Spiralling Into the Abyss

Living The Lie

The Worst Part About Fake ‘Anti-Racism’ Is That It Forces Us To Live Lies

America under the sway of the Black Lives Matter movement is reminding me of life in the Soviet Union: One's entire existence is premised on something believed to be untrue.

Katya Sedgwick
The Federalist

The worst thing about socialism is not empty grocery stores or even the Gulags. The worst thing is harder to represent visually or to pinpoint, but it’s inescapable, and its damage extends for generations. The worst thing about socialism is what being forced to live a lie does to one’s psyche. Save for the few true believers whose numbers dwindle as time passes, virtually everyone experiences this mental toll.

By “living a lie,” I don’t mean minor shows of pleasantry or even bowing to social pressures. I mean having one’s entire existence premised on something widely, by an unspoken agreement, believed to be untrue.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but the pillar of the State.” Solzhenitsyn recognized that the violence of the state depends upon the cowardly culture of lies, on ordinary people trying to stake out space to live while complying with the dictates of the regime.

I Was Made to Live a Lie in the Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, that meant in everyday life that preschool-age kids were forced to recite verses praising the Bolshevik Revolution and that their parents were diverted from work to march in parades. Political meetings convened at schools and workspaces on a regular basis. Sometimes commissars vanished from pictures. Day after day, television delivered news of record harvests or some exciting technological innovation, but these events always took place somewhere far away and didn’t involve anyone we knew.

One didn’t have to dig very deep to discover that under the smooth veneer of uniformity was a vast, stormy sea of despair and resentment.