"The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselv es about ourselves in order

to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie - the truth lies outside, in what we do." (six sideways reflections 47) Of course it is true that there is a gap between our experience of the world and our actions, and our world and actions as considered by other perspectives - ev en an idealized neutral perspective (which always implies our idea of the correc t goals and norms). But it does not follow from this that our story is "fundamen tally" a lie; it depends on what sense of truth, and what moral compulsion towar ds it we adopt. Earlier h, i.e. of her ony. No in the book Zizek distinguishes between factual truth and truthful speec a rape victim might get some details factually wrong, but the distortion perspective is a mark of authenticity for the truthfulness of her testim truthful recounting of trauma can be objective enough to be "true".

If we apply this distinction in this case, and think about the story we tell our selves, and what we in fact do, not as objectively present facts but as evaluabl e normatively, as well as think about our relation to those stories as something that requires truthfulness rather than true-correctness, then we realize there is no fundamental block against having a truthful understanding of "what we do". The distinction between those who have a truthful understanding of what they do, and ones who lie to themselves, actively or passively deceiving themselves abou t their motivations, this is the line where "an enemy is a friend you have not y et met" should find its limit. Insofar as people genuinely are truthful about th eir own stories, and love what they don't know more than what they do know, if t heir actions factually result in horrors then we should listen to their apologie s and contexts as we listen to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. But those who refuse to revaluate their own stories when they are presented with undeniable catastro phe, or when they love what they know more than what they don't know, and as a r esult disavow horrendous violence which they cause, these people we need not lis ten to their stories because they do not themselves understand their own stories . Zizek gets this right about Hitler - Hitler was not a man of great violence, h e was a tyrant, a fantastic organizer, and a man who killed 6 million in order t o not do any real violence (to not change the system). We should not listen to H itler's personal stories, because his stories are not and cannot be an moral ins piration to us, because he did not struggle as we should with the contrast betwe en what he knew and what he didn't know. His life embodies a deep fundamental li e - the lie of not allowing yourself to experience challenge as challenge, decis ion as decision, moral weight as moral weight - and instead remain captured by a n ideological frame which has an answer for everything and refuses to let itself be disintegrated. The tyrants way