The Language of Untruth
Prelude: Naming the Problem
This is not an essay about lying.
It is about something deeper. More difficult to name. Untruth is not merely the opposite of truth. It is a posture. A condition. A way of using language that conceals more than it reveals, reshapes more than it clarifies, and disfigures rather than dignifies the relationship between word and world.
Untruth is not merely the opposite of truth. It is a posture. A condition.
It is language that hides rather than helps us see. We are surrounded by words, yet we no longer trust them. We don’t trust those who speak, or even ourselves to interpret. And so, we grow cautious. We listen for what is omitted, what is implied, what is being sold beneath the surface. That, too, is a form of untruth, not just in what is said, but in the atmosphere of our listening.
We live in a time when even the air feels compromised. It settles in like secondhand smoke. Untruth is not limited to politics or manipulation. It drifts through our daily lives, often unnoticed. We learn to speak in its patterns. Not because we choose to lie, but because we adapt. You didn’t light the match, but you breathe the smoke. Untruth coats conversations, headlines, group chats, company meetings. It dulls clarity. It seeps into the life we share.
To focus only on those who lit the match is to miss the larger danger. This is not just about misinformation. It’s about atmosphere. Untruth becomes the air itself. It reshapes what words can mean, how relationships function, what kind of future feels possible.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger called truth Aletheia; an "uncovering" or "revealing." Language, he said, is how the world comes into view. But when language becomes performance or noise, it no longer reveals. It hides. It blocks. That is the condition of untruth.
Søren Kierkegaard also warned of language that loses ownership. When we speak not from ourselves but from the crowd, he said, we lose our humanity. “The crowd is untruth.” Not because we shouldn't speak together, but because speech without ownership breaks the bond between language and being.
This essay begins with that loss. The loss of presence in language. And with a question: What happens to a world when words no longer reveal what is real, but only perform, protect, or distract?
The Smoke in the Room
Imagine walking into a room that smells faintly off. Not unbearable. Just off. You pause, then ignore it. That is what untruth erodes. Not truth itself, but the atmosphere in which truth can be spoken. It does not shout. It drifts. It is not the fire. It is the smoke. It settles quietly, thinly. We adjust. We breathe shallower. We speak lighter. Words dodge, flatter, evade. Meaning becomes slippery. Speech becomes habit.
It does not shout. It drifts. It is not the fire. It is the smoke.
There was a time when words held weight. When to speak was to stand behind what you said. You didn’t have to be perfect, but you were accountable. Words were trusted. Shared truth was possible. And so, this is not only about communication. It is about care. When we stop tending to truth, we stop tending to each other. To speak falsely is not only to distort reality. It is to abandon what is shared, fragile, sacred. When care disappears, untruth doesn’t just confuse. It licenses harm.
We are learning to live, speak, and act in a world where language has been severed from care, responsibility, and reality. And when that happens, language doesn’t merely weaken. It hollows out.
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt called this the age of bullshit. Not nonsense, but speech that is indifferent to truth. The liar still respects the truth enough to hide it. The bullshitter doesn’t care. Their words are spun to impress, distract, gain.
That too is untruth. A posture of indifference.
The Language of Permission
Untruth changes us even when we don’t notice. Like any atmosphere, it shapes how we breathe, how we speak, how we adjust. We begin to drift. We learn what to omit. What to smooth. What to leave unsaid. Not always from malice. Often from fatigue. Or fear. We suppress what is uncomfortable and perform what is expected.
With each omission, the gap between word and world widens.
We become fluent in evasion. And with each omission, the gap between word and world widens. We begin to prefer the easy lie to the difficult truth. Over time, we stop noticing. We stop expecting truth from leaders, from friends, from ourselves. And the thread between our words and our integrity begins to fray. Untruth doesn’t simply confuse. It hollows out the ground of trust. It replaces presence with posturing. Resolution with momentum. Accountability with performance.
Kierkegaard’s warning echoes again: “The crowd is untruth.” Crowds allow us to speak without
consequence. And in that space, anything can be said. The most obvious lie still works. It doesn’t need to convince. Only to grant permission. That is how harm spreads. Not just through lies, but through language unmoored from care, from presence, from reality.
What Untruth Does to Us
We must ask not only what untruth is, but what it does, what changes in how we speak, how we relate, how we live?
Untruth reshapes our selves. It teaches us to perform. To posture. To protect. It severs the bond between what we say and who we are. We lose our instinct to check our words against the world. And when that link is lost, we speak from templates. From habits. From the success of others. Speech becomes mimicry. We say what is safe, not what is real.
Even our speech about the Earth changes. Nature becomes resource. Extraction becomes progress. Harm becomes development. And we forget: if we speak falsely about the world, we stop caring for it. Language is the beginning of care. If we speak in untruth, we cannot keep covenant. We cannot carry promise. A future spoken in untruth will arrive. But it will not be shared.
A Note on Digital Language
The digital age did not invent untruth. But it made its diffusion frictionless. Online, language is flattened. Incentivized. Algorithmized. We trade in fragments. We echo. We react. We speak to remain visible. But in the churn, we lose something vital. Presence.
Truth is not a trend. It is fidelity.
We generalize. We abstract. We forget how to speak from experience. Truth is not a trend. It is fidelity. To what we have seen. Suffered. Known. Fidelity is slow. But digital speech is fast. So, we drift. The return begins with authorship. With re-: reveal, recover, rebuild, remember.
This is not nostalgia for a simpler time. It is a call to notice what is happening to us now. Untruth is not just error. It is the erosion of the conditions that allow truth to be spoken. Without that, we cannot promise. We cannot repair. We can only perform.
Untruth cannot carry promise. It cannot bear hope. It only maintains, defends, extends. To live wisely is to resist that drift. To speak in ways that reveal. To restore the weight of words. Not perfect speech. But strong speech. Strong enough to carry truth again.
Postlude: A Note to the Reader
You may already feel this.
Perhaps you’ve lived in rooms of partial speech. Led in systems where truth cost too much. Stood in silence between what you know and what can be said.
This is not an indictment. It is an invitation. To name what many feel but cannot say: the ache of a world where words have lost weight. And the hope they might still be restored.
Not all language is hollow. Not all speech is spectacle. There are voices that carry the world with care.
You may be one of them.
If untruth is the secondhand smoke of our age, perhaps we must become those who crack the window. Clear the air. And speak again with breath that carries truth.
Deeper Dive: Suggested Readings
On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt
The Crowd is Untruth, Søren Kierkegaard (from The Present Age)
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
Language and Responsibility, Noam Chomsky
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With gratitude and anticipation,
John Henderson
Founder, The Pivot Mind
