Hannah Arendt cautioned us seventy years ago that the greatest threat was not persuading people to believe the lies, but rather making them completely give up on the truth.
Hannah was a German-born political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany and spent her entire life trying to understand how civilised societies could descend into totalitarian darkness.
She made the point that these systems succeed by impairing people’s capacity for rational thought rather than by persuading them of an ideology.
She actually summed it up perfectly. She said that the ideal matter of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false, no longer exists.
The goal my friends is not the belief, but the confusion.
The idea is to make people so overwhelmed by conflicting information and endless lies that, ultimately, people just give up trying to figure out what’s actually true because when truth and lies muddy together, right and wrong start to blur too, and once this occurs, people are easy to control.
This is not because they’ve been convinced, but because they stop thinking for themselves, and totalitarian education isn’t about teaching people what to believe, it’s about eliminating their ability to believe in anything at all.
People will cease resisting when they stop caring, trusting, and asking questions. As the world around them turns darker, they simply drift along, numb and distant.
Lies corrode society within, and persistent lying doesn’t just spread misinformation; it eats away at the very idea of truth itself.
When every fact is treated as debatable. When everything becomes just someone’s opinion, then truth loses its power, and when truth has no power, neither does justice or morality.
As Nazi Germany unfolded, the lies became so constant and overwhelming that people simply stopped caring about what was true, and that space made for unimaginable atrocities.
I am not assigning blame, but this is a warning because this can happen anywhere and to any society when people give up on truth.
Violence isn’t usually the first step. It begins with bewilderment, scepticism, and mental tiredness, and we are lost as soon as we cease to critically analyse, even about our own beliefs.
However, totalitarianism doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It begins quietly, in the erosion of truth and the rise of apathy. It flourishes when people just shrug and say, ‘You can’t trust anyone,’ or ‘who even knows the truth anymore.’
We must safeguard our capacity for thought. We must demand proof. We must continue to be curious. When the truth ceases to matter, all else collapses; therefore, don’t let the lies, uncertainty, or exhaustion drive you to lose interest in what is true.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 