Having written concretely about the "Alle elsker Rasmus" affair yesterday, I'd like to go one step deeper. This is for those of you who are interested in Reality, Truth, the Lie and the structure of Man.
What follows is not for everyone. But I'm sharing it anyway, so we can look at it together.
Picture the room.
A young man is sitting on a sofa. He's laughing. He has made new friends who laugh with him, and a camera crew that follows him, and a sense that something big is about to happen in his life. He has waited for this. He has hoped for it. And now it's here.
Finally.
Around him sit all the others. The producers. The hosts. The ones playing his new friends. The ones who edit, the ones who sign off, the ones who sit in the meetings and nod. And everyone in the room knows one thing that he doesn't. A whole apparatus of people held together around that one thing for four months, and that one thing was that Rasmus must not find out.
Four months.
It is the purest form of Lie I have seen in a long time. Not because it was malicious in tone. On the contrary. It was friendly. It smiled. It patted him on the shoulder. It was supposed to be bloody good fun.
And that is exactly why it's worth looking at.
Because we normally think of a lie as a sentence. Something someone says that isn't true. But what happened to Rasmus wasn't a sentence. It was a world. A whole world was built up around one human being, with walls and windows and people in it, and the only one who lived in it was him. Everyone else stood outside looking in.
Try turning it around.
Truth does the opposite. Truth is THE ONE WORLD we all live in together. When I say something true to you, we stand on the same ground afterwards. We can disagree about what to do with it, but we're standing in the same place. The Lie moves one of us somewhere else, without him knowing. That is its nature. It splits. I've written it a couple of times before, but the old Greek word for *that which throws things apart* is diabolos, and it is no accident that the word ended up as a name.
Jesus uses another name. He calls him the Father of Lies, and in the same breath he says something that for many years I read straight past. Mostly because I didn't understand it.
He says that he - the Father of Lies - was a murderer from the beginning.
Murderer and liar. In the same sentence. As if they were two sides of the same thing.
It took me a long time to understand why they belong together. But look at Rasmus. Nobody hit him. Nobody took anything from him that you could point to. And yet something was taken. His friendships were copies. His joy was ordered by someone. His future, which he went around hoping for, was a script others had already read to the end. Everything a human being stands on - Reality - had been removed from under him while he stood there smiling.
That is what the Lie does. It doesn't kill straight away. It removes the ground from under a Human Being, so slowly that he doesn't feel it, and when he finally falls, nobody has pushed.
And now listen to the next part, because that is what makes the Lie something other than just a mistake.
In the Gospel of John it says of the Father of Lies that when he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own. I have turned that sentence over many times. I think it means that the Lie has no substance in itself. It lives off what is. A lie about Rasmus could only work because there was real friendship, real joy, real hope for it to imitate.
Remove the real, and the lie has nothing to eat. It is a parasite on Reality. It has never created anything. It can only borrow, distort and empty out.
That is also why it has to be tended all the time. That is something anyone who has ever lied - which is presumably all of us - knows.
The Truth you can say once and go home. The Lie has to be maintained. You have to remember what you said to whom. You have to keep an eye on who's getting close. You have to build new lies to hold up the old ones. A whole production crew had to work for four months to keep Rasmus's world standing, and the moment one person had said one true sentence to him, the whole building would have collapsed.
Four months against one sentence.
That is the Lie's weakness, and at the same time its price. It requires everyone to keep quiet. All the time. That is why it always ends up having to threaten. A little at first, with a look. Then with exclusion. And if that isn't enough, with violence.
Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer who spent eight years in Stalin's camps and afterwards used the rest of his life describing what he had seen, with words that helped bring down the Soviet regime, saw it more clearly than anyone, because he lived in a country built on it. The Lie.
Violence cannot live without the Lie to hide behind, and the Lie cannot hold itself up without violence in the end. They are married to each other.
That sounds like something from another century. It isn't. When a party has said the same thing for thirty years about something that anyone who walks down their own street can see isn't true, and still says it, that is not an error in the analysis. It is a lie that has to be guarded. And you can feel for yourself what happens to the one who says it out loud. Here in this country too.
How did violence get into a TV programme about a sweet guy from Jutland?
It came in as silence. As the quiet knowledge in everyone who was part of it, that if you objected, you were out. Not out of the programme. Out of the industry, out of the circle, out of the place where you want to be. Nobody had to say it out loud. That is what is so effective about the Lie when it becomes shared. It spreads the guilt across so many hands that none of them feels they are carrying anything. Each one just did their little part. Each one saw that everyone else was in on it.
