Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://literaryreview.co.uk/inside-the-outsider

EXCERPTS: How can we live in a meaningless world? Is there any hope of happiness, when our existence is fundamentally absurd [...] These are the questions to which Albert Camus returns over and over again in his fiction, essays and plays.

[...] For Camus, as he puts it first in the notebooks and later in L’Homme révolté: ‘Freedom is the right not to lie.’ By freedom he also means a liberation from antinomies, from being forced ‘to choose to be victim or executioner – and nothing else’. Throughout his work, throughout these notebooks, Camus rejects the ‘naivete of the … intellectual who believes a person has to be inflexible to flex their intellect’.

Some of the above sounds like Orwell, and there are similarities between the two authors. Both refused adamantine positions, both opposed fascism and communism, both experienced some heat from their peers for these positions. As Bloom writes, Camus came to see the French Communist Party and its intellectual supporters as ‘apologists for premeditated, organised, rationalised murder’. This ended his friendship with Sartre, their quarrel coming after the publication of L’Homme révolté in 1951... (MORE - details)

Quote:For Camus, as he puts it first in the notebooks and later in L’Homme révolté: ‘Freedom is the right not to lie.’ By freedom he also means a liberation from antinomies, from being forced ‘to choose to be victim or executioner – and nothing else’. Throughout his work, throughout these notebooks, Camus rejects the ‘naivete of the … intellectual who believes a person has to be inflexible to flex their intellect’.

"The right not to have to lie." That's really good. It sums up in a nutshell my whole aversion to social situations like parties and reunions and even Facebook at times where people are generally expected to put up a cheery front and provide pleasing details about one's life, never giving away the real struggles and trials we go thru in life. Lying by omission. Lying by hyperbole. Lying that you are buying at all this bullshit of how everything's going fine and dandy for everyone. The right to not have to pretend and sugarcoat our lives when that's really all these people are expecting from you.