Warning.
I am about to do a JKRowling and quote Hitler and Goebbels for the purposes of understanding why politicians tell obvious and deliberate huge lies.
It is an important propaganda technique which is well known and well understood. We know that Farage is well versed in understanding this due to his education and his understandings on the subject.
This is what wiki briefly describes the Big Lie as:
Big lie
The repeated articulation of a complex of events that justify subsequent action. The descriptions of these events have elements of truth, and the "big lie" generalizations merge and eventually supplant the public's accurate perception of the underlying events. After World War I the German stab in the back explanation of the cause of their defeat became a justification for Nazi re-militarization and revanchism.
Goebbells explicitly used the phrase and described it as such:
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Goebbels was actually talking about Churchill and his use of propaganda and didn't admit to telling lies but he clearly understood the concept and its use in war.
My understanding of the Big Lie and how when a lie is so big it can only maintain itself for so long before it collapses under the weight of its own bullshit is what has very much kept me going throughout. There are other reference points throughout the history of liberal democracy which essentially make the same point (Many references throughout key points in American and French history make similar parallels about the truth always coming through eventually).
Anyway, Goebbels was repeating something that Hitler had previously said in Mein Kampf, only in a rehashed and more clear way. You may be relieved to know you don't have to read Mein Kampf to get the Hitler's take on the same thing. Its on wiki, under 'Big Lie'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.
All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true within itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X
(Yes I did it. I quoted it on MN. Many people on twitter are now imploding and saying MN is full of Nazis).
The point he makes is that people are swayed more by emotional arguments than logical / rational arguments. Thus 'Be Kind' always wins. Thus disaffection always wins. It is about how much you can wind up the public - this is a form of radicalisation and we should not be surprised when deliberately winding up the public, when you get a small minority taking it too far and becoming dangerous, violent, abusive, coercive extremists who have anti-social behaviour. Because they've literally been encouraged to go down this route.
Hitler had a disregard for the intelligence of the general public and thought they were much dumber than him and could be manipulated. Ironically it was a sentiment he shared with Churchill; "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
Churchill's argument was the average voter simply did not fully grasp the complexities of political issues and thus putting such ideas to vote through democracy is problematic and may not be in the best interests of the public. Its a dangerous path - and Churchill is something of a paradox because he essentially was an authoritarian leader during the war as necessity demanded he acted at times outside normal democratic checks and balances - whilst also remaining an icon of the defence of liberal democracy. (He's not the only example of this paradox either).
This was all picked up during the Brexit Referendum that actually, Remain never stood a chance because their campaign was all about logic and reason and therefore never really connected with a lot of people because they didn't have an emotional connection to the arguments being presented to them. (Conversely this where you do have a bunch of pro-EU crazies who break this idea for exactly the opposite reason because they DID have an emotional connection to the EU. And they have behaved, at times, in a way which was just as questionable as some of the worst Brexiteers). This was replicated by Trump. And this was again repeated by Corbyn's 2017 campaign and he very nearly got it over the line and it caught people off guard as to just how close it was (The closeness was predictable if you saw the dynamics and the momentum he got). And once again by Trump in 2024.
This is how politics is currently operating and there is an inability to get to grips with it and to make people passionate about the pursuit of 'enlightment' in the sense of its true meaning - without ideological bias. This is going to be something that is difficult to enable at this point because of these almighty swings from one extreme to the other and because there are such deliberate propagandic attempts to undermine this concept.
When its said we are in the midst of a Culture War its very much the case. The first casualty of war is the truth. Worst still the supposed defenders of this - the media - have been some of the worst offenders and have undermined their own existance by taking the easy route of opinion and being influenced by activists rather than upholding their commitment to unbiased reporting. The move from journalism to opinion columns has be catatrophic in this regard.
Having said all this, despite the issues with democracy, the problem lies with unchecked power and abuses of power. The public aren't stupid in the sense that they can and do pick up on these as they become the victims of authoritarians using their power beyond reason and against them. And this is where the media should be acting (and aren't acting well enough at the moment). This suits the Big Lie because you get all the powers of authority working together to uphold the lie rather than take it down bit by bit.
There are very much examples of the Big Lie going on all over the place right now. Getting people to look out for them and spot them is probably were we should doing and making the point that no single political grouping is doing this. Its absoluetely bloody everywhere.
We know that the Tobacco Industry did it for years and years. We know that the oil companies look likely to have done the same. I suspect we will see some pretty ugly things come from food manufacturers of ultra processed foods in years to come in terms of how they deliberately pursued addictiveness. And of course there's gender.
And thats it. We understand propaganda in terms of it being something that gets used in war, but people struggle to understand how its used in political campaigning to the degree it is and they definitely have blind spots in how its used in advertising and marketing just to flog you shit. Our world today is dominated by propaganda in a way that didn't exist even 50 years ago. It is weaponised against the interest of the public on so many levels.
This is why I very much think media studies has an essential place in basic education. The focus on 'online safety' misses the point that 'safe' content is fraught with so much of this bullshit. We need to get better at navigating it all.
Its all quite the mess at the moment.
Anyway, why do people believe the Big Lie?
Because ultimately they want to and because it fits with their lived experience and they can't be arsed to try and see things from alternative perspectives because that involves effect.
I would argue that the problem isn't that people are stupid. Its that they are lazy. Understand this and you take a completely different attitude and response to the problems these kind of political movements create. Thats why thought terminating cliches and 248 character messages have dominated. People look for simple solutions to complex and difficult problems because they are easy. They want a short cut. Everyone is looking for the magic bullet (quite literally in certain cases which recent events show).
Thats why highly intelligent people are just as susceptible to these Big Lies.
They can't be bothered to look further than the end of their noses. They don't want to be challenged. They don't want to think deeply. They don't want to do hard things. Thats why many who haven't been entrenched and have just gone with the bandwagon come across a life experience which is different they are more open to that experience than you might expect, because they just haven't thought about the subject matter that much.
The big lie falls apart on contact with the brick wall of reality... Its a timeywhimey law of physics that can not be broken.