It is not so much the fact that there are those who regularly use lies and mistruths to seek to get people on their side that bothers me, there have always been such people. It is that there are so many people willing to believe them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course there have also always been people too stupid to know the difference between truth and blatant manipulation. People who simply believe whatever it is they would like to be true. People who believe whatever they are being told the loudest or most frequent. And of course, there have always been sycophants. People who see it as an opportunity to go along with whoever looks like they might have or might be able to get significant power. Yet whilst this accounts for many of those willing to go along with the abusers of truth, probably most of them, it doesn\u2019t account for all of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So why does a reasonably intelligent, thoughtful, and otherwise caring human being go along with an abuser of truth? Do they not recognise the long term dangers inherent in accepting mistruths and lies as having just as much validity as truth? Do they not recognise that those willing to blatantly abuse truth are far more interested in their personal power and prestige than they are in whatever policies they are championing? Are they deluding themselves that the abuse of truth is less important than some other supposed gain they expect to result from giving the abuser of truth power?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is not so much the fact that there are those who regularly use lies and mistruths to seek to get people on their side that bothers me, there have always been such people. It is that there are so many people willing to believe them. Of course there have also always been people too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thought-for-the-day"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6MFrG-1bB","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutcommonsense.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutcommonsense.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutcommonsense.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcommonsense.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcommonsense.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcommonsense.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4564,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcommonsense.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563\/revisions\/4564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutcommonsense.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcommonsense.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcommonsense.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}