Blog#134- 10/18/22
THE TRUTH NO LONGER MATTERS
By Richard Davis
We live in a time in which the truth has less and less bearing on how the world operates. This is something that has evolved over a long period of time but it feels like we are, more acutely, feeling the effects of allowing ourselves to be influenced by those who are willing to lie to get whatever they want.
It may seem like this is something new, but the world of politics has witnessed this phenomenon for as long as the political game has been played.
The difference today is that the years of not stopping the lies forcefully enough have finally caught up with us and there are now millions of people around the world who are easily convinced that lies have somehow been magically converted into the truth because someone in power has told them to believe them.
The most striking example of this is the claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that the true winner was Trump. Trump has mastered the art of the lie and is able to convince millions of people to believe whatever he wants because he repeats the lie so often. The operating principle for these brain dead followers is that something must be true because they have heard it so often.
The facts don’t matter when power bullies push their agenda. One of the saddest examples of lies that hurt people’s lives are the events that played out after the Sandy Hook massacre when radio personality Alex Jones convinced millions of people that no one died at Sandy Hook and that the entire event was staged.
The Jones lie made life a lot more difficult than it should have been for the families who lost children to a crazed gunman. Because of Jones’ lies some of those families had to move and conceal their identity because the rabid followers of Jones harassed those families with threats of death and more violence.
Trump’s lies have resulted in the deaths of people during the Capitol insurrection. The crazed Trump sycophants armed themselves and followed their leader to attempt to overthrow the United States government. All of this happened because one man was able to perpetuate a lie and make people believe it was the truth.
There are many more examples of lies ruining lives in contemporary society around the world. The question is how can those of us, who still want to believe in a world where the truth means something, move beyond the lies and minimize their effect while marginalizing those who perpetuate them?
The media is wringing their hands over this because they know that when they publicly talk about lies and label the lies bad things still happen.
Those who want to believe the lies twist the media reports and the mere act of reporting lies has somehow caused the lies to become more believable to the masses of the brain-dead.
I don’t know what the solutions to these difficult problems are. I can only hope that more of those who lie lose their bully pulpits and retreat into the shadows. That is not happening yet and that causes a lot of people to experience a new form of anxiety.
This new level of anxiety is taking hold of millions of people’s lives. They find themselves living in world where the truth does not matter. While most of the events that the lies relate to are national and global, the atmosphere we live in has changed and that means that we feel the effects of the lies as we engage in the world on every level. Unless you shut out all communication with the world you will be influenced by the current miasma of lies. It becomes a physical feeling that grabs you in your gut and lingers. There seems to be no end to the tyranny of lies and we all need to find ways to cope.
