What lies, ahead
Before I became a lying teenager, I was a lying child. Deception was my craft. Thanks to copious amounts of ass-whooping, I grew out of it by the time I reached 14. Seeing where we are headed however, it could've been a useful skill to have.
Landscape of political and social discourse changed when opinions expressed in the form of 'I feel' started to receive the same weight as their deceptively similar brethren 'I think'. Deceit, as is often the case, lies in the detail. Not all 'I think' statements are endowed with genius but the constraint of reason is, at the very least, implied. By contrast, 'I feel' makes no such demands. It's modern adaptation 'I feel like' is shrouded in a hazy cloud of emotional instincts that have no need for reason, evidence or introspection. It sheds all responsibility and as such halts any possibility of argument in its tracks. These statements are not equivalent to lying, not even close. But they do make the act of deception easier to perpetrate as the burden of proof no longer applies.
I do not for a moment think that we could or should wish to live in the world where every opinion expressed must undergo critical examination before being uttered. Nor am I against open discussion of emotions - they need to be acknowledged and we should feel deeply. I do however think that those charged with a responsibility to inform us must be held to what Victor Hugo described as 'sovereignty of reason': the absolute freedom of saying what one thinks so long as one thinks hard. Nowhere is this more urgent than in the modern news cycle.
As social media landscape changed, news outlets found themselves competing for attention in the same space as Love Island. Demand for real-time reporting shifted the balance between opinions and straight reporting. In the modern news cycle that can barely keep a story in its cross-hairs for 24 hours, straight news coverage with its requirement for research is just poor business. As lines blurred, our ability to discern the difference between opinions and news suffered. At its worst, all of it is interpreted as truth. It would've been bad enough if it stopped there but it didn't.
By the time I turned 14, I knew that neglecting to reveal truth was also an act of lying. In the midst of the Castro revolution in Cuba, film director Santiago Alvarez claimed with pride that while the spirit of revolution allowed unprecedented artistic freedom no criticism of Castro himself would be tolerated. Castro, boasted Alvarez, was above reproach. The same intense loyalty to a hand that feeds you permeates much of the political and social discourse. Such loyalty is anathema to criticism, for true criticism must bow to no master.
It is tempting to think that these occurrences are fleeting and will pass as soon as the leaders who enable them leave the office. But the compound effect of these occurrences is pogrom on civilised discourse that underpins the very basis of democracy. The silent tyranny of political statements disguised as opinions merely and crafted for a defined customer base bludgeon into submission our ability to stand up to it. After a while, one tires of reading truths on the page of lies.
Writing on the topic of fascism in 1936, Orwell said: 'If you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon.' The plague of our time cannot be sufficiently described by terms such as 'lies' or 'deceit'. One, because lying requires familiarity with objective reality against which a scaffold of a lie is constructed. Two, because these words fail to capture the utter stench of shameless disdain for truth, morality or consequence shown by their most notable exploiters.
The aberration of our time is normalisation of bullshit; and the clocks are growing weary of striking thirteen. What else is there to do but to call it by its name.