“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.”
- Plato
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
- Gustave Le Bon
“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
- Carl Jung
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- Upton Sinclair
“It’s hard to get a man to understand something when his comfortable reality is threatened by that act of understanding.”
- SCIPIO ERUDITUS
“People should keep in mind that nobody ever complied their way out of totalitarian regime rules. So, if you think that you know, by abandoning these rules, that somehow things are going to get better or it’s going to satiate the need to control you, it’s not. It’s just going to embolden them to do something worse.”
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
- Albert Einstein
“When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“. . .the totalitarian systems of the 20th century represent a kind of collective psychosis. Whether gradually or suddenly, reason and common human decency are no longer possible in such a system: there is only a pervasive atmosphere of terror, and a projection of 'the enemy,' imagined to be 'in our midst.' Thus society turns on itself, urged on by the ruling authorities.”
- Joost Meerloo
“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“And wouldn’t they -- if they could -- grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there and kill him?”
- Socrates
“Those who tell the stories rule society.”
- Unknown
“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
- Philip Dick
“The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.”
- J. Edgar Hoover
“Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.”
- Nietzsche
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
- Martin Niemöller
“We make ourselves powerless when we pretend we don’t know.”
- Colm O’Gorman
“The more often a stupidity is repeated, the more it gets the appearance of wisdom.”
- Voltaire
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
- Voltaire
“A 'conspiracy theory’ is something that, if true, you couldn’t handle it.”
- Mark Crispin Miller
“So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood—of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies—or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries.”
- A. Solzhenitsyn
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
- Mark Twain
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
- H.L. Menken
“'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded -- and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed such emergency powers to see to it that the emergency persists.”
- F. A. Hayek
“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
- Elena Gorokhova
“Countless, similar stories across thousands of years of human history point to this simple conclusion: the people in charge don’t always tell the truth. Duh. Is that really a controversial statement?”
- Simon Black
“Despite appearances, Covid has not been the end of democracy. It has merely revealed that we were already not in a democracy. It showed where the power really is and how easily the facade of freedom could be stripped from us. It showed that we were free only at the pleasure of elite institutions. By our ready acquiescence, it showed us something about ourselves. We were already unfree. We were already conditioned to submission...”
- Charles Eisenstein
“The campaign against conspiracy theories is a part of a conspiracy to protect conspiracists themselves.”
- Paraphrase of Murray Rothbard
“It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any 'conspiracy theory of history;' for a search for 'conspiracies' means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane 'social forces,' or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible ('We Are All Murderers,' proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on 'conspiracy theories' means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the 'general welfare' reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions. A 'conspiracy theory' can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State’s ideological propaganda. ”
- Murray N. Rothbard
“Complaining about the existence of conspiracy theories is power-serving behavior. Instead, complain about the existence of government, corporate and financial secrecy which causes people to form speculative theories about what the powerful are up to behind that veil of opacity.
“They concentrate all the power in these tiny little elitist circles, then say 'You don’t get to know what we’re doing with all our power over here. Not only that, but you don’t even get to talk to each other about what we might be doing, even though it could directly affect you.
“How crazy is that? At the very least don’t play along with them and police each other about it on top of that.
“It’s fine to discuss and debate the validity of individual theories (I do it all the time), but to complain about the fact that people form theories about possible conspiracies when we know for a fact that powerful people conspire is just infantile.”
“They concentrate all the power in these tiny little elitist circles, then say 'You don’t get to know what we’re doing with all our power over here. Not only that, but you don’t even get to talk to each other about what we might be doing, even though it could directly affect you.
“How crazy is that? At the very least don’t play along with them and police each other about it on top of that.
“It’s fine to discuss and debate the validity of individual theories (I do it all the time), but to complain about the fact that people form theories about possible conspiracies when we know for a fact that powerful people conspire is just infantile.”
- Caitlin Johnston
“There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies [...], but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”
- Carroll Quigley (Tragedy and Hope)
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
- Gustav Le Bon
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
- Edward L. Bernays
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
- Theodore Dalrymple
“The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found.”
- Allan Bloom
“In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest, and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion’s getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves.”
- James Fenimore Cooper
“Advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government ... will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.”
