'Alternative Truth'

“I soon fell asleep And dreamed an odd dream of Antichrist’s entry Attired like a man, overturning Truth, Ruining the crop, ripping up the roots, Spreading false shoots to satisfy wants In each country he came to, cutting down Truth And sowing deceit in its stead like a god.”

~ William Langland, 'Piers Plowman: A Modern Verse Translation' original written n 1367)

Dosis Letalis - Alternative Truth

Needle and Knife

1. Blatant and bold loyalty-test lies. To be served with a small sprig of misinformation on the top, allowing plausible deniability as to their palatability.

2. Lies painting the world in dazzling, beautiful black and white; those in which everything you believe is good and true, every ending is just, and the bad things are easily explained and can be defeated by some obvious action; those that are a defence against thinking too hard or too long.

3. Those blandly couched in jargonese, designed to slip past the edges of comprehension. These lies leave little, save the impression that of course they are right and that all would resolve, gloriously, into clockwork clarity if only you were paying a little more attention, if only you were a little more clever.

4. Tiny lies, pressed into the cracks in social interaction in the hope of winning a house beautiful award for great socialness.

5. Brightly shining knots of lies; those that are wrapped in paper or spoken or sung, experienced alone or together; having special dispensation because they are stories and know that they are stories.

6. Lies told to illustrate the truth, or which are placed conveniently around locations where one suspects a wandering truth has been doing weights training and might turn up to illustratively punch their lights out.

7. Those told by the doorkeeper who can only lie; or at least those of such doorkeepers who have not been eaten by wandering paradoxes and shat out as pervasive misinformation.

8. Those told by otters. Otters, despite their cute and innocent appearance, are the pathological liebests of the animal world and are able to untruth all five legs off a donkey before breakfast. Otters eat breakfast at 5am sharp so this is especially impressive.

9. Words farted together by mindless automata in the hope of finding an unexpected truth, having achieved the first hurdle of making sense but not the second hurdle of making true sense.