What is the cost of lies?
I think the a real danger is that if we hear enough of them, we stop distinguishing the truth. We become calibrated not to the world in its reality, but to the stories we are told about the world.
Stories are complicated. They can fall anywhere along a spectrum from completely made up, to almost complete honesty. And most stories aren’t outright lies, but rather selective truths with emotion, perspective, and a bias. The intension is sometimes good, but often not.
If all we hear are stories, if every channel, every headline, every soundbite is a story designed to shape us, then how do we ever find out what is real? What tools do we use to sort through the overwhelming amount of narrative data? How do we calibrate ourselves when the “zero” is constantly shifting?
If we are constantly surrounded in fiction, we begin to mistake it for what is real. And when we no longer know what is real, we becomes easily manipulated, used, and governed.
Lies do not just deceive, they de-form. They disfigure a society’s relationship to its reality. And when that disfigurement becomes normalized, and when it becomes institutionalized, the lie becomes the new “normal.” This is far more dangerous.
So what happens then?
A government that lies trains its citizens to doubt their own instincts, to doubt their own pain, to ignore the suffering of others… All the things we learned as children about loving and watching out for each other begins to separate from the norms of adulthood. Why is it my job to take care of them? It becomes justified to not give a shit about each other. And at that point, a government trains its people to accept violence and injustice as stability, and cruelty as common practice to get to there. Their interests matter more, even at the expense of a human being. Oh wait, I meant an “illegal.” Yup, much more impersonal, now I don’t need to think about it.
And so in time, people begin to lie to themselves, which I think is the final cost. The loss our collective societal truth rooted in, at a minimum, the value of humanness in each other, but the loss of our capacity to even recognize the truth for ourselves, to me, is the ultimate consequence. We are apathetic to it.
So I urge us to wake up and to see what is happening slowly and quickly. We must resist that, personally and interpersonally. Because once truth is no longer a shared goal (and not a I know the truth and you do not), democracy becomes a facade. Freedom becomes a story told by powerful liars but believed by an afraid population. Unfortunately, it is the forgotten that suffer because of it.