Stop Lying.

I was brought up by my Methodist parents in the 50’s and 60’s to not lie. I’m grateful because the benefits have been many, but these days I feel out of place. All TV ads are lies of one sort or another, salesmen lie, journalist and the media lie, all arms of our governments lie. Persuasive language is even taught in schools as a necessary part of English. This pandemic of untruths and unrealities is causing an epidemic of stress, depression and demoralisation. Every denial of some underlying truth further separates us from reality, the reality that we instinctively know is there somewhere. But as many psychological experiments have proved one person in a group who have all been told to lie soon accommodates to that lie and accepts it with, “it doesn’t feel right but I guess I must be wrong.” Once accepted that person will add his/her own intellectual powers, like a node in a cognitive Internet, to justify it further. Many mores within finance, the media and government have grown to be so universally accepted in this way that any objections appear overtly pernicious and purposefully made to cause trouble. Branded as such they become righteously ostracised as conspiracy theorists or paranoid extremists. And all by the intelligent, diligent experts in the field. Maybe, just maybe we should thank Donald Trump for appearing at the head of this insidious pestilence. A narcissist so grand he believes he creates the truth by his own willpower alone. Can he show the rest of us the iniquity and ultimately the destruction caused by denying the reality we instinctively know? Will he enter 2017 as President or in prison for sexual abuse?