2025 Life Logs, Day 67: Lies
Date: Saturday, March 8, 2025
Weather: Mostly Sunny and Still Windy, Winds 15-25 W; High Temp 42, Low 28 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
The plans I had for today fell apart, so I just took the time to catch up on email communications and things around the house. I call that a catch-up day. I didn’t finish the job, so tomorrow will be more of the same. But I did have a lot of time to think, and guess where my thinking took me. Yes, right to the political mess in which we find ourselves. One of the things that bothers me the most is the constant lying. And today I saw a quote on my Facebook feed from Millionaires Quotes that I thought kind of nailed it.
“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.” -Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was an American and German historian and philosopher and one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. But when I looked that quote to see if it was valid, I found that it cannot be tracked down by scholars as a direct quote of hers. However, according to the same scholars the quote does capture her thinking. According to The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, the closest quote of hers in content is from an interview with Roger Errera in 1974, in what turned out to be Arendt’s last public interview. She spoke about the importance of a free press in an era of mass manipulation of truth and public lying.
“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
–Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975)
Today the public lies are running rampant. How do we deal with this?
