Lies

In the midst of a nice LA Progressive article about Trump's lies, the author quotes Hannah Arendt:

Writing about 50 years ago, the German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote:

"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end, you get not only one lie—a lie that you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such people, you can then do what you please."

"She wrote that as a German Jew who had escaped the Holocaust and made it to America, obviously, she was reflecting on how the Nazis had managed to take control of Germany, not by convincing people to believe their propaganda and their lies, but by leaving them bereft of a willingness to believe anything."

Personally, I'd add that the worst consequence of lies, really anywhere, is that the liar starts to believe his/her own bullshit. Then all that remains is delusional thinking--not a good way to guide public policy, or one's personal life strategy. Of course that is the cynical object of many Trump fans: destruction of the political system as it crazily motors off a cliff. That means Trumps "negatives" are all positives if he's simply a cluster munition aimed at D.C.

John Kenneth Galbraith was right: “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”