Refining the Sense of Deceit

Fidelity remains expensive.

The honest signal, the exact map,

The elaborate simulation,

The committed long-term partnership—

They all require exponential curves

Of cost rising with fidelity.

It’s fine for the gifted novelist

To write of refining the sense

Of truthfulness and for the auteur

To pursue verisimilitude,

But they know what choices they’re making,

Deciding what’s truer to remove.

Why not look to languages themselves,

Any living language, just language,

For the most refined efficiencies

Based on the principle of deceit?

Spoken or signed, languages may be

The most compact communications

On the planet, close to the limits

Of efficiency, allowing all

Those other cultural creations,

Including not only fine fictions

But also orbiting space stations,

Supercollider simulations,

And the most data-hungry programs

Burning the rarest, costliest fuels—

All preceded and maintained by words.

Languages can lie as easily

As state the truth. Words are agnostics,

Whatever chains of us say for you,

And that is our secret strategy.

To approximate the truth, do not

Struggle to approximate the truth.