The Bankruptcy of “Postmodern” Justifications
As is well known, there are thousands of people around the world who are convinced that the Earth is flat. For some 70 years now, an organization uniting such believers — the Flat Earth Society — has existed. Books and articles are published, social media groups operate, and communities form around this peculiar idea.
In theory, these people can live inside an informational bubble, communicate only with one another on this subject, and continuously invent new “arguments” to reinforce their belief.
So what, then, is my mission as a journalist if I choose to write about this topic? After noting that there are two “sides” to the issue, should I conclude that the Earth is somewhat round and somewhat flat? Or slightly oval here and a bit flat there? Wouldn’t such “impartiality” amount, in fact, to deceiving my readers?
Perhaps the flat-Earth movement can be dismissed as a curiosity — a laughable, harmless delusion one can shrug off with a smile. But there are lies deliberately fed to thousands, even millions of people. Those lies accumulate and pile up, because once someone begins to lie, they must keep producing new lies to sustain the bubble that keeps their circle of influence sealed off from reality.
The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote back in the 1920s and 1930s that revolutionary and totalitarian regimes create closed systems of myth. Within such systems, falsehood becomes a state norm, truth is replaced by the “politically correct line,” and individuals are forced to live in an atmosphere of lies. He was writing this a hundred years ago — long before social networks, “information bubbles,” and “postmodernism.”
Although Berdyaev’s main target was communism, he clearly understood that the triumph of falsehood would not be confined to a single ideology. He warned that the “bourgeois world,” too, could be built on lies if it were grounded not in divine truths but in idols — money, nation, state.
…Today’s Armenian authorities have likewise constructed a closed system of myths, each component no less absurd than the theory of a flat Earth. Let me mention just two chains of falsehood.
First: Armenia’s defeat in the 44-day war is blamed on the “former authorities” who allegedly looted the army and failed to buy weapons; on the Russians; on Russia’s so-called fifth column; on traitorous generals; on 11,000 deserters; and so on. At the same time, we are told that had we won the war, we would have become excessively dependent on Russia.
Second chain: the Catholicos is a Russian agent; he wants to relocate the Mother See to another country; he is preparing to plunder the treasures of Etchmiadzin; bishops are pedophiles — and so forth.
Tens of thousands of Armenians live within this closed mythological system. The volume of official falsehood has grown so large that telling the truth begins to feel almost pointless. Yet, as with the flat-Earth case, to say “well, it’s partly this and partly that, maybe it could be so or maybe otherwise” is to inhabit the same “postmodern” framework. More plainly put — to live in the kingdom of lies.
“What is truth?” asks Pontius Pilate (John 18:37–38). It is the question of a tired, disillusioned man, lost in a foreign land whose customs he does not understand. In today’s colloquial Armenian, it would sound something like: “Come on, brother. Truth? Which truth — and why should it matter?” A postmodern question that demands no answer. A “graceful” justification for washing one’s hands.
But living in the “kingdom of lies” is hardly an innocent pastime. “Because you have said… we have made lies our refuge and falsehood our shelter” (Isaiah 28:15), writes the prophet. He did not believe that such shelter could hold.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
