This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.

There is widespread agreement, a generalized perception, on the definition of lying. In its shortest formulation: to say what is not with the intention to deceive. It is not only a matter of stating a falsehood, but also of intending to deceive. Indeed, there are several ways of saying what is not —fiction, irony, error, etc.— but not in all of them there is an intention to deceive. Instead, we can imagine many ways to deceive —from ulterior motives to marketing gimmicks, from secrecy to hypocrisy to intentional misrepresentations— but in all of them we can find a familiarity with lying.

Taken to politics, the matter acquires a higher level of complexity, particularly in the collective dimension it implies and, with it, the special resources that become necessary for the effectiveness of the lie: simulation (that lie that is made without telling), coordination in action, fidelity or obedience, organizational resources and violence. Hannah Arendt established a distinction between the traditional lie and the modern lie. While the first is similar to the simple lie and consists of hiding a particular truth from the other (the enemy, the adversary, the represented), the second attacks a public truth, known to all, and not only by means of a discursive falsification but also by means of the destruction of this truth and, for this, it requires organization, the participation of a large part of society and self-deception —that the liars themselves believe the falsehood they sustain, that they destroy in themselves the witness of the truth. In this second type of lies an ideological component dominates: the ideo-logical logic organizes the world with absolute independence of the experience of reality.