Joseph Goebbels is credited with the concept of “the big lie’. The bigger the lie and the more often it is told the closer it becomes to the truth.
Well, that is a lie or at best a misconception.
Most lies have a very short shelf life. The liar is often found out sooner rather than later.
Let’s prod that bear a bit.
At present, our most prevalent liar is probably Boris Johnson. Has he been found out? yes, more often than not. Do people believe him? Probably not. Has this affected him? possibly not, he remains in post, continues to lie unabated, so here we are:
Post Truth Era a world of ‘alternative truths or facts?’
Today, the lie is almost a figure of speech, a part of grammar. In a sentence we have a subject, verb, adverb, noun, pronoun, lie, object etc. I slipped ‘lie’ in there – did you notice, did you smile, did you even care?
A few decades ago, sure, people lied, politicians lied. When found out they were shamed, discredited, sacked or fell on their own sword.
Today, we don’t even notice or even care about the inveterate liar.
What the hell is going on?
Actually, it is really quite simple! A lie has very little or no power whatsoever. If you pick up a cat and tell me it’s a dog, I am not going to believe you and go around calling cats, dogs and telling others that the local puss is actually a dog. That lie went nowhere. Why? because I knew it was a lie and I did not believe it. I know a cat from a dog, I was not fooled and I did not try to, or inadvertently try to, fool others.
Mark Twain
‘It is easier to fool a man than to convince him he has been fooled!‘
Progress.
You see, the knowledge I have about cats and dogs protected me from the lie.
Now, another guy tells me that in our brain there is a tiny amount of battery acid to keep the electric pulses going and when that battery goes flat, we die. I am not a neuroscientist but it seems to make sense so I believed it. I could not wait to tell others. Let’s hope I don’t bump into somebody with a bit more knowledge about the brain and calls me a prick. Actually, he calls me a gullible prick!
A lightbulb moment – the word, gullible.
I believed the guy, because I knew nothing about the brain. Otherwise, I would not have believed him, was I gullible? Did he know that??
Back to Mark Twain
How could he know that? I’m a smart guy, right, he knows that, he would never try to fool me, I’m not gullible – oh, but he did! now I am confused – maybe give Mark Twain a call?
Suddenly I wonder. The guy who told me about the brain perhaps didn’t tell anyone else, just me. I didn’t know it was a lie but I told 10 others who trusted me. I am worse, much worse than the liar and I didn’t even tell a lie – how can that be?
I resist the concept of being fooled, then I reflect on how easily I believed the guy and how I struggle to believe I have been fooled?
Mark Twain is right
So, let me reflect. A lie is nothing without a fool, a gullible fool to believe it … and then spread it. But am I a fool? I don’t think so. Am I gullible? on this occasion, absolutely. But what if I become more gullible, more often. What if more people, more often are gullible?
And this is where Goebbels was wrong
It is not about the lie. It does not matter how many times you repeat it. It doesn’t matter how big the lie is. If people are gullible it they will believe a single lie, a repeated lie, a little lie and a big lie. And they will repeat it, again and again and they will be super spreaders.
You see, it’s not about lies and liars, it’s about gullible people, gullible masses, gullible populations.
Finally, how do you make people gullible?
Actually, very easy. There are many many strategies and the Establishment has been very skilled, very masterful in the art of gullible making. There are so many different ways. I will suggest a few but if you follow my drift you will recognise many more, so here goes:
- George Carlin said we teach kids to read and write but not to think?
- I would go further and suggest thinking is not enough, we need critical thinking. When ‘Informed_of_Croydon’ tells us on social media what Putin’s next strategic move will be, you must ask yourself ‘he knows this, how?, I didn’t get the memo, Vlad never calls these days – this is utter bullshit. All he really wants is clicks, followers and more clicks.
- Brainwashing is the neighbour of gullibility. Propaganda, fear and regular doses of trivia will quickly numb the mind, opium of the masses if you will. Turn on the TV, peruse the Guide, wall to wall US tripe right across the card, uber gun totting violence, super heroes, grotesquely unlikely tales of a wee fat bloke and a super model, wars won they never actually happened, people who scream with glee at the opening of the fridge door, people who never seem to work but live in splendour with a brand new $150k SUV yet never do a single normal thing. I defy anyone to subject themselves to this mind-numbing tripe and come out any kind of normal.
- And my best example – celebrity. Did you every wonder if Covid isolation was perhaps a cunning trick to overdose us in celebrity culture – yes, it’s now a culture. Suddenly we’ve got celebrities on games shows, watching TV, baking cakes, painting, dating like crazy, turning up for dinner, singing inside hoods, jetting off to a Caribbean island to shag anything with a pulse then they appear on Breakfast TV talking about their life, sending out their messages? These are mainly unknown, often uneducated, idle or entitled kids whose face fitted or they fell out of daddy’s wallet and were catapulted into a studio to sing a few cords and gyrate a bit until the video and sound engineers have remastered and shoehorned then into a hit single. We are now expected to ‘celebrate their life’, all seventeen years of it and in return they will build for us a moral conscience. If ever there was a social cudgel it is the celebrity. Guess what, who do you imaging is swinging that cudgel??
So how do we know when the gullibility cake is baked?
A few litmus tests have reassured the Establishment that the gullibility cake is ready for the icing. Brexit, the Tory majority, the rise of Stammer, the Scottish referendum in 2014, the Covid contracts eg Track and Trace, the viewing figure of Celebs sneeze into a hankie. Each one of these events was proof beyond any reasonable doubt that Joe public has been …
BAKED TO GULLIBLE PERFECTION