I came across some old videos of Marco Aurelio Denegri (MAD) that got me thinking about what it takes to defend “truth” in public life.
MAD is one of those figures who probably isn’t known outside Peru, yet he’s absolutely worth knowing: a relentless populariser of culture and knowledge, and the kind of public intellectual who could turn a “small” linguistic puzzle into a moral argument about intellectual discipline, and then make it entertaining. He had a gift for making language feel like a public responsibility, not a private hobby.
One of those puzzles is his insistence that Spanish (and other languages) doesn’t really have a clean antonym for mentir (“to lie”). And the more you sit with it, the less it feels like a dictionary quirk and the more it starts sounding like a diagnosis of our information ecosystem.
Why is there “no antonym for mentir”
MAD’s point is not that Spanish can’t express the opposite of lying. Of course it can: we say decir la verdad (“to tell the truth”). But that’s precisely the problem: it’s not a single verb — it’s a construction, a workaround.
For MAD, mentir is a tidy verb because it packages a whole ethical act in one move:
- you know (or believe) something is false,
- you say it anyway,
- with an intention to deceive.
It’s morally and cognitively “complete.” It names a recognisable human action, compactly and efficiently.
Watch MAD’s argument (you can change the language)
The mirror image would require something equally complete: not just “saying something true,” but saying what is true knowingly, deliberately, and faithfully, as a distinct act rather than an accidental outcome. Spanish doesn’t give us a single everyday verb for that. We have to assemble it: decir la verdad.
MAD’s claim is that this asymmetry matters. It suggests that language tends to streamline what humans do often, not what they do virtuously. Lying gets a compact habit-word. Truth-telling stays periphrastic, something you have to choose, not something your language makes effortless.
From time to time, someone will suggest a candidate verb to fill the gap. MAD mentions ortologar, as a solution that has been proposed. Ortologar is “correct” in the sense of being well-formed and meaningful, but it won’t catch on.
Why? Because words don’t become real because they are logical; they become real because people use them. And MAD’s realistic punchline is that we won’t collectively adopt a verb that names something we don’t reliably do or enjoy partly because it’s not in human nature to “tell the truth” in that disciplined, almost ethical sense he’s pointing to.
We lie constantly: sometimes maliciously, sometimes strategically, sometimes politely, sometimes for self-preservation, sometimes to protect others, sometimes because we prefer comfort over accuracy. A language that has been shaped by human social life will reflect that.
But lying is also part of our humanity. The film The Invention of Lying presents a society where everyone tells the truth but is also empty of any sort of creativity. In the more recent Pluribus, no lying comes with the loss of individuality.
Efficient, yes, but who would want to live like that?
If MAD is right, then “truth” isn’t just a value we hold. It’s a behaviour that runs against the grain. It takes effort. And the effort is the point.
Which is exactly why I thought of think tanks.
What MAD’s missing antonym reveals about misinformation
In our world of policy ideas, policy, politics and public debate, misinformation doesn’t thrive only because bad actors lie. It thrives because the whole environment rewards speed, certainty, identity, and performance. Truth arrives slower. It is conditional. It is hedged. It needs context. It often sounds less emotionally satisfying than the lie.
On Think Tanks has been circling the same problem from another angle for years: the challenge isn’t simply “fake news” as content; it’s the ecosystem that produces, amplifies, and normalises it — including the way it corrodes trust and blurs the boundary between evidence and propaganda.
If you’ve been following OTT’s writing on credibility and misinformation, you’ll recognise the contours:
- distrust is rising,
- “fake” versions of knowledge actors are proliferating (fake news, fake research, fake think tanks),
- and being rigorous is no longer enough to be believed, because the credibility of the category is under attack.
MAD’s linguistic observation becomes a useful metaphor: mentir is easy to name, easy to do, easy to recognise. Decir la verdad is harder to do consistently, and harder to “package” in a way that travels far and sticks!
That has consequences for how think tanks should imagine their role.
Implications for think tanks: This is neither a research nor a communications problem
If we accept the MAD frame and we take OTT’s diagnosis seriously, then the implication is uncomfortable but clarifying:
You don’t beat misinformation with “more information” and “better communication.”
You can publish and disseminate impeccable reports and still lose the public argument because misinformation is not primarily a content deficit. It’s an environment of incentives and shortcuts, and it’s deeply tuned to human psychology.
For years, we have heard that think tanks and the sector are facing a credibility crisis.
OTT’s practical guidance on misinformation has always started with that human layer: emotion, cognitive bias, repetition, social identity, the temptation to dismiss rather than engage, the importance of slowing down, checking sources, and communicating corrections carefully.
It recognises what MAD is getting at: truth-telling requires discipline, and discipline doesn’t scale automatically.
So what does scale?
What can scale: Making truth legible, and integrity harder to counterfeit
The most useful shift I see in OTT’s work is moving from “how do we get our evidence used?” to “how do we strengthen the conditions under which evidence can be trusted and acted upon?”
That implies four moves.
- Make credibility visible
In a polluted environment, quality does not speak for itself. It must be legible. Think tanks need to show their workings: not just results, but how they got there, what they can’t claim, where uncertainty remains, and what shaped the choices they made.
This is where OTT’s emphasis on transparency becomes more than a norm — it becomes protective infrastructure.
- Treat “fake think tanks” and experts as a sector-wide risk
When pseudo think tanks mimic the aesthetics of expertise, the threat is not only false facts; it’s counterfeit credibility. That means individual organisations can’t solve it alone. It requires collective signalling: shared standards, shared watchdogging, and shared refusal to legitimise bad actors through lazy “balance.”
If the costume can be copied, you need stronger markers than the costume.
- Stop assuming there is one shared public sphere
OTT’s writing on communication in polarised or captured contexts is a reminder that think tanks are often operating inside parallel realities. In those conditions, you can’t plan as if your audience is “the public” in general. You have to be deliberate about which communities you serve, which intermediaries matter, and which relationships make truth travel across divides.
Truth does not go viral by default. It moves through networks.
- Measure resilience, not victory
The question “Do we have a chance?” is tempting because it implies there is a decisive battle to win. But MAD’s point is that truth-telling is structurally harder than lying, and OTT’s point is that the environment amplifies that asymmetry.
Too many think tanks and their funders obsess over short term policy victories.
A more realistic goal is resilience: building organisations and ecosystems that can sustain credibility over time, correct course publicly, withstand coordinated attacks, and keep showing up as reliable nodes in messy debates.
This is a lesson learned by free-market think tank funders years ago.
So… do we have a chance?
Yes, but only if we stop imagining we can out-produce misinformation.
If MAD is right, “decir la verdad” will always be the harder verb. The work, then, is to make truth-telling easier to recognise, easier to reward, and harder to counterfeit.
That pushes think tanks away from a narrow “publish and communicate my evidence” model and toward an ecosystem role: setting norms, modelling integrity, building alliances, strengthening intermediaries, championing everyone’s truth and designing communication for a world where trust is contested and always weaponised.
Not a heroic war against fake news.
A long project of rebuilding the conditions in which truth can travel.