The Speed of Lies,
the Speed of Truth

I think back to a headline I saw yesterday. The moment that single, neatly resolved sentence touched my eyes, I felt as though I already knew almost everything. Who had done what wrong, and why it was so unmistakable, all arrived in one breath.

The judgment, too, finished in one breath. So that is who they are. So that is what happened. I left almost no room for doubt.

Only after several days did stories of a different grain begin, slowly, to reach me. The context next to that headline. The missing stretch of time. The same scene viewed from another position. They did not arrive as quickly as that first sentence. They came in scattered intervals, surfacing slowly from somewhere deeper.

This essay is about that asymmetry. About why lies move so fast, why the truth moves so slowly, and about which kind of standing place I want for myself in the space between them.

Lies are simple. That is why they are fast. The truth is usually layered. One side and the other side. Facts that shifted with time. The accumulation of small clues. The causal lines that were not visible at first. Only when all of these gather in one place does something resembling the truth come into being. So the truth is bound to be late.

A lie, by contrast, slices off every one of those grains. A single sentence is enough. As light as the cuts it makes, and being light, it travels far and fast. The reason we fail to register it as a lie is that the sentence is simply too clean.

The trouble is that once we accept that one fast sentence, we struggle to see the other grains arriving behind it. One book names this with sharper language.

"The recommendation algorithms of Twitter and Facebook trap users inside a 'filter bubble' that reinforces only their existing beliefs and tastes — and so we end up living inside different 'facts.'"

Kim Yoo-hyang & Kim Bo-rami, AI and Democracy

Living inside different "facts" means that the first sentence each of us received was different. The lie that reached us first becomes our private garden. Inside that garden, other grains have a hard time getting in.

Time passes, and at last the edge of the truth shows itself. And yet, curiously, people do not always move toward it.

"When concealed facts are exposed, the public often chooses another lie rather than face the truth — a phenomenon that grows out of cognitive dissonance and the asymmetry of information."

Jeong Tae-seong, The Hidden Side

To take in the truth from a place where one has already taken in a lie, one must also take in the fact of having been wrong. That ceases to be a question of information and becomes a question of self-regard. So a person, very often, declines the newly arriving truth and reaches instead for one more lie. A double loss of vision.

There are people who know all of this asymmetry. That lies are fast and the truth is slow. That a lie once accepted does not easily come loose. That even in the face of exposure, people will often choose another lie. Anyone who knows this does not leave the asymmetry to chance. They use it as an instrument.

The phrase serpent's tongue arrives here. Not someone who simply lies well, but someone who takes precise aim at the short stretch of time before the truth can arrive. Someone who knows that one sentence is enough, and who shapes that one sentence with the most exacting care. Someone who turns the slowness of the truth into their own weapon.

There is, however, a heavier place from which to view this asymmetry. A place that briefly sets aside pointing at the single person wielding the serpent's tongue, and looks instead at the soil that allowed such a tongue to grow.

"That language, ideology, and the market economy can, while functioning 'normally,' destroy a person's life — does this not suggest that violence is not an event, but is lodged deep within the very inner structure of the system itself?"

Slavoj Žižek, Violence

The asymmetry of speed is the same. It is not that one wicked person is spreading lies quickly; it is that we are all living together on a public square that has been designed so the fast travels furthest. On that square, care loses time, corrections come too late and are forgotten, and the one-line lie takes the first seat in the field of vision.

So it is not that someone with a serpent's tongue has appeared, but that the soil in which such a tongue grows best had already been prepared. While the system functions normally, someone's time collapses. Violence is not an event but a structure.

Reaching this place, the object of one's anger shifts from a single person to an entire era. That does not soften the anger; it deepens it, and turns it in another direction.

Once I have written this far, I always end up standing in the same place. The place that asks what, in the face of so vast an asymmetry, I can do at all. I cannot slow the speed of the square. I cannot till the soil. So what is left.

One thing is left. At what speed I will live on top of that fast square. Whether, the moment a first sentence reaches me, I will close the judgment then and there, or whether I will remain someone who, half a beat later, asks once more. That much, at least, is mine to keep.

So I decide. Rather than become a fast person, I will remain a slow one. May the slowness be a grain of mine, not an awkwardness.

To remain a slow person does not mean to fall silent. It means not to answer a single headline at once with anger. It means, before declaring who someone is, to keep open one more space inside myself for the truth to arrive.

This keeping-open is not avoidance. There are matters one must surely grow angry about quickly, and matters one must surely take a side on quickly. Even so, I hope those quick responses are responses that pass through one beat of stillness. Responses given through the awareness that a grain may not yet have arrived.

What happens in the slow place is unexpected. Imagine two people who first hear of the same event at the same hour. One closes the judgment quickly and moves on to the next topic. The other keeps a single space open inside, and lives several days more slowly. Given time, the shape that event holds inside each of them has become entirely different.

The slow person draws closer to a more accurate shape not because they came to know more, but because they kept open a place to hear more. The fast person becomes enclosed within a smaller shape not because they knew less, but because they had shut the listening place from the start.

One person's slowness looks small. Yet the single space that one person keeps open inside themselves becomes, in the end, the honesty of their own field of vision. And that honesty migrates, slowly, to those nearby. That is the smallest way to slow the square's speed, and perhaps the only way.