Living With Big Lies
Even with Trump out of office, the Republican Party's leaders and media enablers appear determined to keep on living in a world of lies \u2014 a place where democracy can't live. As host Spencer Critchley says, it's like life under Soviet domination as described by writers such as Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milsoz: "Everything is a lie, everyone knows it's a lie, and everyone goes along with the lie anyway."
It consists of the continuing Big Lie of a "stolen election," plus endless others, such as the daily right-wing media "scamdal:" what you get when you build a scandal out of a scam.
Ultimately, the liars are harmed as much as the lied-to, as Socrates long ago warned us:
Having so many evils, will not the most miserable of men be still more miserable in a public station? Master of others when he is not master of himself... wanting all things, and never able to satisfy his desires; always in fear and distraction, like the State of which he is the representative. His jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse with command; is more and more faithless, envious, and unrighteous \u2014 the most wretched of men, a misery to himself and to others.
(Plato, The Republic.)
Sound familiar?
The Eighth Circle of Hell: Fraud. Painting by Sandro Botticelli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.