The mechanics are the same, no matter what they are used for. That is how it worked in the Soviet Union. That is how it worked in Germany in the thirties. None of the people who took part experienced themselves as the ones doing it. They just did their little part, and everyone else was in on it, after all. The difference between them and a TV crew in Denmark is not the mechanics. It's only how far they were allowed to run.
H.C. Andersen wrote it in 1837. The Emperor walks naked through the town, and everyone can see it, and nobody says it, because everyone can see that nobody else is saying it. We teach children that story because we think the point is the child who shouts. But read it again. The point is all the grown-ups. All the sensible people who stood in the street and knew it and kept their mouths shut.
The Rasmus affair is the same story, just turned upside down. Here it's the whole town that knows the Emperor is naked. And the Emperor is the only one who doesn't know.
Now to what is hardest to say, and which I think is the most important.
The Lie doesn't begin between people.
It begins inside a Human Being.
The first lie in the Bible isn't even a claim, it's a question.
"Did God really say?"
That is all it takes. One small loosened word. One "surely it's okay". And from there it's a short road to telling yourself that what you're part of probably isn't that bad. That the others are responsible. That he'll get a good experience out of it anyway. That it's only for fun. And he's going to be on TELEVISION! With his OWN show!! And who wouldn't want that...
Dostoevsky has an old monk say to a man who has lied his whole life that the one who lies to himself ends up unable to tell truth from lie, either in himself or around him, and that he therefore loses respect for himself and for others, and that, because he has no respect, he stops loving. That sentence is two hundred years old, and it describes exactly what happens to a human being who makes the Lie his home. He is split in two.
There is the one who knows, and the one who shows. And the distance between the two is the place where everything that makes us Human slowly seeps out. Conscience doesn't stop speaking. But you stop being able to hear it.
And that didn't only apply to him. All the others in the room went home every evening for four months knowing what they were part of. That is a long time to stand in two places at once.
That is what I mean when I say the Lie does something to the structure of Man. We - Man - are not built to stand in two places at once. We are built for our words to cover what is. When the word and the thing are separated, something breaks in us that we can't repair by thinking our way to it. It can only be repaired by saying it as it is. Out loud. To someone.
That is what nobody did.
And now I can't get around the last part, because this is where it all points.
There was once someone who stood in front of the Lie's entire machinery, the religious and the political at once, and said what was true. He hadn't lied about anything. He hadn't built a world around anyone. He had simply said what was, and healed some people along the way. And the Lie's answer was the only answer the Lie has ever had when it can't win with words.
It killed him.
A murderer from the beginning. There it is again.
But this is what separates my faith from everything else I have encountered. The story doesn't stop there.
Notice how the whole thing was built. The trial against him was conducted on witnesses who couldn't even get their accounts to agree. The verdict was a deal between those who had the power and those who were afraid of losing it. And when he was dead, they put guards at the tomb and sealed the stone, because the Lie, as I said, has to be guarded, even when it thinks it has won.
Three days later the tomb was empty.
And now listen to what happened afterwards. The guards went into the city and told what they had seen, and those who had the power paid them money to say that his friends had stolen the body in the night. It says so. In the Gospel. The first reaction to the resurrection was a new lie, bought and paid for, because the old one could no longer stand.
That is exactly the same thing that happened to Rasmus's world when someone finally told him. It didn't collapse because someone tore it down. It collapsed because it had never had any substance in itself. The only thing holding it up was that everyone kept quiet.
The Truth was still standing. It didn't need guards. It didn't need anyone to keep quiet. It only needed one person to say it.
This isn't a nice story I believe because it's comforting. It is the mechanics of Reality as I see them, and the Rasmus affair is a small, Danish, friendly version of exactly the same mechanics. And what it took from him while it stood, none of the smiling people could give back to him.
So let me say it clearly.
What happened to Rasmus was not a flaw in a format. It was what the Lie always does when it is allowed to become shared. It took a Human Being and moved him out of the world the rest of us live in, and called it entertainment.
TV 2's content director - someone in the comments called her "a big shot" yesterday - called the Lie "new and wild".
Anyone can think about that for a bit.
The Lie has to be guarded day and night.
The Truth only has to be said once.
And when you look around, it's probably high time we said it. Out loud. Without worry. And without fear.
One subject at a time.
How else do you think we're going to take Reality back?
❤️🔥🪽
Have a good Monday, friends ☀️
