Member-only story
The Fertility of the Conservative Lie
The lie is second-nature in Conservatism.
NOTE: Within this text, wherever gender is not key to the explanation, I am using the Elverson ey/em construction of the Spivak Pronouns.
I woke up on Saturday morning with the hazy memory of a dream. It was about my recent essay: The Threat of a Joyous World. The dream itself was fading fast but the lingering feeling told me that I had missed something interesting. It was a dream that taunted without yielding a constructive solution.
The thoughts that were bubbling through my head were about the world of the liar and also about the Conservative legacy of whining that constituted a key part of my essay Gateway Drug to Fascism. The nagging voice in the back of my consciousness was dwelling on the world of the Liar and how that might relate to the world of the Conservative. There was a common thread that I needed to explore: the problem any liar has when asked a completely new question. There must be some process whereby the liar may quickly construct a fresh assembly of entirely new “facts”, facts which sound believable, but which are also consistent with the liar’s internal world. What would that process be?
While that process would likely be different from person to person, it strikes me that one important part of any such process…
