If You’re Going To Lie, Go Bigly

Iwas raised to believe that honesty was next to godliness, or at least something very close. We were told repeatedly that nothing was as bad as lying. The first time I came home drunk — to a very strict, fundamentalist Christian home, I might add — what I got in trouble for was lying, not the drinking. I have an aversion to lying still to this day, not because it’s immoral, but because it’s simply too much work. It’s not that I don’t see the advantages to it. Deception can be both personally rewarding as well as professionally profitable. What I can’t stand are the small, meaningless lies that don’t serve a purpose. Nothing irritates me more than a small deception that doesn’t get you anywhere. The pointless lie. The fruitless deception. Like when you say you’ve seen Succession when you haven’t. What did you gain? Nothing. Nothing at all. In authoritarian politics, the concept of the big lie is nothing new. Adolph Hitler introduced the idea in his book “Mein Kampf.” In a special bit of gaslighting, he claimed it was the Jews who had used the big lie to blame Germany’s WWI loss on General Erich Ludendorff, a prominent nationalist political leader at the time. He felt this was unfair. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist. “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie.  <a href="https://medium.com/rome-magazine/if-youre-going-to-lie-go-bigly-247209388c90">Website</a>