The Lie That Keeps Us Alive: The Decision to Believe

 


No one can truly see all the way through us. We are always alone, not in a sentimental sense, but in a structural one. Every act of communication must cross an unbridgeable gap. Even when someone says, “I understand,” their grasp is refracted through their own symbolic lens. The rest, what matters most, remains unspoken, unseen, untranslated.

And yet, we go on. We fall in love, we pray, we make plans. We act as if we could be fully seen, as if someone might one day understand us. This as if is not a delusion but a decision; perhaps the only one that makes life possible.

Lacan said there is no sexual relationship. He did not mean there is no love, but that there is no perfect correspondence between one being and another. Two subjects never fully fit; between them, language inserts its permanent distance. We invent fantasies to make this distance bearable; the fantasy of being known, chosen, desired, completed. This invention is not deception; it is a creative act, a decision.

Believing in love, in God, in a good future; all share this same structural gesture. We choose the beautiful fiction of being known over the raw truth of being ultimately unknowable. Not because we are blind, but because a truth without fiction would leave us mute.

So yes, we are always alone. But this solitude is also what makes belief possible. The lie that we are seen keeps us alive; it is the poetry we write against the silence of the Real.

The Comfort of the Symbol

Every fraternity, religious congregation, or political movement built on ideals of brotherhood contains a quiet contradiction. It speaks the language of solidarity, yet when a member truly falls, the echo of their isolation is often louder than the helping hand.

And still, people stay. They attend the meetings, repeat the words, trace the signs. Not out of naïveté, but out of desire; a loyalty not to what is, but to what should be. To fall in absolute loneliness is fundamentally different from falling while choosing to imagine that a hand might eventually reach for you.

To belong, even symbolically, gives contour to our otherwise formless solitude. The emblem, the ritual, the shared vocabulary; these are shelters for desire. We know they are human inventions, fragile as myths, yet their existence is the defiant choice that allows us to face the world without despair.

Belief in solidarity is not the expectation that others will always be there; it is the act of deciding that the idea itself deserves our care.

The ideal becomes what we protect, even when it does not protect us. Perhaps this is the most dignified form of faith: holding up the symbol long after we have stopped expecting it to save us.

The Myth of the Unconditional

We like to imagine that love can be unconditional (especially within families) that it is limitless, forgiving, and pure. But nothing human escapes condition. Every affection, every loyalty, every tenderness exists within boundaries: time, fatigue, misunderstanding, the slow erosion of expectation.

There is always a point of no more than this. A moment when patience breaks, or silence replaces care.

And yet, we keep believing. We prefer the fiction of boundless love to the truth of its limits; not out of ignorance, but because this belief sustains us. To imagine infinity within finitude is how desire continues breathing.

Sometimes we glimpse what looks unconditional; a parent’s sacrifice, a stranger’s mercy, a friend who listens when no one else will. But these are not universal laws; they are singular, luminous events. They remind us of what we long for, not of what is guaranteed.

Perhaps love’s greatness lies not in being infinite, but in the courage to pretend that it is. The dream of the unconditional is the poetry that gives graceful shape to our limits.

The Poetry Against the Silence

We live on fictions, but they are not false. They are the mantles that hold together the fragile architecture of desire. The dream of the unconditional, the symbol of solidarity, the beautiful lie of being fully known; these are the courageous forms our endurance takes.

To believe, even when we know better, is not weakness. It is the act by which we survive the truth.

Ultimately, we are alone. But this abysmal solitude; like the loneliness of the Earth suspended in the universe, surrounded by unfathomable distances; is what makes the poetry of life possible. It is precisely because nothing guarantees us, because no voice really answers from the void, that we keep speaking, loving, and imagining. Out of that infinite distance, meaning flickers for a moment; and that flicker is everything.

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