Are you annoyed by all those lying liars—including U.S. Senators—who are still spreading the lie about the election being stolen?
Yeah, me, too.
Well, lying and presenting myths as a way to solidify power goes all the way back to the ancient world.
Take the Behistun Inscription. In huge lettering on the side of a cliff, King Darius, who was born in 522 BCE, presented the story of his life. If you believe him, power was given to him by the gods and he never suffered a single defeat. Moreover, he single-handedly killed anyone who dared question his authority.
Scholars call this a pseudo-autobiography. It’s when a leader creates a myth about his own background to help solidify his power.
Donald Trump came to power with a pseudo-biography, which went like this: “I am a successful businessman.” Of course, if that were true, he wouldn’t be hiding his taxes and financial information.
Another form of ancient lie is what one ancient leader called “concealed wars.” Let’s go back to the Mauryan Empire in India. The founder of the Mauryan Empire had a prime minister, Kautilya, who literally wrote a manual on how to use lies to win wars—the world’s first disinformation manual.
Kautilya talked about “concealed wars” as opposed to “open wars.” An open war is when two armies meet on the battlefield and have it out. Kautilya told the king that open wars are a bad idea. Your own people can die. Heck, you can die.
Concealed wars are when you spread lies to beat your enemies. These are safer and easier.
He gave examples of how to do this. For example, figure out how to get an undercover spy to spread rumors in the enemy kingdom that their king is cheating his top ministers. If you’re lucky one of them might even be driven to assassinate the king and then throw their kingdom into chaos.
Think how much easier that is than trying to kill your enemy king in an open war.
A Soviet Union spy manual bragged that Russians had invented and perfected the art of disinformation. Interestingly, the claim that Russians invented disinformation is itself a piece of disinformation, told for a purpose: Pump up Soviet spies with the lie that they are not only the best, but they actually invented this form of hidden warfare.
By the way, I know these things because I have a book coming out on disinformation so I had to do a lot of research. The point is that using lies as a way to weaken and destroy an enemy, and build up your own power, goes back a long way.
Disinformation is used by people who are trying to consolidate power, which is exactly what the Republican Party is trying to do. I’ve said that oligarchs and would-be oligarchs have a problem: If they are trying to consolidate their own power and maintain a hierarchy with themselves at the top, they have to enact policies that hurt their own constituents. So what do they do?
They lie. They invent enemies who are trying to upset the order and destroy and take what belongs to ‘real’ Americans (who are of course, white).
People who are lying on purpose in order to gain power are not going to stop.
People believe lies for all kinds of reasons. The lie can make them feel good. The lie might reinforce their worldview.
Trump told his base that they are the “real Americans” and they would be at the top of the hierarchy except for people taking what belongs to them. This made them feel good. (Most of us don’t consider these guys the top of any hierarchy. In fact, I figure that for some of them, part of their frustration is that nice girls don’t like them.)
Sarah Huckabee Sanders explained that Trump’s lies pointed to an “important truth.” An example would be Birtherism, which was a provable lie, but pointed to what Trump’s base sees as an “important truth”: Obama is Black. He’s not a real American.
Some people embrace the lies because the lies destroy, and they want to destroy. I wrote about that in 2018, here.
Some people caught in these cults hard to reach. Some are your own family members. Cult specialists have ideas for reaching them. Psychologists tell us that mocking them will not help.
The best strategy is to outnumber them at the polls.
Right now, one of the best vehicles we have for reaching them is the criminal investigations into the Capitol Riot because the people who participated were deep in these conspiracy theories. I’m reading their pretrial motions, and some are realizing they were duped. That’s why I’m watching these investigations closely.
I also think that defamation lawsuits can help dissuade those who are lying on purpose.
In the end, there will always be liars who cynically lie to gain power.
There will also be people who believe the lies because they want to believe the lies, and people with cognitive limitations, who I believe we should think of as victims.
One way to help neutralize these lies is to learn the best way to respond, but that’s a big topic, so I’ll save it for another day.
This blog post is basically a transcription from Video #7 in my Youtube series:
I did this series because I found value in going back and summing up what I’ve been writing about over the past few years.
It’s also a good way for new subscribers to catch up. The series is here.
If you prefer reading a transcript, I put transcripts from each one of the videos here.
