If everyone always lies to you, Hannah Arendt once wrote, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, “but that no one believes anything at all anymore—and rightly so, because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, to be ‘re-lied,’ so to speak” — the liar constantly rewriting his own history.
Arendt was concerned with government lies, which require officials too to constantly rewrite history. Under a system of government lies, she believed, people are deprived of their capacity to act, their capacity to think and to judge. “With such a people you can then do what you please,” Arendt wrote.
But a lying government often has little more to do to keep the populace in line. The people themselves begin to lie as part of their everyday lives. They mirror their government and their government mirrors them.
We are all George Santos. We pad our resumes. We spend our working years sitting behind a desk, shuffling papers, and when we grow old we feel the absence of adventure. We make do with tall tales.
And the only harm in inventing stories to make our lives more interesting are the lies themselves. The lies become our lives.
There are few August Landmessers among us. We are sheep.
Loneliness, Arendt counseled, is a better choice than associating with a dishonest person, a liar; those who keep company with liars will soon be liars themselves.