The crucial issue of our time: Speaking the truth in a world propped up by lies and deception by David Solway via Life Site News
‘Reality has been denatured.’
In several previous articles, I addressed what I believe to be the crucial issue of our time, namely, the institutionalization of the lie in culture and politics.
The situation shows no sign of abating and indeed grows more alarming with every passing day. The integrity of the information we receive about domestic and world affairs has been degraded almost beyond recognition. Reality has been denatured. For the Lie has become a systemic and indelible part of public and institutional life. The dilemma we now confront, as D. Stephen Long points out in an important book dealing with the relation between relativism and authoritarianism, is speaking truth in a post-truth world.
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But the problem goes further than relativism; rather, it involves a substitution of absolutes, of an assumed truth for a genuine truth, replacing objective fact and data with a new paradigm of subterfuge, fable, and casuistry under the rubric of “truth.” When lying acquires something like constitutional status, it becomes a phenomenon so deep it can be described, adopting the popular saying, as “turtles all the way down,” now the title of an indispensable new book on vaccine science and myth, which reveals “how ineffectively and dishonestly the COVID pandemic was handled.”
In fact, a climate of fraud and deception is now omnipresent in all walks of life and endeavor, personal and professional. As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes in The Mystery of Evil, power and institutions are delegitimated today “because the powers have lost all awareness of their legitimacy,” which is why “illegality is so diffuse and generalized.” In other words, lying has assumed the authority of law.
The “People of the Lie,” in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s telling phrase, are now everywhere to be found, inhabiting what we might call the “moral infrastructure” of our era. They comprise not only the elite or parasite class in the corridors of both elected and non-elected officialdom, the federal agencies, the administrative bureaucracies, the corporate world, academia, the medical and pseudo-scientific professions, the suborned media, the diverse nonprofits and aspiring Technates like the World Economic Forum, the radical feminist sorority, “Global Warming” propagandists, much of the judiciary that labors to pervert and annul prosecutorial ethics and legal obligations in our courts, but also the vast body of ordinary citizens whose lives and everyday practices have been infected by the virus of the Lie.
