Living in the Lie

And How Not To

Back in 2017, in the daze and delirium shortly after Trump’s victory, I was convinced that the country was about to tip precipitously into some kind of authoritarian nightmare state and was searching for things to help resist or endure such a situation. It sounds like a silly overreaction in retrospect, considering how mild the first administration was compared to this, and just how much of normal life and politics continued in that era. I didn’t know then that the process of social decay would be more gradual and therefore more insidious. In any case, one of the things I read was a blog post called “Exploration of Wojtyła’s ‘The Acting Person’ and Kołakowski’s ‘Theses on Hope and Hopelessness’ as possible philosophical foundations of the Solidarity Movement in Poland.” Wojtyła’s is Karol Józef Wojtyła, future Pope John Paul II; Kołakowski, of course, is the philosopher and intellectual historian Leszek Kołakowski; and the Solidarity Movement was a trade union whose non-violent civil resistance helped bring down the regime in Poland.

The paper describes resistance in a situation where there is no political sphere, no civil society, and where it is impossible to organize or speak publicly without incurring the weight of state oppression. In other words, it is a situation unlike our own. However distorted or damaged they may be, we retain our political freedoms. But one line at the end stuck with me, “Kołakowski wrote in The Eclipse of Ideology, ‘It is perhaps the most oppressive part of life under communism. Not terror, not exploitation, but the all-pervading lie, felt by everybody, known to everybody. It is something which makes life intolerable.’”

I don’t know about you, but I find the endless lies and lying often to be the most infuriating and demoralizing part of the present situation. In the wake of this terrible killing in Minneapolis, my first thought, after the initial shock, anger, and sadness, was the knowledge that the next few days, months, weeks, and years would be filled with endless lying about what happened from the regime and its stooges. This filled me, if not quite with despair, then at least with a strong sense of depression. I suppose it has something to do with my vocation as a historian, where I can accept tragedy and even evil as unavoidable parts of the human experience, so long as witness can be borne and the truth eventually discovered.

It doesn’t help that I spend much of my time on a website dedicated to the destruction of truth and the dissemination of propaganda: Twitter or Elon Musk’s X. I do this for my work and to try to push back in my small way against that noxious climate, but I generally don’t recommend it. There is an unavoidable mental distortion that takes place in its topsy-turvy world: you either begin to accept the lies or, if you retain your moral center, you begin to believe that a critical mass or even majority of others have, and therefore you exist as an isolated or minor part of society. The result is demoralization. I liken being on there to working with radioactive or toxic waste, and I recommend people who don’t need to do it professionally to avoid it.

The hopelessness that breeds conformity or resignation is dangerous. When I looked back at the “Solidarity” blog, I noticed it also cites Václav Havel, the Czech dissident, and his concepts of “Living in the Lie” and “Living in the Truth” from his samizdat essay “The Power of the Powerless.” He points out that for an oppressive system to operate, people don’t really need to believe the lies of the regime in their hearts, but just act as if they do, living in the lie:

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

You go along to get along. You pretend that fake statistics are real and fake elections are real. Everyone does it, and so you think fewer and fewer people are dissatisfied with the state of things. Again, Havel was operating in a context that was far more restrictive and oppressive than anything we are experiencing here and had taken on a certain regularity and automatism. In other words, it was a self-sustaining system. What we have here is not a system, but the effort to create one. But many people in the US are already living in the lie and are encouraging others to do so. The administration comes up with totally absurd lies; they are obscene and preposterous. They issue outlandish statements and parade their clownish idiots on TV, but what I find much more insidious and insulting is the demand on the part of some that we take them seriously or pretend that they are a government like any other. This is presented as truth, objectivity, or fairness, but it is its ultimate destruction. For instance, this is what I believed was going on with Bari Weiss’s memo. It struck me as the beginning of a system of apparatchiks who produce legitimating propaganda for a regime that openly mocks the truth. Such people can flatter themselves that they are independent and not members of “the Party,” so to speak, but they are living in a lie. They are pretending that there’s something more than issuing from the mouths of authority than obscenities and lies. I, for one, won’t play along with this stupid ritual. It poses as civility but is in reality the death of civic life.

Another thing that stuck with me from that post was this passage:

Kołakowski was aware that a characteristic of monopolistic power was the continued effort to atomize society and destroy all forms of social life not prescribed by the ruling apparat. Thus he proposed that even the ‘most innocent forms of social organisation can … become transformed into centres of opposition’[26]. Therefore constant pressure, rather than armed conflict, in the form of persistent dissidence and self-organised social groups, had the potential to build the independent sphere, creating the ‘snowball’ phenomenon which could threaten the whole political order[27].

Kołakowski’s strategy is similar to that later presented by Václav Havel in The Power of the Powerless (1978). Havel stated that the oppressed always contain ‘within themselves the power to remedy their own powerlessness’[28], and encouraged individuals to ‘live in truth’, to go about their daily activities as if communism did not exist, such as organising small book clubs or sports teams.

This is quite similar to Alexis de Tocqueville’s accounts in Democracy in America of the important role that "voluntary associations” have in American democracy:

As soon as some inhabitants of the United States have conceived of a sentiment or an idea that they want to bring about in the world, they seek each other out, and when they have found each other, they unite. From that moment, they are no longer isolated men, but a power that is seen from afar, and whose actions serve as an example; a power that speaks and to which you listen.

This is why I always thought the mockery and criticism of BlueSky or the No Kings Protests were wrongheaded at best and could be actually harmful. Whatever else you may say about them, they are other spaces, not dominated by the lies of the regime and its supporters. They let people know who don’t agree that they are not “isolated men,” but a “power that is seen from afar.” This is just basic civics. But I digress. I guess what I’m saying, for myself as much as anyone else, is that it’s important both for one’s soul and sanity, as well as one’s politics, not to live solely among the lies.