This Winston Moment gives a good opportunity to remind about Authoritarianism.
It can't be overstated just how dangerous deliberately destroying the truth is:
“It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism — an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed”
Hannah Arendt
Its effect is to destroy the power of truth tellers. And to make them feel powerless.
It is a deliberate act to destroy the will and agency of someone else to make them say something they know to be untrue. It is a demonstration of control and power over someone else.
Conversely it also creates this situation where other can exploit this sense of feeling powerless too.
She says that in destroying the truth we create a situation where truth is reduced to 'an opinion' in which a falsehood then holds equal value.
“To the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries, they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions.”
Hannah Arendt
This is why we see the likes of KJK supporting Trump - because destruction of the truth has destroyed trust in those saying it and has made people feel powerless. Thus the truth no longer has power, it has removed the agency and power that the truth gives and thus so the truth is no longer of value either as a tool or as having value.
It gives power to others who wish to exploit. This therefore is a threat not of either the left or the right but a threat to the autonomy and interests of the people and exposed them to abuse from authority and power.
Arendt talks about how to identify a truth and how to identify an opinion.
“the hallmark of factual truth is that its opposite is neither error nor illusion nor opinion…but the deliberate falsehood, or lie.”
Hannah Arendt
In other words the truth stands alone. A lie / opinion falls apart on scrutiny.
“Hence, even if I shun all company or am completely isolated while forming an opinion, I am not simply together only with myself in the solitude of philosophical thought; I remain in this world of universal interdependence, where I can make myself the representative of everybody else. Of course, I can refuse to do this and form an opinion that takes only my own interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account; nothing, indeed, is more common, even among highly sophisticated people, that blind obsitnancy that becomes manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge. But the very quality of an opinion, as of a judgement, depends upon the degree of its impartiality.”
Hannah Arendt
However truthfulness isn't useful to politicians and politics.
“truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, because it has little indeed to contribute to that change of the world and of circumstances which are among the most legitimate political activities.”
Hannah Arendt
It's inconvenient. That's why politicians often don't like the truth.
“opinion, and not truth, belongs among the indispensable prerequisites of all power”
Politicians lie because it means they are then
“free to fashion his facts to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience”.
Hannah Arendt
This is exactly the principle that the official Leave Campaign admit they centred their entire campaign around: they gave voters the freedom to decide what Brexit meant on a individual level - to match their expectations - rather than being truthful about mainly of the limitations. Technically Leave didn't lie - they just omitted to tell the truth deliberately and avoided the inconvenient truths such as the Irish Border issue, the agency of the EU itself and the whole article 50 process - but it demonstrates the point. Farage's unofficial campaign lied and Boris Johnson later lied when he became PM.
A lie is politically useful because it can manipulate opinion, and politics is all about persuading people to change their opinion and support you. This makes it easier for liars to convince people than truthtellers. At least initially...
Arendt then talks about this is short lived precisely because the truth stands alone and doesn't collapse under scrutiny. She observed how the propaganda during the Vietnam war eventually collapsed with only those who were lying still believing in their own lies because they couldn't abandon their reasoning for it - because to do so would mean the collapse of the justification of their own unjustifiable actions.
(Does this sound familiar? There are now a few individuals who have done things to further gender identity and have left numerous harms in their wake because they pushed the lie and ignored the inconvenient truth).
She talks about this becoming a psychology of self-deception by saying that those who attempt to change reality
“will be tempted to fit their reality — which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise — into their theory”.
“the self-deceived deceiver loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world”.
Basically they lose the ability to separate their own lie from reality. They no longer understand that their opinion is not reflective of the real world.
This is fascinating and a useful thing to understand to know how to deal with such behaviour and persistent in believing known lies. I note how many some people continue in cults even after its leadership collapsed and it's been exposed as abusive to the world.
The UK, because it's only ever been partially captured, is an odd case and it's a thorn in the side of gender ideologists in other countries because it always is the reminder of the inconvenient truth and shows truthtellers are not completely powerless.
It's also why there will be more efforts to silence on international platforms.
In the UK we are starting to see the collapse of the lie. And the collapse of the power and control needed to maintain the lie.
We aren't there yet in the UK but we can see all of the dynamics above in real time between this gradual collapse in the UK and it's continued enforcement in Canada.