The Big Lie - How to Enslave the World

https://odysee.com/@academyofideas:3/the-big-lie-how-to-enslave-the-world:4?r=2CeHyp5mPPo9ByxsqW8vc4caqGzw8jKY
https://academyofideas.com/2021/09/the-big-lie-how-to-enslave-the-world/

The following is a transcript of this video.

“And the lie has, in fact, led us so far away from a normal society that you cannot even orient yourself any longer; in its dense, gray fog not even one pillar can be seen.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Lying has always been used for political purposes. Lies cover up corruption, past mistakes and hidden motives, and they are an essential ingredient in political campaigning. Sometimes, however, political lies take on a much more sinister form. The lies become all-encompassing, embrace all aspects of life and infect every corner of society. This occurrence is a sign that totalitarianism may be rising. For as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, totalitarianism, at its essence, is an attempt at “transforming reality into fiction”. It is the attempt of corrupt and pathological state actors to impose a fictional account of the world onto the entire population. In Nazi Germany it was the idea of a superior race and an unclean people that formed the big lie, in the Soviet Union it was the belief that state communism could work and that all could be made equal. And from this big lie trickled down a stream of endless little lies. Referring to Communist Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:

“In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf
Describing Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule, Vaclav Havel similarly explained:

“…life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies…Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics.”

Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
When a political system rests upon a bed of lies, what can be done to turn the tide back towards truth and freedom? In this video, drawing from the insights of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel, we are going to explore this question.

The day before he was exiled from the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published a short essay titled Live Not By Lies, and in it he wrote:

“We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble: “But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.”…But we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that this is not so. It is not “they” who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we!”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Live Not By Lies
When a state turns totalitarian the individuals who live in these societies are not merely its victims. All the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century rose to power amidst thunderous applause as many citizens openly called for the brutal control that defines this form of rule. Without mass support and compliance the great minority in the ruling class would be but paper tigers. The responsibility for the oppression, suffering, and loss of life that comes in the wake of totalitarianism, therefore, cannot be placed exclusively on politicians and bureaucrats. A large portion of responsibility must be placed on the citizens who support this form of rule, or else do nothing to resist. Vaclav Havel explains in his book The Power of the Powerless:

“There is obviously something in human beings which responds to this [totalitarian] system…Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people’s own failure as individuals.”

Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
If the fuel for the growth of totalitarianism is weak and fearful individuals, then a cure is a personal revolution that takes place in hearts and minds and leads to an awakening of self-responsibility, courage and strength.

“The best resistance to totalitarianism is simply to drive it out of our own souls, our own circumstances, our own land, to drive it out of con