Barry Brownstein: When Lying Becomes a Virtue, Civilization Declines

Barry Brownstein’s essay is chilling. Please take a few minutes to read it.

When Lying Becomes a Virtue, Civilization Declines

There’s so much here, it’s hard to find an excerpt, but here’s something to chew on:

Totalitarians demand the truth be ignored. Now, as then, people are incentivized to demonstrate loyalty to government policies. Jisheng describes the duplicity of “officials and intellectuals”:

Dread and falsehood were thus both the result and the lifeblood of totalitarianism: the more a person possessed, the more he stood to lose. Possessing more than the average person, officials and intellectuals lived in that much greater fear, and demonstrated their ‘loyalty’ to the system through virtuoso pandering and deceit. The lies they spun in official life, academia, and the arts and media enslaved China’s people in falsehood and illusion. 

To support Chinese industrialization, vastly inflated crop yields were reported and Jisheng writes, “anyone who dared question the accuracy of these reported crop yields risked being labeled a ‘doubter’ or ‘denier’ engaged in ‘casting aspersions on the excellent situation,’ and anyone who exposed the fraudulence of the high-yield model was subjected to struggle.” 

The worst part of the character of individuals was called forth, “people would not hesitate to lie or sell out their friends for the sake of self-preservation and promotion.” Those who dissented, or merely refused to lie, were subject to physical violence.

Historically, under authoritarian Chinese emperors, dissenters who remained silent were tolerated; there was no need to lie. Jisheng explains that silence was no longer possible under totalitarian Maoism:

Under the imperial system of earlier eras, people had the right to silence. The totalitarian system deprived people of even that right. In one political movement after another, each person was forced to ‘declare his stand,’ ‘expose his thoughts,’ and ‘bare his heart to the party.’ Repeated self-abasement led people continuously to trample upon those things they most cherished and flatter those things they had always most despised. In this way the totalitarian system caused the degeneration of the national character of the Chinese people.

Sadly, This Is US. As Brownstein elaborates, this is what’s happening HERE. NOW.

If you are a “safe space” for people to share their truth, you know. People are lying - about their political views, their vaccination statuses, their opinions on controversial issues - because they know there will be consequences socially and sometimes financially.

Others are silent. We have been trained to believe that pointing out the naked emperor is in poor taste. It’s rude to make people uncomfortable.

But if we want our children to recognize truth, we have to point it out. Barry Brownstein does this with grace. Me, a little less so. But, please, it’s time to speak up while we still can.