My regular coffee shop stands at the end of a slippery stone alley, and the alley was bequeathed by our ancestors with one acoustic marvel: whatever is shouted at its mouth comes back from the far end ten times louder. The locals call it Echo Alley. The coffee is excellent, but chatting there takes courage, since even a whisper can return as a public announcement. The shop's wise owner has hung thick cloth on the back wall. The architect of the alley clearly never imagined what his creation would do to community life.
From this marvel the residents drew a law of nature taught from nursery school onwards: the loudest must be the most truthful. A child who shouts that he did not steal the biscuit is thought more honest than one who whispers a confession, even if crumbs are still clinging to the shouter's lips. Doctors no longer ask where it hurts, only how loudly the patient declares himself well. I stirred my sugar and reflected that the whole of this alley's learning rests on a single unit of measurement, the decibel.
Yet behind the shop, beyond a door padded with thick cloth, lies a hushed carpeted room with a long, dark-varnished table. There sits a Judge named Scales. He has no loudspeaker, no account and no followers, a condition which the people of Echo Alley regard as severe poverty. He has only one irritating habit: he always asks what the evidence is.
That afternoon the hushed room received a visitor whom I shall call Mr Pantomime, since acting is his trade. His clothes were immaculate, his voice deep, and he knew precisely when to draw a long breath so that onlookers would think him bearing the sorrow of the whole nation, when in fact he was holding back a sneeze. He was asked to raise his hand and swear, and he did so flawlessly: elbow bent, fingers together, eyes fixed on the ceiling as though seeking the blessing of the plaster. Then came a lovely tale, layered upon layer, complete with a twist in the middle and characters who happened to be unavailable for questioning. I peeped through the crack in the door, glass in hand, and thought that if courtrooms gave out prizes, that script would win best original story. Judge Scales took notes calmly with a thin smile. Nothing in a courtroom is more worrying than that smile, for it means he already holds the file.
Thinkers have long warned that an oath is not an opening line to be skipped like an advertisement. It is a pledge: a person stakes his honour so that his words may be believed, and part of that honour in truth belongs to the court and to everyone who still believes that testimony has a price. That is why the new Criminal Code, in force since 2 January 2026, deals with false statements under oath in Article 373 of Law No. 1 of 2023, replacing Article 242, which has now retired to enjoy its old age in the law library. The core remains the same: what is punished is deliberate falsehood, not honest forgetfulness. Unfortunately, as we know, Mr Pantomime never forgets his script.
On leaving the hushed room, Mr Pantomime faced a bitter fact: his acting talent was worth nothing in there. The judge was unmoved by wistful gazes into the distance or dramatic pauses of three seconds. So he walked to the mouth of the alley to call on the only institution that still treats falsehood as a product: the Applause Factory. It is staggeringly efficient. On the first floor, scriptwriters turn out one magic sentence in forty variations. On the second, thousands of residents whose faces are never seen, with profile pictures of cats, flowers and clenched fists, copy that sentence with the devotion of medieval scribes. On the third, an enormous machine converts the copies into the thing Echo Alley loves most: noise that looks like conviction. The fourth floor is the canteen, where truth is often overheard, since the staff love to gossip.
The staff are paid per shout, and they never ask what the script says, just as a postman does not read the love letters he delivers. They cry hoax at whatever the boss points to, slander at anyone carrying a file, and persecution even at the weather if the weather proves uncooperative. It is said that one employee once yelled at his own watch merely because it showed he was late. A famous thinker once distinguished the liar from the bluffer: the liar still respects the truth, for he knows what it is and hides it, whereas the bluffer does not care, since only the impression matters. The Applause Factory is a monument to the second kind, a place where truth is not an enemy but simply not invited. Logicians have a name for the fallacy that fuels this factory, the belief that something is true because many people believe it. Echo Alley's version is more refined: many believe it, as proved by the many who shout, and the shouters happen to be our own staff. Picture a restaurant declaring its cooking the finest because all its chefs agree.
Meanwhile, in another corner of the alley, a quarrel blazed over a single sheet of paper said to certify that someone had studied, been examined and passed. Nearly everyone had an opinion on that paper, and nearly all rested on visual inspection: the shade of the paper, the choice of typeface, the slant of the signature. Suddenly every resident became a document forensics expert, armed with a magnifying glass and a cousin who once worked at a print shop. Amid the clamour Mr Pantomime unfurled the sheet and cried that it was plainly written there. The crowd cheered, forgetting the simple distinction every teacher teaches: paper proves that something was once printed, not that its contents are true. To show a sheet of paper as proof of its own authenticity is like holding up a mirror to prove that the reflection is not lying.
