When I was coming of age in the 70s, a Soviet dissident, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn gained hard earned notoriety as a contemporary prophet after surviving some of the worst of his country’s oppression under communism. His enormous story, ‘Gulag Archipelago’ was published in 1973. A shorter more readable rendition, ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ was required reading in high school at the height of the Cold War with Soviet Russia, the USSR. It’s hard to imagine that required reading today. The urgent core message brought to the West by Solzhenitsyn, encapsulated in the title of a more recent retrospective of his message, was this: ‘Live Not by Lies’. We urgently need that lesson now.
We live in an age of lies, surrounded by liars. There are never not liars constantly trying to influence your mind. But just as there was a free West and an enslaved oppressed Soviet bloc, held in by force and the threat of death behind the infamous ‘Iron Curtain’, the literal geopolitical divide between the two worlds, there was a difference in the degree to which lies had been institutionalized into every tiny facet of civil and even private life. Both the free world and the Soviet bloc had liars, always have, always will, but the degree and pervasiveness of lies behind the Soviet system amounted to something so much more devastating. It was a world in which men would be dispatched to your house at 2 am because of something someone told the authorities; maybe a neighbor telling a lie about you to get even. You or a family member could be taken away, tortured for days, weeks, months and would likely die in captivity. This did not happen in the free West, there was a difference.
Fast forward to today. We have a window on Vladimir Putin and what he says to his people about the war in Ukraine. Still today, we see that the Russian/Putin autocracy, albeit ‘Christian’, rightist, even czarist, is still the same Russia that existed under Soviet communist command, a land steeped in lies. Unfortunately, we cannot stroke ourselves and congratulate ourselves for living the antithesis to that dismal system. The American left and its enabling institutions in Big Tech, Big Media have fully embraced lies as its primary mode of operation.
Russia-gate, Hunter Biden, Jen Psaki, the endless baseless attempts to entrap Trump, almost every word and action out of the mouths of the entire hierarchy of the Biden administration. [Don’t expect chapter and verse from me, I’m not paid to write an entire encyclopedia.] Do an exercise if you’re interested in truth – and by that, it’s a given that many people are not – you’ve heard the phrase, ‘the truth eventually comes out’. Setting aside ‘beliefs’ and feelings, take someone like Trump for example, and write out the hard accusations that have been made against him. After the headlines of died down, the commissions concluded, the MSNBC commentators moved on, what facts were found to be correct?
Even most liars have a level at which they are forced to understand and appreciate truth. Does your SO/spouse tell you the truth and do you expect that from them? You can be all the colors of the rainbow and have a Mao poster on your wall and you will still likely hope to be dealt with in truth on a most personal level. If your boss promises a raise or benefits, you will hold them accountable. Why would anyone advocate for the opposite ethic in public life? And yet they do.
We’re in a truth crisis because socially, we’re losing a basic sense of trust on a massive industrial scale. We can no longer trust media because their lies are well documented. We can’t trust medicine any longer because Covid corrupted the whole profession and their credibility as they caved-in to bureaucrat’s forced and false advice. We can’t trust science anymore because we learned that peer review is nothing but peer pressure to lie when it serves the official diktat. The present Democrat regime is a house of cards made out of lies that are now finally being solely and methodically verified, ie the New York Times admission that the Hunter laptop story was real. Quite frankly, we’re in danger of falling into the same kind of long-term self-deception that spans institutions, regimes and nationalities just like the Russian system has demonstrated. The only antidote is for truth tellers to never back down and never apologize for telling the truth, no matter the consequences.