it's all a lie
"every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. no leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept 'leaf' is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through *forgetting* the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be 'leaf' - some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form. ... what then is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has *forgotten* that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. ... to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all..."
--Nietzsche
--Nietzsche