“Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.”
-Richard Feynman
Why Don’t They Believe Us? – Tablet Magazine
You know each example very well already. But feelings of disquiet may be occasioned by more examples from the last few years than you can easily list.
The effects accumulate below the water line, because the speed with which each new major prevarication has arrived dims the previous one. Continual review of our nomenklatura’s drip-drip-drip mendacity is necessary.
There’s no hyperbolic rhetoric in that article, no jumping to conclusions. There’s nothing sensational, except maybe the scope of audacious duplicity.
The catalog of deception is by no means complete. Unmentioned are cover-ups of anti-semitism in our Congress, and attempts to repeal the 2nd Amendment by executive order – despite denials of that intent. I’m sure that does not complete the list, either. But those affronts are also glued onto your hull.
You wonder when Newsweek will put this on their cover:
The surprise isn’t that we have people who can ignore the accumulated deceit, it’s that they can champion it; because they consistently reason backward from their desired political outcome. This is true for some across the political spectrum.
Lately, though, this tendency has been distinctly one-sided. And distinctly fervid. And – you’re intended to believe – widely popular.