The truth will set you free

"Is it perhaps the very essence of truth to be powerless, and the very essence of power to be deceptive? [...] Is powerless truth not as despicable as power that does not listen to truth?" (Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics, p. 30). The German philosopher of Jewish origin, Hannah Arendt, devoted many of her writings to the problem of truth and power, investigating in particular the question of the use of lies in politics. In her essay On Lying in Politics (1971), she drew inspiration from the Pentagon Papers, a reconstruction of American policy in Southeast Asia from the end of the Second World War to the Vietnam War. In this document, the US Department of Defence revealed that for decades, political and military authorities had resorted to lying when informing the American people about what was happening.

This episode prompted Arendt to reflect on the correlation between political action and the deliberate and conscious falsification of facts, emphasising that this manipulation of facts was not motivated by national security issues or the need to protect US interests in Asia, but rather by the desire to save the country's image as a superpower that had never lost a war.

This intention seems almost noble compared to the manipulations we are currently facing, not only when thinking about the “former cradle of global democracy”. Hannah Arendt emphasised that it is only possible to manipulate the opinions of others by resorting to violence, and therefore fear, or by satisfying some subjective desire that is considered so important by the recipient of the manipulation that it justifies the renunciation of their own judgement. The two methods indicated, which are more relevant today than ever, have as their emblematic models those of the totalitarian regime and consumer society.

Now, the conflict between truth and power is generated by the fact that man becomes hostile to truth when it poses obstacles to what he wants to do, and therefore to his power, which he defends as an end in itself, at the cost of lying, effectively taking total control of information. The fundamental ethical assumption behind all this is arrogance, that is, the excessive self-esteem that leads one to put one's own judgement and will above everything else. Is this a tragically irreversible process? Perhaps not, because the ultimate danger for those who resort to lies and deception to exercise power is that they lose touch with both what the recipients of power think and with reality. Now, Arendt already pointed this out: even if man can refuse to tell or listen to the truth, he cannot do without the truth altogether, because a world in which people completely stopped telling it like it is would become unliveable. In short, even power needs facts in order to be exercised, and these are superior to power, because facts are “given”, undeniable, while power is transitory and unreliable. In short, persuasion and violence can destroy the truth, but they cannot replace it. This applies to rational or religious truth, as well as, more obviously, to factual truth. It is a limitation that does not deny the freedom and creativity of political action, but rather establishes its boundaries and allows for its fruitful, creative and effective exercise.

And we, having inherited a world in pieces, are forced to place our hope in the younger generations who are currently resisting in Washington as in Beijing, in Moscow as in Tel Aviv, in Istanbul as in Tehran, in Buenos Aires as in Naypyidaw (the capital of Myanmar). They are fighting for a future, increasingly aware (inspired by the reversals of history) that freedom is a means inseparable from the end, which is truth. Young people are aware that truth without freedom is imposture, but they also know that freedom cannot coincide with simple self-realisation, understood as “absolute” and therefore disconnected from a project of human coexistence at the heart of a fragile creation that must be preserved, conditions without which a future is not possible!


Claudio Monge
NP April 2025