People want to feel right, righteous, on the side of good and standing firmly against evil. This impulse to be on the side of good is deeply wired into most of us. If we believe someone is a monster, we recoil from them, marginalize them, want to see them gone. It is this human desire for righteousness that the greatest liars exploit. It feels good to be right, and if a well-placed lie makes you feel more righteous than the complicated, sometimes difficult, truth, what is the real harm in that?
We see the power of determined, shameless liars’ use of incendiary lies, designed to produce righteous anger and persuade people to follow them, in politics every minute of every day. It works perfectly to persuade millions of the righteousness of an objectively rotten cause and it works equally well among much smaller groups. There is no group too small for this principle to work in. Here is a personal example.
I had a small, almost senseless conflict with a dear friend of fifty years. It was over, literally, nothing. Hearing the actual details, few would be able to figure out how this stupid impasse was not worked out easily between old friends, how it became a fatal fault line. In hindsight, this woman who insists on being in charge had been spoiling for this final fight for a while. Given the opportunity to righteously rage, she glared at me with silent hostility, refused to speak, letting her implacably fierce stare speak for itself.
I offered compromises, proposed solutions, her husband tried to explain her irrational objections which she refused to address herself. She remained silent and glared a laser beam of hostility at me, before snarling her final refusal of even a small compromise as she closed the door behind her for the night.
In the end, because I could not accept that my “defiance” had completely justified her totally understandable rage, I had to be destroyed. I’d seen a humiliating weakness in a person with an outsized need never to be wrong. Since she does not possess first class tools to make her case persuasively, she resorts to emotional terrorism, a very effective form of control, as I would learn. She is well-known for her willfulness, her need to be obeyed, to have the final word on everything from which restaurant everyone goes to to what topics may be discussed at dinner.
How did she convince everyone else in our group of longtime friends, and their entire families, that I was suddenly the incarnation of Adolf Hitler? She told them that rather than trying to make peace for a year, I’d spent a full year relentlessly torturing her husband, my closest friend, to “bend him to my will.” To my amazement, the reality that I’ve never tried to bend anyone to my will, readily apologize when I know I’ve hurt somebody, am always ready to compromise rather than fight, was completely disregarded by people who’d known us both well for fifty years. She bent everyone to her will with conscious lies, repeated with enough passion to convince a group of my oldest friends that I was toxic, a person to be shunned unto the death.
When I see JD Vance bristle that the CBS moderators are fucking liars because they promised not to fact check his lies at a debate where he lied over and over, when I see trump’s sphincter of a mouth move, his angry petulance when asked a question he takes offense to, I see my former dear friend. Not everyone will immediately lie when they feel themselves under stress, or challenged. Every one of these desperate people who can never be wrong will lie exactly the same way whenever they feel under pressure. They will do whatever is necessary to bend others to their perverse will to control the people around them.
That the angriest, most insecure, insane, mendacious pieces of shit in the world often have the final say in human affairs is a horrifying tragedy. Netanyahu and his perverted Jewish fundamentalist extremists vs. Hamas and their perverted Muslim fundamentalists extremists get the last word about whether millions of peace loving people in Israel/Palestine will live quiet lives of hope or suffer gruesome, endless warfare and death. Trump and his billionaire handlers currently decide whether millions of Americans live in fear and rage, and resort to deadly violence, or come together to peacefully work out our common problems.
Sadly for humanity, sick motherfuckers very often get the last word. Look at fucking Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Ginni Thomas, cherub-faced fanatic MAGA Mike Johnson and the rest of their stinking divisive, constantly aggrieved ilk. Every one of them righteous as hell in their own mind and intent on convincing others they’re on the side of the angels, resolute in their determination to exterminate all demons. As it is written: fuck those fucking putos.
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