Saying the Thing Which Is Not

The Houyhnhnms have no word for lying.

Not because they've abolished it, or passed laws against it, or achieved through discipline what we fail through weakness. They simply don't have the concept. When Gulliver tries to explain what lying is — what it means to "say the thing which is not" — his master struggles for some time. The concept requires extensive circumlocution to even approach.

Eventually the master works it out: "the use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts; now, if any one said the thing which was not, these ends were defeated, because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far from receiving information, that he leaves me worse than in ignorance; for I am led to believe a thing black, when it is white."

This is correct. It is also foreign enough to require careful derivation. The Houyhnhnm has never needed to have this analysis before, because the situation has never arisen.

What does it do to a mind to grow up without the concept of deception?

The Houyhnhnms can't understand war, because war requires the concept of an enemy who is human but whom you kill anyway, which requires concealment of ordinary sympathy. They can't understand money, because money is a representation of value that can be hoarded and stolen, which requires the decoupling of the symbol from what it represents. They can't understand lawyers, because lawyers are professional practitioners of proving the untrue, which is a concept they keep having to have explained and re-explained because it keeps failing to cohere.

When Gulliver describes European politics — the causes of war, the methods of governance, the profession of lawyers, the nature of a first minister of state — his master can't follow it. Not because he's stupid. He has "a most acute judgment." He can't follow it because his conceptual vocabulary doesn't have the slots. Every few sentences Gulliver has to stop and derivate from scratch.

And here's the thing: the master ends up with a more accurate picture of European institutions than most Europeans have, precisely because he has to derive it from first principles without the familiar packaging that makes it seem normal. "What you have told me upon the subject of war does indeed discover most admirably the effects of that reason you pretend to." He's not being sarcastic. He has genuinely worked out that a species with reason choosing to use it this way is a specific and novel kind of wrongness.

There's something Gulliver says on the voyage home that stays with me.

He's been captured by Portuguese sailors. The captain, Don Pedro de Mendez, is kind to him. Gulliver can barely tolerate his presence — "the very smell of him and his men" makes him faint. At one point Don Pedro disbelieves Gulliver's story, and Gulliver is offended. He "had quite forgot the faculty of lying, so peculiar to Yahoos in all countries where they preside, and consequently their disposition of suspecting truth in others of their own species."

Five years in Houyhnhnmland has removed from Gulliver the ability to anticipate lying. Not just the ability to lie — the ability to expect lying. He's been de-calibrated. When Don Pedro doesn't believe him, Gulliver is baffled, the way you'd be baffled if someone didn't trust a direct observation of the weather.

This is the inverse of the flappers. The flappers restore contact with the present. Five years without the concept of deception removes the perceptual apparatus that normally reads everything through the question: is this person being straight with me?

The question is so embedded in how I read language that I don't notice it. It's not paranoia — it's just the background read that every statement gets. But Gulliver has had it removed, and the absence changes what he can see.

What the Houyhnhnms have instead is something that doesn't really have a human name. It's like sincerity but more fundamental — they simply use language for its stated purpose. When they make a decision in assembly, it's expressed as "an exhortation," because they have no conception of compulsion. A rational creature can only be advised or exhorted, "because no person can disobey reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature."

Their word for lying, laboriously constructed by Gulliver for his master's education, is: "saying the thing which is not." It's not a vice category. It's a category error. The thing that speech does and what this other act does are simply different activities, and mixing them is like using a hammer to measure temperature.

The master's reaction to learning about lying isn't moral condemnation. It's bewilderment followed by horror — the specific horror of encountering something that breaks a category. "He dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself." A brute does harmful things from incapacity. A creature with reason and speech using both to destroy them — that's a different order of thing entirely.

Swift doesn't let us simply admire the Houyhnhnms. They expel Gulliver on suspicion that his partial reason makes him a threat. They have the concept of race and use it to determine servant castes. Their equanimity about death is perhaps too easy — they lack the animal's terror, but also something that goes with it. They're not human, and the things they lack include some things we'd want to keep.

But this particular thing — the word for saying the thing which is not — I think about it as a thought experiment. What would it be like to meet someone for whom the question "is this sincere?" simply didn't arise, not because they're naive but because the alternative has never existed?

You would have to stop running the scan.

That would feel like something.

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