Public life has become disorienting. Most people, by and large, previously expected to hear the truth, or some semblance of it, in daily life. We would generally expect this from each other, but also from public media and authorities such as governments or international agencies set up ostensibly for our benefit. Society cannot function in a coherent and stable way without it, as so much in our lives requires us to place trust in others.
To navigate the complexity of existence, we generally look for guidance to certain trusted sources, freeing up time to sift the more questionable ones. Some claim they always knew everything was fake, but they are wrong, as it wasn’t (and still isn’t). There were always liars, and campaigns to mislead, and propaganda to drive us to love or to hate, but there was a core within society that had certain accepted norms and standards that should theoretically be followed. A sort of anchor. Truth is indestructible but the anchor cable connecting us to it, ensuring its influence, has been cut. Society is being set adrift.
This really broke in the past four or five years. We were already in trouble, but now public discourse is broken. Perhaps it broke when governments openly employed behavioural psychology to lie to their people on a scale we had not previously seen. They combined to make their peoples do things they rationally would not; accept bans on family funerals, cover their faces in public, or accept police brutality and the isolation and abandonment of the elderly. The media, health professionals, politicians and celebrities all participated in this lie and its intent. Virtually all our major institutions. And these lies are continuing, and expanding, and have become the norm.
We are now reaping the harvest of untruth. The media can openly deny what they said or printed just months earlier about a new presidential candidate or the efficacy of a mandated vaccine. A whole political party can change its narrative almost overnight about fundamental characteristics of its leader. People paid as “fact-checkers” twist reality to invent new facts and hide reality, untroubled by the transparency of their deceit. Giant software companies curate information, filtering out truths that run contrary to the pronouncements of conflicted international organisations. Power has displaced integrity.
Internationally, we are pummelled by agencies such as the UN, the World Bank, the G20 and the World Health Organisation to give up our basic rights and hand our new masters our wealth in response to threats that can unequivocally be shown to be false. Paid-off former leaders, grasping legitimacy through the legacy of greater minds, reinforce mass falsehoods for the benefit of their friends. Once something a free media would have exposed, these falsehoods feed narratives in which the same media is openly complicit.
The frightening part is not the lies, which are a normal aspect of humanity, but the lack of interest in the truth. Lies can stand for a time in the presence of a people and institutions that value truth, but they will eventually fail as they are exposed. When truth loses its value, when it is no longer even a vague guide for politics or journalism, then recovery may not occur. We are in an incredibly dangerous time, because lies are not just tolerated but are now the default at the national and international level, and the fourth estate has embraced the darkness.
History has witnessed this before, but on a lesser scale. In Germany, a way of running society built entirely on the acceptance of lies led to the wholesale massacre of millions, from individuals whose disabilities were considered a burden on the majority, to people of specific sexual orientation, to entire ethnic groups. It was ordinary people like us who served to facilitate, and implement, this slaughter. A barrage of lies disoriented them, allowing them to be separated from their consciences or appreciation of goodness. As Hannah Arendt noted: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
And further:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
But this passivity of the ‘people’ is not necessarily inevitable, or applicable to society as a whole. We are all capable of implementing tyranny, but this does not remove our capacity to insist on equality (or, to use its analogy in this context, freedom).
The regime of lies from which Arendt fled was halted through an invasion of foreign armies. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s regime faltered with his death. But we are now in a place where the all-devouring dictator is a coalition of interests broad enough to be resilient to the death of any of its members. It has no physical borders to be invaded. Although feudalism has long been the greed-driven default of society, we are now in uncharted territory, facing a devouring confluence of interests on a global scale with no obvious counter. They anoint national leaders from New Zealand to North America to the EU, and control what we then hear and read about them. No white knight or armed coalition is going to ride to our rescue as we cower in a bunker or simply keep our heads down, keep our thoughts to ourselves, eat what we are fed and try to fit in.
It is only us who can actually make a stand. Otherwise, we – humanity – simply lose. But taking a stand is in the capability of all of us. We could first recognise where we are. We could then take hard decisions and risk being outcasts by supporting people we ourselves assess as telling the truth, and absolutely refuse support to those who are not. We will make ourselves really unpopular by doing so, as unpopular as those who protected neighbours rather than report them, or refused to raise the arm or the little red book. They were vilified, derided, and described by the media as vermin.
We could make a stand in workplaces, in conversations with friends and family, and it may be the last conversations they will accept. And we can do it through the way we vote, which may mean breaking with all we had once claimed to be indisputable. All that we thought we stood for, and that our chosen media had confirmed for us. And we will have no personal reward at the end – this does not collect likes and followers. As Arendt also said: “Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.”
But forgiveness will also make us unpopular, even hated, by many who thought we were allies.
Or, we can buy into the fallacies, blank our minds, accept that the past never happened and lie on the pillow of deceit the media are providing for us. We can accept the assessment of liars and follow their lead over that of our own eyes and ears. ‘Truth’ can become subject to convenience and to what our friends and colleagues would prefer. We can all participate in the farce, embrace the comfort of blank self-deceit, and pretend to live life as we always have. One day, we will find how deep is the hole we have dug for ourselves and our children.
In politics, in public health, in international relations and in history, the best times were always when truth was valued above all, however imperfectly applied. What the media, governments and the empty husks who now direct them are offering is something quite different. Let us hope enough are repulsed by it to take the risks that are necessary. Don’t stay safe. Get to a place that is quite the opposite. Light overcomes darkness but it also makes it very hard to hide. A very dark future can be avoided, but not by keeping it hidden.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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