The Insidious Danger Of The Uncontested Lie

MEDIA

What obligation do we have in our personal lives to seek and demand the truth?

I saw a meme today that read: “Once you stop trying to prove points, your life will be much more peaceful. Let people say and think what they want. It has nothing to do with you.”

I believe the intent of this meme is to be positive, to remind us that we don’t always have to be right, that everything need not be an argument, and that we might all be better off with a little less need to be proven right all the time.

While that is almost certainly true, it doesn’t tell the whole story. There is an insidious danger to allowing the blatant lie to go uncontested, and we’re seeing it play out each and every day in America, and indeed throughout the world.

I used to work for a guy who was a habitual liar. We didn’t call it that, of course. We had all sorts of friendly euphemisms for his many departures from the truth. His exaggerations, we would call them.

His invented conversations with people, known and unknown, that would become the rationale for bolstering up his unfounded and unwarranted claims. Elaborate, revisionist histories concerning everything from the critical to the mundane. His misstatements of fact, and his delusions of what might have happened, were simply part of his running dialogue.

It became normal.

I learned early on that if I did not contest a lie or misstatement of fact, it would become canon and therefore irrefutable. I found myself contesting his many incorrect statements so often that I became known as being the contentious one. If he said black, then I said white, was the accusation made concerning me.

He was infamous for making bold statements that supported his worst fears, greatest hopes, or otherwise skewed worldview and he expected me to fall in behind him. I simply refused. Not out of any moral obligation but purely out of self-preservation. Once a lie was firmly embedded, it was near to impossible to change the narrative.

The former President of this country is on record as being the most deceitful in our nation’s history. During his term, he made tens of…

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