- Bertrand Russell
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic. The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.”
- Donald James aka Dresden James
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
- H.L. Menken
“The contemplation of things as they are without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.”
- Francis Bacon
“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
- Attributed to Nietzsche but actually anonymous
“The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.”
- Mohandas K. Gandhi
“Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Humans are storytelling creatures, so whoever can control the stories the humans are telling themselves about what’s going on in the world has a great deal of control over the humans. Our mental chatter tends to dominate such a large percentage of our existence that if it can be controlled the controller can exert a tremendous amount of influence over the way we think, act, and vote.
&ldquoThe powerful understand this, while the general public mostly does not. That’s all we’ve been seeing in these attempts to regulate ideas and information as human communication becomes more and more rapid and networked. An entire oligarchic empire is built on the ability to prevent us from realizing at mass scale that that empire does not serve us and inflicts great evil upon our world. The question of whether our species can awaken to its highest potential or not boils down to whether our dominators will succeed in locking down our minds, or if we will find some way to break free.”
&ldquoThe powerful understand this, while the general public mostly does not. That’s all we’ve been seeing in these attempts to regulate ideas and information as human communication becomes more and more rapid and networked. An entire oligarchic empire is built on the ability to prevent us from realizing at mass scale that that empire does not serve us and inflicts great evil upon our world. The question of whether our species can awaken to its highest potential or not boils down to whether our dominators will succeed in locking down our minds, or if we will find some way to break free.”
- Caitlin Johnstone
“...this is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.”
- Bari Weiss
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
- George Orwell, 1984
“Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.”
- Søren Kierkegaard
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”
- Samuel Adams
“Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion. This is the weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and the trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, the wrong the right. In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest, and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion’s getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves.”
- James Fenimore Cooper
“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid … Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”
- Bertrand Russell
“The reasoning for this is not too difficult to apprehend; school, as we plainly call it, is an institution that has historically been put in place to ultimately serve the wants of the ruling class, not the common people.
“In order for the so-called elite to maintain their lavish lifestyles of overt luxury — where they contribute the least but enjoy the most — they understand that children must be dumbed down and brainwashed to accept (and even serve) their rapacious system of artificial scarcity, unending exploitation, and incessant war.”
“In order for the so-called elite to maintain their lavish lifestyles of overt luxury — where they contribute the least but enjoy the most — they understand that children must be dumbed down and brainwashed to accept (and even serve) their rapacious system of artificial scarcity, unending exploitation, and incessant war.”
- Gavin Nascimento
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
- Charles MacKay
“I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology. Mass psychology is, scientifically speaking, not a very advanced study, and so far its professors have not been in universities: they have been advertisers, politicians, and, above all, dictators. This study is immensely useful to practical men, whether they wish to become rich or to acquire the government. It is, of course, as a science, founded upon individual psychology, but hitherto it has employed rule-of-thumb methods which were based upon a kind of intuitive common sense. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modem methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called education. Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.”
- Bertrand Russell – The Impact of Science on Society (1951)
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”
- Ayn Rand
“Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.”
- Jonathan Swift
“Mass insanity comes from the denial of what everyone knows is true.”
- Charles Eisenstein
“We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability.”
- Bonhoeffer
“Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.”
- Joseph Goebbels
“The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.”
- Mohandas K. Gandhi
“The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.”
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
- Aldous Huxley
“We live a double life, civilized in scientific and technical matters, wild and primitive in the things of the soul. That we are no longer conscious of being primitive, makes our tamed kind of wildness all the more dangerous.”
- Hans Von Hentig
“The great citizens of a country are not those who bend the knee before authority but rather those who, against authority if need be, are adamant as to the honor and freedom of that country.”
- Albert Camus
“I do not believe it’s a fault in those who fall for the narrative that they cannot see the lies. People want to believe that governments and experts, for all their well-known flaws and occasionally uncovered corruption, are trying to do the best they can. They cannot accept the truth, that there is a group of powerful people who regard the ordinary members of the public as surplus to requirements. They want to deny evil because it makes them feel bad, sad, and uncomfortable to think about the world this way.”
- Dr. Mike Yeadon
“The Superior Man thinks always of virtue, the common man thinks of comfort.”
