lie has forced itself into the world so strongly, the truth has been obscured. “We can’t receive audio or visual information, it is jammed or cooked. So ‘St. Sophia’  (divine wisdom) must land behind enemy lines – within the prison, and inform us here, located here with us, since its info is not getting through.”[2]

The world as it is has to be the place where we first encounter the truth. Again, this is possible because the lie all around is has this truth as its foundation, all cooked up and distorted, so that the fullness of the truth is now jammed in the world. We, ourselves, have helped jam the truth – every time we sin, every time we falter from the path of the truth, we obscure the truth. We know not what we do, and the truth – which is the living Hagia Sophia, the Triune-God-of-Love, loves us despite our turning away from the truth, and comes to us in the world we have created so as to restore us to an integral unity with the truth itself.  But this Hagia Sophia, this intra-Trinitarian essence of love is transposed and becomes the foundation for creaturely Sophia, who becomes the focus of creation, its root which connects creation to God, as Pavel Florensky explains:

Sophia is the Great Root by which creation goes into the intra-Trinitarian life and through which it receives Life Eternal from the One Source of Life. Sophia is the original nature of creation, God’s creative love, which is ‘shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us’ (Rom 5:5). For this reason, the true I of a deified person, his ‘heart,’ is precisely God’s Love, just as the Essence of Divinity is intra-Trinitarian Love. For everything exists truly insofar as it communes with the God of Love, the Source of being and truth.[3]

Thus, Hagia Sophia, the intra-Trinitarian love finds itself in the world, taking on its image, creaturely Sophia, allowing the creaturely image to flow into and be united with the Trinitarian original. “The tri-hypostatic God has a single essence or nature, a single life and self-revelation, and this self-revelation of Divinity, as existing in itself, is the Glory of God and His Wisdom. This Wisdom is the foundation and goal of creation.”[4]

The lie is founded upon the weakening and jamming of this link, the link between creaturely and Divine Wisdom. The incarnation of the Logos is the eternal answer to the lie, the truth made flesh, the truth itself in the world so that the truth can be seen and heard and heeded to in the midst of the lie – to show the lie’s inner being leads to its own defeat. But this doesn’t mean the lie won’t try to respond to the truth, won’t try to obscure it even more by imitating it in a new way. The Logos which brings freedom can be imitated by a lifeless logos which pretends to give freedom but only brings death. The replicant Christ, the anti-Christ, is the final example of this – though the replicant Christ is itself a kind of “form” which finds itself repeated throughout history before all of its strains are brought together to create the one, final eschatological anti-Christ. With his understanding of the power of the replicant, of the machine which imitates life, PKD feared that someone, such as the Soviets, were trying to create this imitative Logos, so that it can try to take over and infuse its logic throughout the world. “Using Tesla’s theories about energy and information transfer, the Soviets are not able to synthesize a sort of mundane Logos, or ionospheric information transfer grid.”[5] A human-made logos, the ultimate replicant, the ultimate lie, for it is the ultimate attempt to deconstruct the real and recreate it through human ingenuity.

But we must understand, by the very nature of sin, we have been creating and recreating this replicant logos throughout history. We have been replacing the real with the imitation of the real. This is the crime of humanity, the crime of sin. It is, indeed, the perfect crime, as Baudrillard puts it. We create the simulacra which then destroys the real by its existence. Our technology in the creation of the computer, in the creation of the delete button, shows itself as the continuation of the lie as it attempts to delete the real itself:

What the computer has given you – perhaps too easily – it takes away with the same ease. Everything is in order. A zero-sum technological equation. We are always talks of unforeseen, negative side-effects; here technology produces a positive (homoeopathic) side effect. The integrated circuit loops back on itself, ensuring, as it were, the automatic deletion of the world.[6]

The anti-Christ, the simulacra of the Logos, ends up being the ultimate destroyer, in the same way the real Logos is the creator. The lie, if left to its own will, self-destructs. This is why the anti-Christ principle, however good it initially appears, will end up facing off against the truth and serving the lie with murderous rage. But, the answer to the anti-Christ, the answer to the lie, is the truth itself. The truth is stronger than the lie; the lie feeds off the truth, but the truth perseveres. Baudrillard saw the destructive tendency of the simulacra, but he did not see the power of the truth, a power which is able to take even the simulacra into itself. This is what differentiates the truth from all falsehood, the truth integrates. The eschaton is the surprise ending to this drama:

The dramatic reversal fits my most acute analysis and understanding of the ‘end times’ – that vast paradoxical reversals (big-small/weak-strong/wise-foolish/major-minor/important-unimportant, etc.) will without warning (i.e., without evident transitional stages) set in. This is one way which we will know – recognize – the end times. Those upheavals which are essentially reversals. A black guard and a hippie cop will destroy the Government and send them all into disgrace, prison and exile.[7]

When the simulacra appears to be victorious in destroying the world, the Logos will return, reversing all the harm that has been done by taking the world and transfiguring it within himself. The real which appears to be destroyed will be restored. PKD sees this already happening, in part, in time itself: “When the mind (S.t Sophia) encounters and detects a spurious (i.e., irreal) section, it replaces it with an ontologically real section of itself; by transubstantiation.”[8] This allows the kingdom of God to be already in the world, to be there with us, to allow participation with it now, even if the end of time has not yet come.  The real, the truth is in the world; the lie has been overcome. We just need silence to find it.