Whopperville

In his podcast on the Persian empire, Dan Carlin told a story from Herodotus about a Spartan Greek who found his way in the court of Cyrus the Great. In the story, the emperor made the point to the Greek visitor that the Persians would have little trouble subduing the Greeks because the Greeks were all liars. They lied to one another in their political debates, and they lie to one another in their economic dealings. A collection of liars could never band together and fight the Persians.

The story is certainly apocryphal, as Herodotus was fond of explaining history through fictional accounts. Carlin further dramatizes it in his telling, in order to emphasize the point Herodotus was making with the story. This fanciful tale gets across the point that lying was highly immoral in Persian society. So much so that lying could get you executed if you lied to the wrong person. In other words, a made-up story by a famous storyteller helps explain the honesty of the Persians.

In fairness to the Greeks, not all of them were liars. The Spartans, for example, were not as fanatical about truth telling as the Persians, but they also looked down about the perfidy of the Athenians. Most of the Greek city-states shared their disdain for lying to one degree or another, depending upon their embrace of democracy. The more they embraced the Athenian democratic culture, the more likely they were to have a casual relationship with the truth.

It is something familiar to us today. As the democratic mindset has settled upon us, the truth has been pushed to the edges of the public domain. Back in the bad old days when certain parts of the population were discouraged from voting, politicians were discouraged from lying. As we have become obsessed with making sure every voice is heard, politicians are now rewarded for perfidy. America is on the verge of becoming a nation of liars, just as Cyrus described the Greeks.

This is by design. The argument for democracy and the "free market" is that the magic of the marketplace will solve the perfidy problem. The expert who is always wrong, due to incompetence or discerption, will be revealed and ignored. The seller who rips off his customers will be found out and before long word will get around that he is a bad guy, and no one should buy from him. We no longer need a moral code in a democratized society, because the market will do the policing.

It turns out that this was a lie. For example, the drug makers lie about all sorts of things and never face any consequences. The miracle weight loss drug Ozempic may cause your heart to explode, but at least you will look good in the casket. Time after time we see the drug companies roll out miracle cures that are worse than the thing they seek to cure, but they suffer no loss of reputation. The people who needed to redefine the word "vaccine" are no redefining the word "healthy."

It is not just that these companies are not held accountable, but that they continue to hold a prominent place in society. It is not that all their products are deadly or simply a fraud like the Covid vaccines. There are drugs that genuinely improve the health of people, but many of their products are a disaster. In some cases, like the Sackler family's scheme to addict the world to opioids, the sole motivation behind the product is to harm the intended audience.

Consequence-free lying is most obvious in the public square. Here is a thread about a fellow calling himself Phillips P. OBrien. He is a professor of strategic studies at a Scottish university. He likes to go on about the war in Ukraine. He has been wrong about every aspect of the war, even some that no one thought were important to discuss, suggesting he is a man on a mission. That mission is to deceive, which may explain why he spells his own name wrong.

Of course, the news media is full of lies and there are never any consequences to the media organs for lying. We just went through an election in which the media consciously organized itself around the promotion of Kamala Harris. A major part of that campaign was to bullshit the public into thinking she was a wildly popular person to whom the nation was flocking. They lied and they knew they were lying, yet they will keep on lying about the next thing.

The election is a useful way to imagine the opposite. Imagine a world where lying was the worst offense to the general morality. So much so that people convicted of lying had to be held in special prisons, like we do with child molesters. It is the world of the ancient Persians where men swear oaths like, "If I am lying, I'm dying" in which the result of a lie would be death. The news coverage of the election alone would have been unimaginably different.

The question is why is it that everyone seems to be fine with America evolving into a massive lie machine? Most Americans do not realize it, for sure, but lots of people have noticed the collapse of honesty and integrity. Trump labeling the media "fake news" did not set off alarms. It became a joke and then was internalized. Sensible people know that if it is in the media, it is most likely false. The truth may remain hidden, but at least we know what option that is not the truth.

Perhaps it is self-correcting. In the last election, the Harris campaign spent a billion dollars telling one lie after another. The media added untold billions to the effort with their own gaslighting in her favor. The government and corporations chipped in billions of their own to the cause. It was the most expensive lie machine ever built and yet it failed to fool enough people to make a difference. Perhaps there is a limit to lying and we are reaching that limit.

That raises another question. If the people running the media, to use just one example, reach the point where they see a negative return on lying, how can they change course and stop lying? How do people get used to trusting the media after having been conditioned to not trust them? It may be that once a society heads down the road of democracy is ends up as a low-trust society and then dies. The Greeks never could shake their habit of lying to themselves.

This may be why people were always so terrified of democracy. They understood that as soon as you open everything up for debate, you open the door to the worst aspects of the human condition. That sets off a process from which there is no turning back until it is a war of all against all. Maybe that is the end for the great experiment in self-government we call America. In the end, we are all standing around telling whoppers to each other as the roof falls in on us.