What is the cost of lies? The real danger is that if we hear enough of them, we stop being able to recognize the truth at all. We become calibrated not to the world as it is, but to the stories we are told.
Stories are simultaneously great and cursed things. They can fall anywhere along a spectrum from purely made up to almost perfect honesty. And most stories aren’t outright lies. They are selective truths, created for persuasion, infused with emotion, reinforced by repetition, rooted in perspective, and usually made with good intentions. Often not.
If all we hear are stories; if every channel, every headline, every soundbite is a story designed to shape us, how do we ever find out what is real? What tools do we use to parse through the overwhelming number of narrative data? How do we calibrate our heads and hearts when the “zero” is constantly shifting?
Because here is a truth, 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 become easily moved, easily used, and easily governed.
Lies don’t just deceive, they de-form. They disfigure a society’s relationship to its reality. And when that distortion becomes normalized and when it becomes institutionalized, the lie is no longer just a weapon. It becomes the “normal.” This is far more dangerous.
So what happens then?
A government that lies does not merely betray its people but it trains them. It trains them to doubt their own instincts, to doubt their own pain, to unsee 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. It becomes justified to not give a shit about each other. And at that point, a government trains a people to accept violence as stability, injustice as order, and cruelty as common sense. Our 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. Not the loss of truth, but the loss of our capacity to even recognize it. To feel it. To name it. To defend it anymore.
So I urge us to wake up and to see what is happening both slowly and quickly. We must resist that, personally and interpersonally. Because once truth is no longer a shared goal, democracy becomes a facade. And Freedom becomes a story — told by powerful liars, believed by an afraid population, and suffered by the forgotten.