“Facts and metaphors are ‘different ways of lying’, each uniquely blinding us in some domains in order to produce specific modes of certainty or insight in others…

Language and facts can be unexpectedly deceptive due to our inclination to recklessly extend their scope of their meaning or apparent authority. The actual face of nature is entirely unavailable in facts, yet their seeming authority aspires not only to the universal — but to the explicit denial of the Divine, which is to say Origin. Although facts are not in themselves false unless they are malformed or gravely misconstrued… they are a peculiar form of lying.

his is possible because their purchase upon truth is nearly always won by the wholesale exclusion of nearly all of reality, relation, novelty, and the minds that compose them. So facts are, in many cases, a peculiar form of ‘peculiarly true lying’. The lie is their authoritative ‘explicative’ power, which is, in general, extremely limited and often unavailable to actual human experience or participation (you have no experience of atoms).

The mechanicity of scientific facts implies a ‘nature’ within nature that is not precisely nature at all, but the standing body of abstract analytical perspectives about observable mechanisms of origin, function, action or relation.

There are other forms of lying that invert this potential; figures of speech such as metaphor, analogy, metonymy and, most significantly, meronymy (upon which language itself is secretly founded). These figures ‘unflatten’ ordinary language and conception or perspective by processes that involve the imaginal reconnotation of a subject, and the arts of rhetoric comprise the categorical library of methods and nomenclature related to these activities.

Their produce, when suitable, is insight, which can be understood as a complimentary opposite to facts. For where facts may delineate ‘objective’ qualities of expected interaction or relation in an effort to produce ‘functional’ knowledge, the primordial tropes such as metaphor invert this process in a species of fantasy that results in otherwise inaccessible domains of perspective, meaning, emotional and sensory tone, and other qualities familiar to our lived experience and senses of reality.

The former requires an evacuation of being and relation, of emotion and sensation. Its produce is ‘flat’ in the sense of having to exclude most of experienced and felt reality; most domains of possible meaning are missing. The latter, in a strange inversion, invents new and unexpected domains of meaning and sensed relation in a process that could be called prodimensional. In a sense, both facts and metaphor are ways of lying; both are burdened with the threat of inclining us to misconstrue reality and identity, relation and meaning, each in a unique way.

If we can learn to understand limited scope of living authority that facts are actually bound by, we can acquire protection from overprojecting their importance. Similarly, if we can learn to detect the vast graveyards of dead metaphors and deceptive figures that are our common linguistic inheritance we can avoid the resulting misapprehensions that lead is into dire confusion from the complementary position. It is fascinating and ironic to realize that our most powerful cognitive faculties depend upon different ways of lying about reality, identity, relation and meaning.”

— an intelligence agent