An academic record is kept not on the paper but in the university archive, the graduation database, and the hands of an official with a stamp and the patience to use it. The way out is therefore single: official verification by the issuing institution, with no need for the neighbours' views, an opinion poll or a hashtag. If the document is genuine, the answer arrives in a matter of clicks, and the whole commotion disperses like mist in the sun. If not, the law has prepared a room with the door number already on it: Article 272 of the same Law threatens forgery of a degree certificate with up to six years' imprisonment or a category V fine. This is not a matter of vanity but of trust, for every honest graduate who ever sat up in the library on a fourth packet of instant noodles is entitled to believe in the system he went through. So the oddest part of the uproar is not whether the paper is genuine, but why those most certain of its authenticity seem busiest hiring loudspeakers rather than opening the archive door. A rightful owner seldom employs so many guards for the front garden, least of all ones who can shout in forty variations of a sentence.
Then came the day the Applause Factory reached peak production. Overnight, the hashtag defending Mr Pantomime climbed to the top of the loudest list in the whole alley. Thousands of copies of one sentence droned from end to end, bounced back, grew stronger and returned again, until the residents were convinced that a sound so big must be the voice of truth. Some even wept with emotion, including two scriptwriters who had forgotten the sentence was their own creation. Mr Pantomime then approached the hushed room with his chest thrust out, carrying a phone full of numbers: fifty thousand thumbs-up, two hundred thousand shares, a million views. He set it on Judge Scales's table like a trader unveiling his best wares, complete with a smile rehearsed in the mirror. The judge gazed at the screen for a long time. He was neither angry nor amused, though the corner of his mouth trembled slightly. He merely asked the cruellest question ever heard in any courtroom: where is the document, sir?
The phone chimed and the thumbs kept multiplying, yet in that thickly carpeted room there was no echo. Every shout from the alley stopped at the threshold like a flood meeting a dyke. In that place, numbers have no vote. Only evidence under the rules of procedure may speak, and there is no category for how many are angry, how viral it has gone, or whether Uncle so-and-so has shared it. Mr Pantomime grasped the paradox his factory had never taught him: noise can win an election over people's feelings, but it can never win a case against reality. Feelings can be coaxed, bought and herded, whereas reality does not care who is bidding.
From all this I sipped my coffee, which was growing cold, and drew a few conclusions. An oath is not a performance; it is the one moment when a person's words are given collateral, and so it cannot be withdrawn with the excuse that it was only strategy. If oaths may be worn like costumes, someone will soon swear in a clown suit. Nor is a crowd evidence, for a thousand accounts asserting one thing are no more convincing than a single document that can be checked, and when help must be bought to make a claim sound organic, the claim is admitting it lacks sincere defenders. Good food seldom needs a thousand people to call it good. As for paper, it is not truth but a door to truth whose key is held by the competent institutions. Whoever displays the door while padlocking the way in, then blames the guest for failing to enter, is performing a worn-out farce.
It is said that after these events the people of Echo Alley slowly learned a bitter lesson: however loud, an echo always dies at the far end of the alley. It carries nothing but itself. What remains once the noise subsides is an honest silence, in which Judge Scales still sits, still takes notes, and still asks questions in a voice that never rises by a single octave. Some residents stopped counting thumbs and began counting evidence. Others went on shouting, for shouting is a habit hard to break, rather like smoking but with vocal cords. The applause factories lost customers once people realised they had been paying dearly for something free all along, namely plain honesty. Two floors of the factory are now let out as a café, and its canteen remains the most honest of all.
As for Mr Pantomime, history does not record how his story ended. All that is recorded is that the cheapest way out of the whole mess comes down to two sentences: if it is true, show the proof, and if it is false, say sorry. And one more thing, no less important: send the troops home, for they have not yet had lunch. I finished my coffee and left the grounds at the bottom of the glass, for even grounds know they never lie about what remains. Every character in this coffee-shop tale is a pure invention, and the legal fate of anyone is decided by a court, not by the number of thumbs.
