I have realized what my most persistent mistake is. I had to turn forty before I finally saw the light. Ever since childhood I had cherished the firm belief that one always had to tell the truth, come what may. Truth, and only truth, they told me, made a good life possible. Truth makes you free, some said. Truth makes you happy, others claimed. I took their advice to heart. My life followed the track of inconspicuous unhappiness. Nobody told me that a good person doesn’t get further than average. I followed the path of the colourless majority, who have nothing to reproach themselves with and accept everything.
Then came the turning point that marked the start of my new life. The truth about the truth suddenly struck me on a fateful weekend. From now on nobody would persuade me to be honest at my own cost. I will tell you this much: a good day starts with a big lie. My own case is an object lesson. I stagger into the bathroom, look in the mirror and see the shadow of a pale mass oozing discomfort. If I were forced to look more closely, it would trigger a crisis. My enemy is in the room and wants to share the sphere with me. My nocturnal self is already stalking me and demanding half of my life. It has been pestering me for years with the notion of talking with me about what it sees as my problems. But I don’t deal with ghosts any more. The thing in the mirror is unreal. The question of who I am – in future I will be the one to decide. I fetch the atomizer from the cupboard and engulf myself in a cloud of goodwill; I put soft-focus drops in my eyes and remember my affirmation: ‘What luck that I am as I am.’ Now I am ready to face my doppelgänger. I smile at my image in the mirror as if the fellow were humanly close to me. I have forgotten the multifarious reasons for spitting in his face and have decided long ago that deep down I like the guy. In fact, I have hardly ever met such an interesting person. I’m not exaggerating. That has brought the first step to recognition – an early victory, a good omen. I can already tell that today I will say lots of nice things about other people as well. Isn’t ‘positive thinking’ the fundamental rule of the new ethics? Positivity and toughness: the victors’ alloy. No sentimental stuff before the start; no moment of quiet concentration before the big booze-up. Watching, relaxing, reflecting, all of that is only for losers after the race – they do it with the help of commercial TV channels that have been remodelled with programmes to cater entirely for losers. My programme is about upgrading. Smiling at myself three times before breakfast – that’s my mental stretching. I energetically train muscles for telling lies in places where other people sit on their depression. I get the deep tissue moving. A high bouncing ball would look lazy compared with me. I count to ten and find myself enchanting. They haven’t promised me too much – a dream figure for my better self within weeks. Self-criticism is the early morning drink for losers – nowadays I take immaterial vitamins. The winner in me starts the engine roaring; I check through my appointment calendar. I tell myself with a booming voice that I can trust in myself blindly. I like the guy; this fellow is the irresistible type. That hovering in the no man’s land of the morning doesn’t mean anything. I leave the house like a grenade leaves a launcher – living ballistically is the order of the day. A smart projectile in search of its target – since I started my new way of thinking I feel the happiness of those who attack. A man with the Siegfried factor is speaking to you. They really didn’t promise me too much. The new 3-D lying system Mendanetics-Basic – from the Latin word mendacium, the lie – has made a new man of me. Over four weekends they have remodelled me to become the man of the moment. They tell me that in less than six months I could progress to 4-D-Super-Mendanetics, and when I succeed, which of course I will, nothing can stop me from becoming an identity counsellor for winners: persons, firms, countries – we have formulas for every customer format. As you can see, I dare to dream great dreams again.
Since I began playing the good luck game, I look back to my former naïve life with expert cold-bloodedness. I was a child of ancient occidental culture – and that means in questions of truth I was a primitive person, raised to understand truth in a fitting way for flatlanders, creatures who live in a two-dimensional reality and regard a third or even higher dimension of truth as the work of the devil. Ironing oneself out is the virtue of these old authentic types. They seriously believe that one can find one’s direction in the world labyrinth simply by distinguishing between true and false, good and evil, suitable and unsuitable. Their flat cosmos allows no room for complex games; they know nothing of forays into untested areas, and they can hardly imagine where experiments with anticipated truths could lead to. Yes and no, sic et non, either–or, that is the drab everyday reality of the old 2-D system. In my flatlander years even a simple ‘maybe’ took the wind out of my logical sails – I became passive and actually admitted everything. I was the good person in the queue, trapped in a mournful truthfulness that I was proud of like an old family heirloom. Back then I collected defeats like trophies that enhanced my human dignity. I was a fool, a good person. The more I failed, the brighter my beautiful soul shone – my ego was a neurotic jewel, inept and saintly, crouching in the sulking corner of the world, an untouched person, a denier and a scorner. I had internalized St Augustine’s fundamental principle that lies are reprehensible under any circumstances; even if the whole of humanity can be saved by a single lie, the utterance of an untruth still merits damnation.
