Might we find that lies display the same dynamics. Are specific lies repeated again and again? Like Mother nature are lies lazy? Are they applied without change to many different scenarios? A “good” lie about “corrupt”, “power hungry” government can be assigned not only to election outcomes but also environmental protection legislation and the rights of people to privacy. We might also find that lies are “strange attractors” that pull in other falsehoods. Like the avalanche, a “big” lie gathers both speed and neighboring resources.
More people are attracted to the lie; they add their own distortions and recruit other people around them to the lie. Soon we have a carefully orchestrated “flock” of true believers. The irony (and terror) of this process is that there doesn’t actually have to be a single leaders or small group of leaders who make it all happen. It seems that complex processes—such as conspiracies and mob action—can take place through what Nobel-prize winning theorist, Ilya Prigogine (1984), calls “self-organization.” It all depends on what one’s neighbor believes and does, rather than on some central agent of change.
Lying and authority
Ultimately, groups and entire societies that are saturated with lies will yield to and support a strong and coercive authoritarian structure. This might very well be the most destructive and long-lasting outcome of abundant lying. Heather Cox Richardson (2022) provides a summary statement regarding this pernicious link between lies and authoritarian rule:
The construction of a world based on lies is a key component of authoritarians’ takeover of democratic societies. George Orwell’s 1984 explored a world in which those in power use language to replace reality, shaping the past and people’s daily experiences to cement their control. They are constantly reconstructing the past to justify their actions in the present. In Orwell’s dystopian fantasy, Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite history for the Ministry of Truth to reflect the changing interests of a mysterious cult leader, Big Brother, who wants power for its own sake and enforces loyalty through The Party’s propaganda and destruction of those who do not conform.
Richardson turns from Orwell to a prominent social historian:
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt went further, saying that the lies of an authoritarian were designed not to persuade people, but to organize them into a mass movement. Followers would “believe everything and nothing,” Arendt wrote, “think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” “The ideal subject” for such a dictator, Arendt wrote, was not those who were committed to an ideology, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.”
She then references a troubling observation made by the advisor to an American president:
Way back in 2004, an advisor to President George W. Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind were in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
