This morning’s post by blogger Zman put me in mind of a couple of quotes about the role of lying by the Regime and its fellow travelers. First, one (mis)attributed to Solzhenitsyn:
They are lying. We know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. Yet, they are still lying.
Next, one (correctly) attributed to Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels):
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
Zman makes the interesting and controversial point that endemic lying is an inevitable feature of democracy:
In a world where the standard is public opinion, winning public opinion is what matters most. In fact, it must count for more than the truth, as the public often accepts as true things that turn out to be false. If the goal is to win the crowd, then playing to their deeply held misconceptions is just as good, if not better, than disabusing them of those misconceptions.
…
Like the Athenians, we have embraced the democratic spirit to the point where factual reality is just one tool in the toolkit of persuasion that may or may not be used by the successful. The modern sophist is untethered from the truth, both spiritually and emotionally, because the only thing that matters is tricking some portion of the public.
Whether or not his thesis is correct, the trajectory is accurately delineated and the West appears to have arrived at the endpoint he describes.