I had learned from Immanuel Kant that a right to lie for the love of humanity existed only as a supposition, and the moral law I cherished demanded that, whatever the circumstances, I should reveal the full, undisguised truth. Like most victims of tradition, I was raised to live as if I were permanently in the witness box, sworn in to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Today it is a mystery to me how I could ever have thought of the classical 2-D ideologues as great intellects. Why didn’t I rebel against their rigorous fibbing earlier? Well, I have probably already explained – I felt bittersweet gratification in being more truthful than most people.
Yet there were already a few precedents in Antiquity, counter-authorities and people who acted as character witnesses to support anybody who rejected the strict priests of truth. I can still remember today that our new 3-D picture of the world – I won’t mention the 4-D visions here – had already existed indirectly and discreetly for a long time. Even among the ancients there were clear-headed people who formulated permissions for lying, at least partially. Think of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria – didn’t he advise clever women who wanted to keep their lovers to deceive their men by faking desire even if they did not feel it at that particular moment? Aristotle likewise discussed cases in which lying is better than speaking the truth – such as illnesses when we should cheer up the sufferer, or when noble deception is necessary to save the fatherland in war. In a later period the Jesuits highly praised and refined the art of lying, whereas their arch-enemy, Luther, gave permission for everything, including the worst tricks, that might damage the Pope, the Antichrist. But what is all that compared to the sublime brutality with which our progenitor Machiavelli taught the ultimate technical use of truth and lies in his work The Prince? In substance, Mendanetics stems from the existence of this major work. We, the postmodern princes of lies at our monitors, think back proudly to this bold predecessor. Since that time the word ‘lie’ has essentially been superseded. Instead of lies we should talk today about self-inductive hypotheses. Lying is nothing but an ancient European misnomer for experimenting with contra-factual statements – an art, by the way, that we learn from prophets rather than from philosophers. Is it by chance that more than half of our Mendanetics trainers are former theologians? A liar is simply a prophet who has had bad luck, probably due to unprofessional dealings with the available data.
Today I know that a person who doesn’t tell the plain truth is not a liar in the sense that the flat people believe, but is someone who takes out a loan on something that is not yet reality. Lying means: living with semantic debts. It would be a miracle indeed if the laws of speculative capital came to a halt at the spoken truth. The basic form of speculative truth of our times is the ‘project’ – the throw of the dice to project the will into what is to come, what is desired or demanded in the future. On this view the liar of yesteryear would be the prototype of the entrepreneur – a pioneer of 3-D realities, experienced in the art of projecting statements not yet backed up by reality until the sum of coherent fictions becomes a kind of fact. Up until now, people with such talents were usually victims of old Western-type denunciation. The new situation, however, which affects me personally, sweeps away the prejudices: Mendanetics ensures that the entrepreneur principle is introverted and applied to the ego programme of the entrepreneur. The art consists of sharpening up like a projectile and not being deterred by obstructive authorities – whether they are called morality or old bourgeois truthfulness – from launching oneself as a missile on the grand stage.
One of our early morning affirmations says: anybody who slows you down is the enemy. Repeating this phrase to oneself intensely like a prayer or an oath before taking the car out of the garage has taken some of us to the top pretty fast. Another phrase is: study how to eliminate obstructions internally and externally. You have to remove those ugly little truths coolly, like a bug zapper. You should understand that our ancestors were wrong to say that a little grain of lying, low-dosage, might be permissible – as if lying were only a phenomenon or a seasoning. No: Mendanetics-Basic, the holistic 3-D teaching of truth-lies for the new millennium, insists that people fail to understand the idea of lying as long as they only see it as an additive to a substance that is otherwise fake-free. Our breakthrough is that we serve up the lie as a main course – or, better still, as a network, a construction kit.
Strategic ontologists like us understand the world soberly: everything is a theatre of competition and the survivors are the people who stage the show better. That is why lying is our marching orders, our tonic, our diet. Lying helps me to get started where truth of all kinds leaves me standing on the spot. The main thing in a performance world is to combine individual lies into great success – vision is everything; it is the beginning of the miracles of the fourth dimension. This, of course, takes us onto terrain that I am not qualified to speak of yet. In six months I will be ripe for 4-D Super Mendanetics. I expect great things; I am close to transfiguration. Systematically telling lies – that will add the last touch of glamour to my life. Nowadays I sometimes glow like a halogen lamp. I will shortly become transformed into a total work of art.