On Liars and Lying, and How They Generated the False World We Are Doomed In
On Liars and Lying, and the Doomed Fossil-Fueled Culture of the USA
"speak falsely, tell an untruth for the purpose of misleading," Middle English lien, from Old English legan, ligan, earlier leogan "deceive, belie, betray"
We speak, and act, falsely—lie—for at least two reasons.
The first reason is to gain advantage for our self by presenting a false state of being to an audience, intending to have them accept the false state of being so we may assume power, wealth and or pleasure thereby.
The second reason is also to gain advantage by endorsing and repeating a false history, a false shared narrative, that is accepted by a large and armed audience as being truthful.
When a person lies for personal advantage, they generate a second self. This second self is a phantom that must be maintained through continuous effort. For example, a high school student who skips school must present a self to their parents that did not did not skip school or had an excuse to do so. Before the audience of parents, the liar generates a second self that did no wrong, creating false histories that are presented to protect the second, phantom self. The parents investigate and the school tells them their child did not attend school; they confront two versions of their child, the truthful and the liar.
A person loses their self when they lie; the purpose of generating the false self is to lose the honest self. The dishonest self is a newly invented self designed to obtain advantage for the original honest self.
By misleading others with a newly invented self, a person can permanently lose their original honest self and, lost in the false personal relationships and histories it has generated, never find it again—"Pinocchio". Liars can lie to so many people that they generate several phantom selfs, each one designed to fit the specific contexts of the individuals they seek to gain advantage from. It becomes impossible for them to maintain the authenticity of the phantoms they generate. They get "caught in a web of lies," a misleading strand of history binding them so escape from falseness is impossible.
Liars are alone, because they have a secret life/lives they cannot share with others without forfeiting the social advantages their lies enable. This secret life protects itself by keeping the self/selves that lie hidden. The lying self is lonely; without risking exposure and getting "caught is a web of lies," it can't reach out for help.
Because lying alienates a person from their authentic self and also from other people, it can be considered a form of mental illness. Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a "a mental health condition where you have two or more separate personalities that control your behavior at different times". The indication is, then, that all liars are mentally ill–an indication given credence by a psycho-neurological study that concludes:
In short, lying reduces the activity of a part of the brain that "has a primary role in the processing of memory, decision-making, and emotional responses (including fear, anxiety, and aggression)". Lying is biologically hard-wired to be addictive; the more the liar reduces the activity of their amygdala, the more they want to lie: "the amygdala became less active mostly when people lied to benefit themselves. In other words, self-interest seems to fuel dishonesty."
So: A) we lie to gain advantage for our self by presenting a false state of being to an audience, intending to have them accept the false state of being so we may assume power, wealth and or pleasure thereby; yet B) we mislead ourselves when we lie and, by generating phantom selves and histories, lose the authentic honest self we intended to protect. Lying makes us sick, and, because it is addictive, we lie more, making us sicker.
A lone liar is a doomed liar. When a lone liar finds other liars to confirm and support their false state of being, which is constructed via false histories and narratives, the lone liar's chances of not being exposed and thus surviving increase. The person of Donald Trump epitomises this kind of liar, and its survival strategy. The person of Samuel Bankman-Fried epitomizes the lone liar who fails to find others to support their false state being.
Donald Trump provides us with the best example of how a single person's mental illness—expressed as serial lying—becomes, and is, a cultural pathology that dooms the infected culture. Trump's supporters know he lies. By supporting him, they endorse his lies, even as they mislead themselves and others by saying they don't. His "web of lies" entangles them ubiquitously as long as they share his ethos of self-interest, for as we learned: "the amygdala became less active mostly when people lied to benefit themselves. In other words, self-interest seems to fuel dishonesty."
Trump's personal mental illness is our national mental illness. The 2026 election proves that a majority of Americans know that now. Anybody who hears him claim he won the Iran war knows he's lying, even if they voted for him or his lackeys.
From the perspective of evolution by natural selection, a creature that devotes itself solely to self-interest is a creature that is doomed. Since our nation devotes itself solely to self-interest, it is doomed.
Our doom is caused by our adherence to the ethos of selfishness, also known as possessive individualism. The source of this ethos is biological because all creatures survive (breathe, eat, sleep, poop etc,) on an individual level; yet in our culture the ethos of selfishness finds its source in the Constitution, that posits private property instead of a monarch/dictator as a central organizing principle.
The Founders were wise, within their historical moment, to substitute property for a king as a way of legally organizing large populations. The ethos of self-interest was used by them as a way of progressing from a system of absolute rule to representative democracy, and they did not foresee the cult of selfishness established by Milton Friedman and baby-boomer neoliberals like Clinton (who abolished Glass-Steagal and deregulated Wall St) and Obama (who bailed out Wall St not Main St after the '08 crash caused by Clinton's Secretaries of Treasury Robert Rubin and Larry Summers; Summers also served as Obama's director of the National Economic Council, a senior fellow at he neoliberal Center for American Progress, and was an intimate friend of Jeffrey Epstein).
