A highly perceptive analyst and a close reader of Alexandre Koyré, Hannah Arendt described totalitarian regimes as being “secret societies established in broad daylight.” (see Koyre, pp 296-7, Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p 492). By imitating the apparatus of secret societies  without ever trying to keep their own goals a secret, these movements, just like secret societies, suppress dissenting opinions and seek to “safeguard the fictitious world through consistent lying,” as manifested, for example, in the Nazi’s “racial selection,” the Bolshevik’s “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the infallibility of the leader.. (Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, 2002, p 137)

Extracts from Koyre’s essay: The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes unanimously brand as nonsensical the idea that there exists a single objective truth valid for everybody. The criterion· of “truth,” they say, is not agreement with reality, but agreement with the spirit of a race or nation or class – that is, racial, national or utilitarian. Pushing to their limits the biological, pragmatist, activist theories of truth, the official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes deny the inherent value of thought. For them thought is not a light but a weapon: its function, they say, is not to discover reality as it is, but to change and transform it with the purpose of leading us towards what is not….

The initiated, the members of the elite, by virtue of a kind of intuitive and direct perception are aware of the profound innermost thoughts of the leader, know the true secret aims of the movement. And so they are not troubled a whit by the contradictions and inconsistencies in their chief’s public utterances: they know that these have only one object: to deceive the crowd, the enemy, the “others,” and they adulate the leader who manipulates and practices the lie with such skill. As for the others those who believe they evince by their belief that they are insensible to contradictions, impervious to doubt, incapable of thought…

We maintain that there has never been so much lying as in our time, that lying has never had so massive, so total a character as it has today. The written and spoken word, the press, the radio, all technical progress is put to the service of the lie. Modern man – genus totalitarian; bathes in the lie, breathes the lie, is in thrall to the lie every moment of his existence. Moreover, the intellectual quality of the ·modern lie has deteriorated as ·the ·volume has increased. The distinctive feature of the modem lie is its mass output for mass consumption. And all production destined for the masses; especially all intellectual production, is bound to yield to lower standards.

Thus, for all its subtlety of technique, the content of modem propaganda is of the grossest, manifesting an absolute and total contempt for truth, or even for verisimilitude, a contempt equaled only by the contempt which it implies for the intellectual capacities of those to whom this propaganda is addressed. The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes unanimously brand as nonsensical the idea that there exists a single objective truth valid for everybody. The criterion of “truth,” they say, is not agreement with reality, but agreement with the spirit of a race or nation or class – that is, racial, national or utilitarian. Pushing to their limits the biological, pragmatist, activist theories of truth, the official philosophies of -the totalitarian regimes deny the inherent value of thought.

For them thought is not a light but a weapon: its function, they say, is not to discover reality as it is, but to change and transform it with the purpose of leading us towards what is not. Such being the case, myth is better than science and rhetoric that works on the passions preferable to proof that appeals to the intellect. In their publications (even in those they call scientific), in their discussions, and of course in their propaganda, the representatives of the totalitarian regimes are scarcely hampered by objective truth.

More  puissant than God Almighty, they change the past as well as the present according to their whim. One might conclude, as many have, that the totalitarian regime functions outside the sphere of the true and the false. But this is not so. The distinction between the true and the false, the fictitious and the real, plays a very significant role inside the totalitarian regime. Only their positions have been reversed: the totalitarian regime is founded on the primacy of the lie…

So the lie remains, tolerated, admitted. But .only that … just tolerated and admitted, and only under certain conditions. The exception is war: then, and then only, the lie becomes a just instrument. But what if war, an abnormal; episodic, transient condition, should come to be permanent and. taken for granted? The lie, once an emergency measure, now becomes the norm: for a social group that sees itself hemmed in by enemies will not hesitate for one moment to ·utilize any weapon against them. The truth among themselves, the lie for outsiders – this rule of conduct would become deeply embedded in their mores.

Carry the case further. Complete the rupture between “ourselves” and “the others.” Let the bare fact of hostility be transformed into essential enmity flowing in some way from the very nature of the parties involved. Suppose the enemy to be all powerful. It is patent that any group surrounded by a world of unbending and irreconcilable foes would see the abyss between itself and them as one that could be spanned by no tie or social obligation. Within such a group, the lie, as told to the “others” would be neither an act merely tolerated nor a simple rule of social behavior; it would become obligatory arid be transformed into a virtue. In revenge, the truth, if ill-chosen, and the inability to lie, far from being deemed chivalrous attributes, would be looked on as infirmities, as signs of weakness.

The lie presupposes hostility and yet implies contact, an interchange of some sort. Let us suppose the autonomous existence of the group is suppressed, that it is wholly submerged in the hostile element of an alien group, sunk within the very bosom of an enemy society with which, however, it remains in daily contact. Within and for this group, the ability to lie will become all the more necessary, the virtue of the  lie all the more praiseworthy, the greater the external pressure, the greater the tension between it and the others, the more the hostility of the “others” toward “us” intensifies and increases.

Imagine this enmity to have been rendered absolute, total. Clearly, the group whose transmogrification we are tracing will find itself forced to disappear, either in actuality, or more likely, by pushing the lie to the very limit and in this way vanishing from sight, taking refuge in the .dark of secrecy. Henceforth, the inversion is complete: for our group, whose character is now secret the lie will be more than a virtue. It will become a condition of sheer existence, a primary and fundamental rule of behaviour. By the very fact of secrecy certain features characteristic of all social groups will be emphasized and exaggerated .to an extreme. (The best way of pushing hostility to the very limit is to root it in biology. It is · no accident that fascism became racist)….

Download the full text here: The Political Function of the Modern Lie; Contemporary Jewish Record, 298-9

John Keane – lying, journalism and democracy (2010)

We live in times of rising sensitivity among publics to lying and that, in consequence, some old and vitally important perennial questions to do with lies and truth and power and the role of journalism in a democracy are making a comeback. Inspired by a recent range of global controversies, for instance to do with weapons of mass destruction, WikiLeaks and climate change, pseudology is suddenly fashionable and commentaries on the subject of lying are flourishing. It has become conventional to quote the work of Plato on noble lies, or Kant‟s discussion of whether it is justified to save the life of a friend by telling a lie (he didn‟t approve of that), or more usually to draw upon the writings of Hannah Arendt stimulated by the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

But it was the Russian-born philosopher and historian of science Alexandre Koyré who was the first contemporary writer to pose new questions about the activity of lying: to ponder its changing historical significance and to emphasise the potentially catastrophic consequences of political lying in the age of media-saturated democracy. His treatment was not only careful, sophisticated and unsettling. Its strengths and its weaknesses should ensure that it retains great relevance today..

Keynote Lecture at the 2010 Journalism Education Association of Australia Conference, by John Keane

NB: The study of the secret society has been singularly neglected by sociologists. Even if we do have comparatively ample knowledge of the secret societies of equatorial Africa, we know nothing, or next to nothing, of those which existed and still do exist in Europe. Or, where we do know their history, we are still ignorant of the typological structure of these groups, whose importance was recognized by almost no one but Simmel. (fn, p 294) (The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies; Georg Simmel; American Journal of Sociology; Vol. 11, No. 4 (Jan., 1906), pp. 441-498