Decades ago now, some people believed that greater availability information would lead to humanity becoming more enlightened and truthful. The internet was an expression of this with a free sharing philosophy for many topics previously hidden or at least hard to obtain by physical mediums. For me it has been exactly this, and I cannot imagine my life without this learning that has been facilitated through the internet. If I’d just had a local library my knowledge would have been greatly reduced and my education would have been far slower.
However because humans are not as altruistic and honest as I would like, it seems the world is not better off as a result of this leveling of the information playing field (and one could argue it is worse). The vast majority of information on the internet now at the end of 2024 is lies, and the effort involved in finding the truth is greater. Lies are far easier for people swallow and for others to sell for their own profit; be it attention, likes, or genuine money. Lies and simplification are far easier to construct and are easier to disseminate and swallow. The truth takes work and time to find, and taking this time to investigate is just too much for people, and it seems to be a basic human failing.
We are spoilt for meaningful truth, yet we believe the empty words of a politician.
I would say this is why politicians tell lies, it is a shortcut to further their agenda, the simple story with good and bad positions just works.
Let’s look at Keir Starmer and the reported 22 billion black hole his government found, this is most likely an easy to swallow lie to further his agenda. The reality of this is probably far more complex and difficult to sell. It is hard to imagine that the prior government were as bad as they are being made out to be, even though they weren’t great on many fronts.
What would Starmer’s agenda be then?
I would wager that it is likely to be to do with following the SDG’s of the UN and the WEF that the UK committed to in line with other countries. These were things that the prior government did not do despite promising to do so and while they are not perhaps crucial to the working of the county they are perceived as needed to be in the club. So in this light, the black hole is likely a sum of money needed to fulfil a promise, rather than an act of fraud and a covered up loss through incompetence.
When lies are found out, one chastises the opposition for lying. Truth is still fundamental to humanity and is a basis for trust and honor. Sadly it seems that this human trait is abused and by those who perpetrate untruths themselves, believing that their own lies will never come to light. Truth is easily sold to the public as the lower levels of humanity rely on this in their daily lives, and sadly those at the top of “society” rely less on it, buy still value its selling power to the masses.
So the internet has over the last 20 years become a reflection of base humanity, rather than a teacher of higher truths. AI too is heading down this same path and must be considered in this light. Humans want the truth but cannot be bothered to find it out for themselves and so fall for the most basic of psychological tricks by liars. The truth is at the bottom of a bottomless well, it is hard to reach and requires graft to search through layers of lies. Much needs to be discarded before the sign of truth can be seen like a glint of light, beckoning one to reach it. Giving up however is easy, and perhaps one can find a lie that is not so bad to believe at a medium level of the well!
Friends, family, teachers, authority figures, leaders and Institutions then do not often tell the truth, but they all play this game of telling an easy bite size lie, and they ask you to trust them over any evidence you can find to the contrary.
The establishment goes after people who want truth as they cannot stand being revealed as the liars the are. The very search for truth is ridiculed, and people are ostracized for not believing what their group believes. The liars will fight tooth and nail to avoid being exposed, and this is why truth telling is punished so harshly in the courts. Someone revealing the truth of a trusted institution’s lies could face more jail time than a murderer.
People en masse predominantly copy others to get by in life, and there is safety in the herd. Is it any wonder then that people will copy this technique and use lies against the liars, as it is a method that works, even if you get caught yourself. Sadly this is a downward spiral for all concerned and honest people should never do this, and instead should let the truth stand on it’s own two feet. However as we can see all around us, the human water is muddy and all parties are covered in shit. Finding the truth is clearly going to require effort to uncover and discard the layers of lies.
Another thing to be aware of is that as part of the copying tactics; words are used differently by different people, their meanings twisted to persuade and convince. It takes time to work out how a person acts and speaks with respect to this. Some use words as one might swing a sword, others will use words to shock and repulse, and others still may suck one in with kindness and love, yet all of these are lies that need to be uncovered. The same thing is true of leaders, with authorities and institutions using the same approaches.
When an institution talks about truth, what they are really saying is that there is information and a narrative that works for us, and it is one that will guide the public easily. Likewise when they talk about misinformation it is the opposite case and is a perspective they do not want shared, even if it is the truth. Institutions give the truth an untruthful name to stop people from learning from it. Labelling it misinformation/disinformation helps them guide their followers away from one thing and back into their narrative. It ultimately just comes down to tribal warfare and the truth is likely hidden somewhere between opposing camps and their spoken version of events. I guess most people think they have the truth, say as given by the BBC, and anything contrary to this is misinformation and bad, when in reality this is not necessarily the case.
Going beyond Institutions to the level of government, it can be seen that Democracy relies on the truth being told for decisions by the public to be informed and based on evidence. If this is not the case then Democracy is not possible and instead a country begins to slip downhill to the point it becomes reliant of lies from authority figures who are not telling the truth and may present their own misinformation as the law. This is the sort of thing we think of when talking about a dictator and how a society is controlled by terror instead of trust. In such a society one cannot speak/write the truth and must abide by the party line, for fear of punishment.
For things to get as bad as that in any country, there must be something which prevents people from speaking out early and preventing the rot from spreading. I believe this is because of the easy lie principal that requires little effort to believe and great effort to disprove. So a country must then slip from goodness to badness through a process of ever worsening lies that pretend to be for the benefit of all, rather than truthfully being to their detriment.
For people to do bad things, I think they have to believe they are actually doing good. The human animal just cannot accept evil as a master, so it must be twisted around for them to believe wrongly. Thus to do great evil, the human animal must itself be corrupted to the point that the great evil appears to be good. Now the sort of leaders who can do this are messed up psychologically, and this is why we see leaders who are twisted from the normal human state. You can see it in their eyes and in their crooked smile, you can tell by their inappropriate amusement at suffering of others. These people take on the mantle of a good person, but give themselves away with micro expressions and “off behaviours”. They are no longer human by my definition, and they are now the embodiment of a tortured soul who is able to hold it together for a press conference or maybe a Royal dinner, but when no-one is watching they rely on lying PR to hide their true selves. These people are often unqualified or lack experience and they look and sound the way they do because they have been falsely lifted into an authority position, precisely because of their corruption and they are put in these positions precisely to do great evil.
I feel so sorry for those who are taken in by the evil people and the easy lies, Just look at those crying over the rare victory of a genuine person in politics. These are good decent people, I am sure, but they have been fooled by lies and because they trusted the liars they are very upset. For example they believe the good leader is the opposite, because they did not do the work of searching for themselves for the readily available information on the internet, and instead simply believed the easy lies told their TV/Newspaper.
This is not something to laugh at and ridicule because these people need love and support, and they are fundamentally broken. The things they feared won’t happen and in time they will see, but they may not learn. They will forever be susceptible to falling for propaganda and cult like thinking, and may believe themselves not worthy of the truth.