Let’s talk about lying. Or the way we lie now. In other words, what happens to a free society, and supposed democracy like the United States, when our discourse and our collective dialogue are saturated with lies. Certainly, history is full of examples of the way in which lies, which can include propaganda and other nationalist sentiments, come to erode a democracy’s very foundations.(Think Stalin’s Russia and the Nazi regime, to name just two regimes built on lies.) Lies, if told repeatedly and insistently, don’t just waft through the air and eventually disappear into the ether. To the contrary, they calcify into their own iteration of “truth.” And those same lies come to substitute for truth until a far too sizable portion of people no longer are able to discern fact from fiction. It’s a dystopian reality, not one far from George Orwell depicted in his haunting, cautionary works like “1984” or “Animal Farm.” Democracies don’t necessarily perish at the barrel of a gun or with tanks rolling into the city streets. Lies and untruths can steadily undermine, slowly and gradually, a long held set of agreed upon principles as well as a collective commitment to the rule of law Students of political theory, might recall the work of a German emigrant and brilliant political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, whose writings from the middle of the twentieth century and the postwar era remain both perceptive and evergreen. Think democracy is indestructible in the face of leaders who won’t or even can’t tell the citizen the truth? A look back at Arendt’s words might convince you otherwise.
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The Way We Lie Now
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Let’s talk about lying. Or the way we lie now. In other words, what happens to a free society, and supposed democracy like the United States, when our discourse and our collective dialogue are saturated with lies. Certainly, history is full of examples of the way in which lies, which can include propaganda and other nationalist sentiments, come to erode a democracy’s very foundations.(Think Stalin’s Russia and the Nazi regime, to name just two regimes built on lies.) Lies, if told repeatedly and insistently, don’t just waft through the air and eventually disappear into the ether. To the contrary, they calcify into their own iteration of “truth.” And those same lies come to substitute for truth until a far too sizable portion of people no longer are able to discern fact from fiction. It’s a dystopian reality, not one far from George Orwell depicted in his haunting, cautionary works like “1984” or “Animal Farm.” Democracies don’t necessarily perish at the barrel of a gun or with tanks rolling into the city streets. Lies and untruths can steadily undermine, slowly and gradually, a long held set of agreed upon principles as well as a collective commitment to the rule of law Students of political theory, might recall the work of a German emigrant and brilliant political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, whose writings from the middle of the twentieth century and the postwar era remain both perceptive and evergreen. Think democracy is indestructible in the face of leaders who won’t or even can’t tell the citizen the truth? A look back at Arendt’s words might convince you otherwise.