The creative power of lies

For the first time, I am celebrating World Creativity and Innovation Day in my original country. WCID has been a UN-recognised holiday only since 2018, 15 years after I relocated to South Africa. I discovered it only after that.

WCID — Tuesday 21 April, the day before Earth Day — is itself an act of creation. 

It began as Marci Segal’s idea in 2001 to commemorate the importance of creativity in our society. Something that was not true yet became true when she declared it. That is how creativity works.

As I set out to mark the day this time, I have decided to make it part of this America column instead of my creativity one. 

After all, the US is the world’s most creative country if we equate creativity with lies, which we can do without making a moral judgement. America today is the land of the lie. The scale, confidence and consequences of its invented narratives are hard to match.

Silicon Valley, for example, runs on lies. Founders routinely present visions that are not yet real and by exaggerating, secure the capital and talent required to make them so. 

“Fake it till you make it” produces extraordinary breakthroughs. Sometimes it also produces spectacular collapses. Never mind.

Hollywood is the world’s capital of invention. It manufactures entire universes at scale and tells stories that reshape how people see themselves and what they believe is possible. 

In the film The Invention of Lying, fibbing is itself a conscious innovation with a start date. Without lying, in the film, there are no fictional stories, only documentaries.

America was even founded on a lie, in a sense: the declaration of its independence from Great Britain, which was not the case until the Revolutionary War made it so.

There are lies that distort reality and lies that extend it to new domains. A manipulative lie replaces what is true with what is false. But a generative lie does something more valuable — it replaces what exists now with a newly useful reality. Every act of creation starts there.

Before the aeroplane, “humans can fly” was not true. Before the internet, “we can communicate instantly across the world” was fiction. Before any new company, product or movement, there is a moment when someone asserts a version of reality that does not yet exist — and chooses to act as if it does. 

This is not a moral quandary. It is artifice. The line between innovation and illusion is determined by what happens after the lie.

Granted, things have become somewhat out of control with America’s reality-authoring under Donald Trump, an undisputed master of the form. In Trump’s first term, the Washington Post Fact Checker counted 30 573 false or misleading claims, an average of more than 21 a day. In his second term, the Post no longer keeps track.

I am not saying that no country has ever lied as much, because there is no basis for clear comparison but the scale, confidence and consequences of official American lies today seem unparalleled. 

The government has taken it beyond a cultural operating system to what could be termed a pseudocracy (rule based on false-hoods) or mythocracy (rule by alternative facts).

But is that so wrong? 

Is lying ultimately just a form of branding? A company tells a story about what it is, what it stands for and why it matters — and then, through consistency of execution, works to close the gap.

It goes today with American exceptionalism, which we continue to present as intact, despite actions such as bombing Iran and eviscerating Venezuela. Is America’s blatant lying today, in a sense, the boldest form of truth-telling?

America did not invent artifice. But it has turned the volume up to 11 and made lying a competitive advantage. Trump has normalised the idea that rhetorical bombast matters more than accuracy.

A beginner’s mind is the ability to approach something as if you are seeing it for the first time, even though you are not, loosening the grip of what you know so that something new can emerge. 

That, too, is a type of lie: strategic ignorance — choosing to unknow what you know to see something deeper. This is not easy to achieve in a culture oversaturated with narratives.

Expertise, for all its value, can become a constraint. The more certain we are about how things work, the less willing we are to consider what might work better. 

A beginner’s mind reopens that space. It allows us to ask: What if it is not that way? That question is the beginning of every creative act. 

There is power, too, in Trump’s absolute belief in his own rightness.

Lies are not the strict opposite of truth. Sometimes a lie is less about what is not than what is plausible. This is where the idea of the “noble lie” takes shape. 

Plato suggested that societies are often held together by such shared stories. We see versions of this everywhere: the idea that hard work always leads to success or that democratic systems are fundamentally fair. The American Dream. The rainbow nation.

Some lies protect reality rather than replace it. But even they do not stay contained. 

Which brings us back to where this question matters: not governments and certainly not Trump. Once his lies are recognised as total, they begin to negate themselves.

What matters is you. Because while every breakthrough begins with a lie, what makes a difference is what comes afterwards.

In honour of WCID, let us not point fingers at institutional lies or Trump’s. Let us celebrate ourselves instead. What do you believe about yourself that is not yet true — but could be? Which stories about your future are you willing to create as if they were real?

You can use a lie to avoid reality or to build a future. Which will it be?

Yes, creativity lives along the lifeline of a lie. It does not survive when truth is the only morality. 

Happy WCID.

Michael Brian Lee is the Mail & Guardian’s US correspondent in New York.