Trump is an expression, not the cause, of the mental pathology that dooms the USA, as Chris Hedges often explains. He allied his personal lies to the false histories, and ethos of selfishness, that both Democrats and Republicans broadcast and defend as quintessentially American. His attacks on green energy are the same as Larry Summers', who was "a leading voice within the Clinton Administration arguing against American leadership in greenhouse gas reductions and against US participation in the Kyoto Protocol, according to internal documents made public in 2009".
Every day we live a national lie, and the many others, that insists that self-interest is the core organizing principle of the USA. It is not. The Declaration of Independence says the core organizing principle of the USA is human equality. The ethos of self-interest and equality do not have to be antipodes, but for Trump they are, and they are because the baby-boom neoliberals deregulated Wall St and instituted our present plutocracy. The plutocracy requires a dictatorship and constant war to keep itself in power; moreover, its wealth is acquired via the industrial practice of destroying functioning ecosystems on a global scale, warming the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and poisoning our food and water.
Because self-interest is not the core organizing principle of the USA (equality is), our plutocrats revise our national narrative to buttress their lie:
They dismiss the egalitarian ethos of our modern liberal culture and replace it with theirs:
What he means is the fundamental weakness of plutocrats is empathy,
Musk is a serial liar, like Trump. And like Trump, he is a serial law breaker. They are firm allies, who destroyed our national public records and regulatory systems through their extralegal Office of Government Efficiency, a newly invented federal agency that copied federal databases so the information can be used by them for their self-interested pursuits like profiting off of human and ecological violence and ensuring their critics are debanked, jailed or killed.
While they bring on "end times," the world they claim to protect is—like the once honest self protected by the lying phanton self—lost. Musk pretends to protect "Western Civilization" while his unempathic business profits by destroying it; the same goes for Trump.
Do they believe the lies they tell? They do and they don't. They do because they are surrounded by people and media that defend them. They don't because most of the same people and media know they are lying, and are rewarded for it, gaining power, wealth and or pleasure thereby. Liars know they are lying, and for a lie to work, they have to believe in it, like Elizabeth Holmes does.
Our problem is that they—baby-boomer neolibs—have the political power to revise our history and our ethos, and are doing it. They derive that political power from our use of fossil fueled technology; and as long as our lives require the technologies they control, they have control over us.
Their false history is a fossil fueled national narrative of possessive individualism and because we are trapped in it, we are sick and dying.
Actual history is biological, and human equality is not merely an ethos; it is a natural law— as Türkiye's COP31 President and Minister of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change Murat Kurum explained:
"Nothing can stop rising seas. No wall can prevent drought. No flag can change the direction of a storm. Climate change reminds us of a very important truth: Our destinies are interconnected".
The truth of interconnectedness extends to all species, not just human.
When the ethos of possessive individualism is magnified by political leaders to the extent it becomes the central organizing principle of humanity it is a lie, a false state of being and a false history, that generates the sick fossil-fueled world we are doomed in.
Darwin wrote that altruism, which is rooted in the egalitarian ethos, was the key to evolution of the human species. It was not self-interest, though as mentioned a creature must always have an interest in caring for its self. The representative human was, for him, Homer Simpson not Donald Trump. Like Midas, a Trump dooms itself and everything it touches by destroying the basis of its own existence, in the same way parasite that kills its host perishes with its host.
The effect that lying has on the health of a culture is to kill it. But we don't have to lie—do we.
Our collective mental illness can be cured. Youths and young adults are experiencing a pandemic of mental illness, largely because they understand they living a lie, that their futures will suck because of global warming, plutocracy and constant war. They voted to remove Trump's senators, congresspeople and governors from power because they reject the false history and ethos of selfishness of the baby-boomer neolibs. Youths and young adults are becoming democratic socialists—and leaving the neolib Republican and Democratic parties behind.
We depart with 2 more big lies—that Trump and Musk and neolib boomers nest in—to consider.
"Israel is a democracy". > Israel has no constitution, no constitutional government. Nobody can define what kind of government it has. Without a constitution, Israel's government is improv.
"The New Deal saved the USA and capitalism". No. War did. Factories boomed with the bombs. The USA has been a national socialist government ever since Eisenhower defined it as the MIC and while warning about it, said it could never be dismantled because the USA would always be at war. (And: McCarthy and Cohn were popular not because their ideology was democratic; but because anticommunism was MIC big business.)
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