An old acquaintance recently wrote to me that their teenage child said that truth is dead, that nobody can know the truth anymore, and that to insist on the truth was wrong and judgemental and arrogant. I am sure that both the parent and the child are sincere and very wonderful people, but it shows me how far the attack on truth has gone. When the truth is discounted, democracy fails, and authoritarians take over. The brilliant Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher that had intimately observed the Hitler and Nazi atrocities made this very important observation:
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you
believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a
people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is
deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and
to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
We are in a terrible time where the former president of the United States has created the most blatant, ridiculous, unbelievable lie in the history of this country - that he did not lose the election to Biden but actually won it in a landslide and the election was stolen from him. He lost by 8 million votes, so who on earth could believe such a clumsy and stupid lie? Well, about two thirds of Republicans say they believe this lie. I don't know if they actually believe the lie or are they just saying so in order to demonstrate they are part of the Red Tribe, and it gives them justification for using any and all tactics to thwart the 2020 election. But, that is what they say.
The lie is not to convince the already convinced, and it is not to convince the opposition, who know it is a lie. The lie is to confuse the teenager mentioned above, and all those in the middle, so that they say - Who Knows? One side says this and the other side says that, so everyone has their own truth, who can decide? No one wants to be judgmental after all...
This is how Hitler becomes Hitler and the Former Guy gets to become the new Hitler. Very dangerous.
