ENGLISH ABSTRACT - RESUMEN EN ESPAÑOL - RESUMO EM PORTUGUÊS This article analyzes the contemporary culture of deception as a psychosocial structure that exceeds isolated acts of lying and operates through subjectivity, institutions, and symbolic systems. It advances a conceptual distinction between the lie as a structurally necessary psychic resource, serving defensive and adaptive functions, and deception as a calculated relational process aimed at colonizing the other’s perception, desire, and judgment. From a psychoanalytic perspective, deception is examined as an intersubjective operation rooted in unconscious fantasy, through which the subject externalizes private fictions and captures the other within a preconfigured scene. At the social level, the institutionalization of deception transforms these subjective mechanisms into organized systems of power that manipulate meaning, normalize distortion, and undermine epistemic trust. The article argues that the persistence of deception cannot be explained solely by misinformation or moral failure, but through a fundamental subjective dilemma based on the tension between the need for symbolic belonging and the fear of confronting uncertainty, vulnerability, and lack. It argures that, ultimately, the challenge is civilizational rather than technical, as it implies that societies must be capable of renouncing the consoling fictions of deception and tolerating the disruptive demand of truth and incompleteness, basic conditions to forge genuine and stable social bonds. In this context, the article proposes the ethical and symbolic relevance of what psychoanalysis designates as the feminine position, a subjective stance capable of inhabiting lack, finitude, and ambiguity, without resorting to domination or denial; a path that opens the possibility for a sustainable social order, less violent and more civilized.
Alejandro Vaillant Valdes (Sun,) studied this question.