Living With Big Lies

Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good

Even with Trump out of office, the Republican Party's leaders and media enablers appear determined to keep on living in a world of lies — a place where democracy can't live. As host Spencer Critchley says, it's like life under Soviet domination as described by writers such as Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milsoz: "Everything is a lie, everyone knows it's a lie, and everyone goes along with the lie anyway."

It consists of the continuing Big Lie of a "stolen election," plus endless others, such as the daily right-wing media "scamdal:" what you get when you build a scandal out of a scam.

Ultimately, the liars are harmed as much as the lied-to, as Socrates long ago warned us:

Having so many evils, will not the most miserable of men be still more miserable in a public station? Master of others when he is not master of himself... wanting all things, and never able to satisfy his desires; always in fear and distraction, like the State of which he is the representative. His jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse with command; is more and more faithless, envious, and unrighteous — the most wretched of men, a misery to himself and to others.

(Plato, The Republic.)

Sound familiar?

The Eighth Circle of Hell: Fraud. Painting by Sandro Botticelli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.