Lies that Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

. . . wandering in the labyrinth, and finding no possible means of getting out, they miserably ended their lives there: or were destroyed by the Minotaur which was (as Euripides hath it)

Lying is making things up out of thin air. Except that the air is toxic, corrupting everyone who hears the lie, and the liar most of all.

getting away with a lie brings its own particular euphoria, a secret pleasure like an adrenaline high, and if you’re not careful it can become an end in itself.

“Icarus is . . . I don’t know: aspiration and daring but also arrogance and hubris. It’s a cool story, the boy who flew too close to the sun so that the wax holding the feathers in his wings melted, but it’s also a great tragic metaphor for overreach, not knowing your limitations.”

“The people who live in the cave and have never been outside see shadows on the walls cast by the sun. Animals and stuff. Because they’ve never been outside they think the shadows are the real thing rather than just, you know, shadows. Plato thought life was like that. That all we saw were shadows, but that the real things—the ideal forms of them—existed somewhere else.”