• Truth, Lies and Nihilism

    by  • September 18, 2012 • Philosophy, Thoughts • 0 Comments

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Freddy Nietzsche once said “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” I think what makes a piece a wisdom so wise is that it seems like a self-evident truth — but I guess hindsight is always 20/20. Once it’s said, it’s kinda of a “no duh,” but no one ever “put it that way” until someone does, and then it becomes this little piece of wisdom that we can all intuitively feel to be a truth (whatever that is) — we can feel it in our bones, and we can feel it in our memories of past experience.

    I think Freddy only got half of the picture here, though — which isn’t to detract from the genius in his nostrils, because the man dropped more wisdom in a single book than most of us will drop in a lifetime. A huge part of the betrayal we feel when we’ve been deceived is definitely that there is now one less person in the world we can trust. We lose more than a friend or a trusted confidant when someone lies to us. We lose another little piece of certainty in a world already rife in uncertainty. There is suddenly one less thing, one less person, we can be certain of — and we gain yet another doubt in its place.

    But I think the other half of the sense of betrayal, the other half of the uncertainty we feel when we find out we’ve been deceived is that we can no longer trust ourselves. We trusted in someone for some reason to some extent, and when we find out that it was a mistake to do, we have a hard time trusting ourselves and our own judgement afterward.

    Of course, we try to learn from the betrayals and deceptions we suffer, and move on with a stronger, more cautious sense of self. We try to console ourselves that hindsight is 20/20, but it’s still hard not to question just who it is we are.

    Who was that person that allowed themselves to be deceived? Who was blind to the writing on the wall? And just who is this person we’ve become? What do we know of them? Can we know anything? 

    I guess that’s why Socrates was the wisest man in Greece: he knew that he knew nothing. But still, that’s little comfort when you’re stumbling through life trying to find meaning in the things you do and the people closest to you, like a hurt lost and blinded fool

    About

    Kris Romaniuk is a writer and novelist based in Montreal. He is the author of the satirical travel memoir, Rum Socialism and a collection of short stories called Portraits. He is currently working on a serial novella that he's publishing here on this blog. You can find out a bit more more about Kris here.

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