Well, it’s sort of a hard issue isn’t it? Because as it turns out Mao was sort of right about the importance of controlling the story your society tells. I’d a

Well, it’s sort of a hard issue isn’t it? Because as it turns out Mao was sort of right about the importance of controlling the story your society tells. I’d argue that we don’t actually have a problem with deliberate lying, but that we have an issue that too many people are doing it. Because our democracy has always been build on a certain degree or twisting facts to whatever purpose. The difference is that until very recently we had a society where the public narrative was controlled by a set of institutions and authorities. With too many billionaires and populists questioning those institutions for too long, we now have split narratives where people have to chose the lies they believe in, and that’s turning out to be a bigger problem than anyone ever imagined. It’ll likely also end up biting some of those billionaires and populists in the ass when enough people decide to follow the same path of lies. It’s a tad ironic that we’re likely witnessing another relatively free and liberal society fall due to too much decadence between the ruling class who have failed to live up to their responsibilities. Either because they were too stupid to realise the fire they are starting or because they were to greedy to care, but in either case, you need a coherent story to have a functional society where it’s different members don’t turn on each other because their world views become too different. A lot of libertarians believing in total free speech, and a lot of HNers share this. Which is understandable, because when you are part of the technical elite of a society you tend to value the essence or basic human rights and personal liberties. So much like the masons of the past formed the free masons, you too see engineers going down similar lines of thought. But the thing is, if you look at history, that’s just not how society works as a whole. Which brings me back to my opening statement about Mao, because while we little about Mao beyond the cultural revolution and the hunger travesties and attribute most of the sway of socialism and communism to Marx and Lenin in the west. The true brilliance of Mao is still at play in the core of what is modern China, in that the revolution never actually ends and that you need a tight grip on information and the public discord on matters that effect society as a whole if you want to control society. Unfortunately we are currently very busy proving him right. The populists may have taken some hits recently because the reality caught up to their stupidity, and the world has woken up to the foreign influence, but we still don’t have strong enough support behind our democratic institutions to have any form or safe future for our western ideologies. Unless that changes, we’ll soon become what China used to be for us. Not because we didn’t strike down on lies, but because we didn’t mutually agree on one of the lies.