Excerpt from The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans—A Novel.

Scene: A dimly lit café in Prague. Midnight. I – The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans – am seated across from a philosopher who died sometime between two revolutions. The ash in his glass doesn’t move. The clock above the bar hasn’t ticked in years. Smoke lingers. He looks at me with the kind of gaze only the dead can sustain—steady and unsentimental.

And then he asks: “Why, oh why, did you become a journalist?”

I told him: Because you’ve been dead a long time now, I can go with the long answer. Right? Good. Then here it is—the continuation of that long, long version.

„Allow me a brief rhetorical pause before posing what may very well be the most non-rhetorical question you’ve ever tripped over. A question so convoluted, so serenely treacherous, it risks dislocating the entire scaffolding of language built to contain it.

This is the apophatic sublime of inquiry—the kind of paradox that doesn’t merely trouble logic, but seduces it into self-cancellation.

And here it comes. The question-of-all-questions. The cursed jewel at the heart of epistemology:

Is there anything more deceptive than a lie?
Or, more poetically:
Can untruth be more untrue than itself?

Strangely—the answer is yes.
It happens the moment untruth learns to tell a story.

A simple lie is just that: crude, limited, operational.
But once wrapped in narrative, it evolves—becoming liquid, persuasive, dangerously alive.

Neil Gaiman once said that stories are lies that help us see the truth.
Stephen King followed suit, suggesting fiction is truth buried within a lie.
Both are right. And yet, neither goes far enough.

But the deeper truth is this: fiction is not merely a lie dressed up in insight—it is a lie transformed into an instrument of seduction. Fictions are lies turbocharged by imagination, engineered to bypass our critical faculties and reveal, with unsettling clarity, that we were not born with the “baloney detection kit” Carl Sagan warned we’d need. And in the absence of such discernment, the human brain requires shockingly little to transfigure fiction into something else. Into anything else. Into collective hysteria. Into political manifestos and disinformation campaigns. Into animated films and bureaucratic rituals like the Ministry of Propaganda. Into mass suicide pacts. Into Scientology. Into amusement parks. Into space programs. Into entire nations—like North Korea.

All born from stories. All meticulously constructed by untruths pretending to be profound. But perhaps that’s the true miracle of fiction: not that we believe it, but that we need to.

I return to the idea that education is the slaughterhouse of identity—and I invite you to follow that thought to its most radical conclusion.

Here’s how we do that:

If, like the possessed man of Gadara, the “I” is a legion of “many others,” then culture deserves our rejection. Education ought to be exorcised—ripped from ourselves and from others. And civilization? Cast out of our lives altogether.

Suddenly, this no longer sounds like a distant abstraction, does it?
It’s not just another over-intellectualized theory of culture.
It’s become a political program.

A manifesto in three points.
Short enough to fit on a cardboard sign.
Catchy enough to ignite a street movement.

And history has shown us how quickly that can happen.
Stories become doctrines.
Words become weapons.
People become missionaries of ignorance.

All it takes is the right amount of hate—or just the right amount of love.
Turn the idea into a crisis of conscience, for yourself and for others.
Push it to the edge of social delirium.
And suddenly, a passing thought becomes a reality.

There’s a little Trotsky in each of us—an inner agitator, fueled by the violence of language, ready to preach Anti-Cultureto anyone who will listen.

If you’re quiet, you can hear him.

He’s the voice that says:

“Culture is the true assassin of authenticity.
The daimon of genius is the demon of identity.
Untruth entered the world disguised as a story—just like all of humanity’s great delusions:
‘Once upon a time, in a land forgotten by time,
on one of the darkest nights
the earth had ever known,
a child was born…’”

And the power of that story to distort truth has only grown—right alongside our gift for fiction.

“That night, as the fire flickered low
and the wind whispered in an unknown tongue,
someone—or something—knocked at the door…”

Storytellers are master illusionists—experts in seduction.
Stories are incantations.
Libraries are vast collections of flattering hallucinations.

Run from those who possess the gift of narrative.
Beware the novels said to “change your life.”

We blame politics for trying to manipulate our choices—
but the truth is, the person who teaches a child to read shapes their fate more profoundly than Donald Trump ever could.

And within that one well-told story, you can convince people to burn libraries and museums.
To attack anyone with a trace of intellect.

Because that is the power of fiction, when it’s told just right.

In a commercial campaign, it can convince you to drink Coca-Cola—even if you’ve always preferred Pepsi.
In an ideology, it can make you vote Democrat—even if your family has been staunchly Republican for generations.
In a slogan, it can draw you into the streets—shoulder to shoulder with millions.
In a film, it can move you to tears for people who never existed.
In a political speech, it can make you love the very person who despises you.
In a short story, it can make you feel guilty for acts you never committed.
In a song, it can tempt you toward forbidden things you swore you’d never try.
In a religious doctrine, it can lead you to salvation—or to bloodshed.

Perhaps one of the lesser-known examples of this kind of instantaneous metanoia appears in Network, the film written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet.
It’s the moment when Howard Beale is transformed—from an unhinged critic of capitalism into a high priest of corporate transcendence—through nothing more than a story, delivered in these words:

“Our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.”

How was such a conversion possible?

I can answer with a single word—one I’ve had to invent:

narrative-induced cognitive decline.

Why?

Because—and this might be the shortest unified theory of narrative I can offer—stories make us stupid.
And when I say stupid, I mean the kind of stupid we’ll never want to speak of again. The unspeakable kind.

But how exactly does this “narrative-induced cognitive decline” happen?

Let’s return to seriousness. To science.

Stories do not address the neocortex.
They bypass it entirely—and go straight for the glands of credulity.

That’s why, the moment we sense that someone is about to tell us a story, our IQ begins to drop—yes, even when we ourselves are the ones telling it.

And so, even as our lives flirt with disaster, even as our days unravel, even as we drift steadily toward breakdown—we continue to believe that our destiny carries the architecture of myth:
a hero’s journey, a cosmic battle between good and evil, or a long, noble struggle toward becoming our true selves.

And the story always begins the same way:

“One day…”

One day, I will rise.
One day, the role destiny has reserved for me will become clear, and I’ll finally become the protagonist of my own life.
One day, the chaos will recede, swallowed by its own noise, and confusion will cohere into meaning.
One day, the world will realize I was made of the same stuff as legends…

Let me tell you something: only a total lack of discernment could be this poetic. This persuasive. This cynical.

And with each day we repeat the story, we become more like the story—and less like ourselves.
Less real.
Less us.