But three decades after Havel had told us to live in truth, the film-maker Michael Moore declared that "we live in fictitious times" (speaking at the Oscars ceremony in 2003), while the satirist Stephen Colbert coined the term "truthiness" to describe those things that we feel and know ought to be true, but sadly just cannot (and never will) prove.
For the fictitious ex-offenders in our experiment, we declared that they had been convicted of an assault, that they were under probation, and that they were doing community service as a punishment.
("I was born in Naples," a fictitious eunuch declares, "where they caponized 2,000 to 3,000 boys a year").
Potentially more damaging, though, he also suggests the fictitious Chinese company employ him through his wife's company, Low, so that the arrangement need not be declared.
Not only that: in a number of newspapers Baker was declared to be a known gangster and hardened criminal; some articles even going as far as to refer to a fictitious gang they named as Bloodline, and then linking this "gang" to the Tottenham Man Dem and inevitably to the name of Duggan, as if this somehow helped to explain or justify the killing.
Carlos Labarthe declared.
When Nathan asked King David what the rich man's punishment should be, David declared, "As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die". Nathan then replied, "You are the man!"1 Despite the fictitious nature of Nathan's story, its point was not lost on David, who responded with contrition and repentance, having been made dynamically aware of the truth of his own crime.
"A Beautiful Mind" opens with a speech by the fictitious Professor Helinger Judd Hirschh), declaring that American mathematicians, having played an important part in the defeat of Nazi Germany, must now turn their attention to defeating Soviet Communism.
