People of the Lie

In several previous articles, I addressed what I believe to be the crucial issue of our time, namely, the institutionalization of the lie in culture and politics. The situation shows no sign of abating and indeed grows more alarming with every passing day. The integrity of the information we receive about domestic and world affairs has been degraded almost beyond recognition. Reality has been denatured. For the Lie has become a systemic and indelible part of public and institutional life. The dilemma we now confront, as D. Stephen Long points out in an important book dealing with the relation between relativism and authoritarianism, is speaking truth in a post-truth world.

But the problem goes further than relativism; rather, it involves a substitution of absolutes, of an assumed truth for a genuine truth, replacing objective fact and data with a new paradigm of subterfuge, fable, and casuistry under the rubric of “truth.” When lying acquires something like constitutional status, it becomes a phenomenon so deep it can be described, adopting the popular saying, as “turtles all the way down,” now the title of an indispensable new book on vaccine science and myth, which reveals “how ineffectively and dishonestly the COVID pandemic was handled.”

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