Montaigne set forth that nothing man-made can achieve the beauty and perfection of things created by nature. In the western man-made society, there were full of inequality, evil and greed. Comparing to Europeans, he thought barbarous Tupinamba were closer to nature. They had no words to describe the concepts of lying, treachery, envy or greed, and they would not steal resources from other tribes. They believed “valour towards their enemies and love towards their wives.” Under the naturalistic virtues, Tupinamba would kill and eat their prisoners as a form of symbolic revenge. Unlike Europeans tortured their enemies into a state of cowardly submission, Tupinamba treated their prisoners well and the captives always faced death with bravery and scorn.
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Montaigne was incredibly critical of those individuals—particularly the paid orators who lined the streets of medieval France and were willing to make any argument for a price—for whom falsehood became a means to intentionally adulterate pure knowledge. For example, in chapter 9 (“Of Liars”), Montaigne says:
In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have other tie upon one another, but by our word.
Because the process of lying involved taking into one’s consciousness a proposition that one knew beforehand to be untrue, Montaigne argued that lies themselves were incredibly vain, without firm commitment, and easy to forget.
Therefore, he considered lying to be a perverse action not only because it entailed the deliberate corruption of knowledge but also because the process of lying itself produced a heightened state of ignorance in a liar.