- Confucius
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
- Marcus Aurelius
“You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”
- Ayn Rand
“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
- Ludwig von Mises
“Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.”
- Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer
“In an age of universal deceit, telling the Truth is a revolutionary act. Whoever controls the past, controls the future.”
- Attributed to George Orwell, but actual author unknown
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
- Carl Sagan
“Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus in science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
- Michael Crichton
“If the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
- George Washington
“...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms...it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
- Philip K Dick
“Above all he is a victim of emptiness – he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing – something to fill his inner void …. He is available and ready to listen to propaganda. He is the lonely man …. For it, propaganda, encompassing Human Relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.”
- Jacques Ellul
“I am afraid to say it, but up until one and a half years ago, I was a scientist. Now, I see what is going on. I have to admit that the colleagues and friends of mine that have been telling me that this is genocide may be right. I don’t know, but I feel in my mind there can be no other agenda. There is no other explanation. There is no other explanation because it is clear these gene-based vaccines are not needed because we are not dealing with a killer virus that is destroying mankind. Anyone who says otherwise is obviously lying to your face. Second, it is obvious these so-called vaccines could never ever have protected against infection. . . . Third, and the worst, these gene-based vaccines are the most terrible instruments that have ever been introduced into the human body to destroy humans. . . . These vaccines are going to destroy mankind.”
- Sucharit Bhakdi
“If our dear leaders are so worried about our losing faith in our institutions, they shouldn’t be concerning themselves with manipulating us into trusting them, they should be making those institutions more trustworthy.”
- Caitlin Johnstone
“You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“There are none more hopelessly enslaved, than those who falsely believe they are free.”
- Johann Von Goethe
“For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”
- Hannah Arendt
“To my way of thinking, the minimalist, decentralized federal republic envisioned and codified in the Declaration of Independence, US Constitution and Bill of Rights is as close as mankind has been able to come to an ideal form of self governance. But it is groaning under the weight of accumulated years, legislative and administrative baggage.”
- Robert Malone
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
- Hannah Arendt
“The high-minded man must care more for the truth than what most people think.”
- Aristotle
“The best way to control opposition is to lead it ourselves.”
- Vladimir Lenin
“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.”
- Thomas Paine
“So my theory is that when aspiring conformists—who look for love in any form—grow up without seeing the face of the machine, they remain compliant. The establishment rewards the act of betraying one’s inner child—and because it promotes self-betrayal through formal education, academics can become messenger viruses of spiritual defeat and blinding pride.”
- Tessa Lena
“One of Arendt's key observations about totalitarianism and lying is the concept that totalitarian regimes rely on lies as a crucial tool for controlling and manipulating the populace. Totalitarian leaders use lies to create an alternative reality that serves their political goals. This manipulation of truth is not just about deceiving people, but about undermining their capacity to discern truth from falsehood. In a totalitarian state, facts become irrelevant, and the line between truth and lies blurs, creating a state of confusion and disorientation among the people.
Arendt argued that the constant barrage of propaganda and misinformation in a totalitarian state serves to erode the public's ability to think critically and independently. The incessant stream of falsehoods aims to wear down the individual's capacity to trust their own judgment and experiences. This leads to a situation where people begin to doubt the existence of an objective reality and become more susceptible to the dictates of the regime.
Furthermore, Arendt highlighted the concept of the ""big lie"" in totalitarian regimes. A big lie is a gross distortion or falsehood so extreme that it becomes a kind of enforced reality, requiring everyone to live as though the lie were true. Totalitarian regimes use such big lies to create a new ""reality,"" one that aligns with their ideologies and objectives.”
Arendt argued that the constant barrage of propaganda and misinformation in a totalitarian state serves to erode the public's ability to think critically and independently. The incessant stream of falsehoods aims to wear down the individual's capacity to trust their own judgment and experiences. This leads to a situation where people begin to doubt the existence of an objective reality and become more susceptible to the dictates of the regime.
Furthermore, Arendt highlighted the concept of the ""big lie"" in totalitarian regimes. A big lie is a gross distortion or falsehood so extreme that it becomes a kind of enforced reality, requiring everyone to live as though the lie were true. Totalitarian regimes use such big lies to create a new ""reality,"" one that aligns with their ideologies and objectives.”
- Unbekoming