You know, there is a fundamental asymmetry between arsonists and fire fighters. It is much easier to set a fire than to put one out. One requires almost no training or equipment, and the other at least some training to do effectively, and a lot of equipment.
Likewise, it is much easier to lie than to dispel lies. It is much easier to speak nonsense that sounds good than to think things through carefully and say useful and intelligent things.
PARTICULARLY if you add obsessive manias on the part of the liars, coupled with the rewards of effortlessly assuming the moral high ground AT THE VERY MOMENT THEY ARE ATTACKING THE FOUNDATIONS OF OUR CIVILIZATION, and you get a recipe for mass delusion and mass imbecility, which indeed is what we see today.
Despite strong conflicting impulses, I still find myself in the fetid bogs of comment pages sometimes. It’s pack of ghouls, determined to twist everything I saw into wrong, no matter how carefully I say it, or how patently ludicrous their claims are.
The obvious goal is simply to make me, and people like me, disappear. They want absolutely blemish-free message boards, where the illusion of unanimity is achieved by being so hellishly awful that all decent people get tired of the continual insults, and retreat into silence. Then they claim they speak for the majority, when this is an obvious and egregious lie. The goal is to silence the majority through threats and intimidation–a task they are now joined in by a politicized FBI and DoJ and DHS–then pretend they speak for most people, when they know perfectly well this isn’t true.
No totalitarian state ever speaks for more than a fraction of its citizens. I would estimate it AT MOST at 30%, those who get at least small crumbs from the cable, and the connected elite is probably truly 1-5%. They eat well, and more or less live as nobility in a land turned into a mob of equalized peasants. No doubt in some parts of Cuba and China and North Korea they expect literal red carpets, and salutes to their motorcades.
And I would say that no evil regime ever ruled in the name of evil. That’s not how it works. They rule in the name of justice and God, and the “proletariat”.
Liars, at the level of psychopaths, enjoy lying. It’s a thrill. They love the hypocrisy, and the fact that everyone knows they are lying, but no one can say anything. It’s just another, more subtle, form of cruelty, just like that which Fidel Castro used to inflict on people by giving 6 hour pointless rants, in which no one felt safe enough to use the restroom, lest they miss two minutes of his idiotic rambling.
You just KNOW, don’t you, that Castro loved watching a crowd pretend to be listening to thoughts he was making up as he went? And that he loved watching them getting more and more uncomfortable as he went on, knowing he had them under his control? It was all a big sadistic thrill for him. He probably got erections behind the podium.
And the appropriate punishment, in Hell, for him, would be to give him a tiny bladder, kidneys that blew up repeatedly, then healed, and make him listen to speeches lasting a thousand years.
Here is what I would suggest for comments sections, and contested public media: don’t subject yourself to the wolves, but leave crumbs of truth, so those reading understand they are not alone. That is not hard. Dealing with the packs is hard, and the thing is, victory is not possible. There is no argument which exists in words sufficient to dispel terror in those whose personalities revolve around it. When you comment, you are not feeding the dead. You are hoping to send a message to the living. That task, in my view, is important.