On (Always) Telling the Necessary Lies

The Inescapable Cultural Need to Fictionalize Our Worlds (Vol. 5; Issue 41)

When encountering an acquaintance on the street, several thoughts may cross your mind:

What’s his name again?

Didn’t my last meeting with him end poorly?

I’m running late for a meeting, so I need to keep this conversation brief!

But we almost never utter these thoughts aloud. What we say instead is:

It’s good to see you again.

This statement involves multiple levels of interaction:

1. An ambiguous expression of affection.

2. A means of disguising whatever you really think and feel.

3. A way of allowing options for future interactions.

Such a superficial utterance, deeply embedded in our minds by culture, represents the types of performances we enact day in and day out. On the one hand, the statement avoids excessive intimacy. It creates a kind of distance. On the other hand, it is polite.

The expression demonstrates how one level of communication resides in the words themselves. Another consists of the “understood” meaning of the phrase. The contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2006) observes that:

Human speech never merely transmits a message, it always also self-reflectively asserts the basic symbolic pact between the communicating subjects (p. 12).

What Žižek means is this:

That phrase, “good to see you again,” is a well-worn feature of the social contract. The fellow you encounter knows the same rules. He is also hiding, also keeping his options open. When he replies, “yes, good to see you also,” his words are similarly encoded.

Reminiscent of Heidegger’s (1954/2013) concept of our “thrown-ness,” we have no choice but to use whatever language we are taught. We do not choose where we are born, what language we learn, or our cultural contexts.