Who You Gonna Believe?
As so often happens, comedy got there first. In the 1933 movie “Duck Soup,” Groucho Marx, dressed in a flowing nightshirt and cap, rushes out of a bedroom, leaving behind a stunned Margaret Dumont. She turns her back. Chico slips from under the bed, dressed in an identical outfit. Bewildered, she says she just saw him leave. No, he asserts. “But I saw you with my own eyes,” she insists. Pulling the cigar from his lips, Chico delivers the ultimate rebuttal: “Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
The line was picked up fifty years later by Richard Pryor in “Live on the Sunset Strip.” Caught by his wife in bed with another woman, he weights the probing question even more: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes.”
Forcing disbelief upon someone in the face of overwhelming evidence is a comic trope. But on a deeper, fundamental level, it is not at all funny. It is a sign of control. And when employed on a massive scale by politicians in an authoritarian state, it is a prime mechanism of domination.
I learned this while a foreign correspondent covering the communist countries of Eastern Europe in the late 1970s and early 80s. American reporters were able to develop a “truth metric” for the various countries — not how mendaciously the regimes lied (which they all did) but how steadfastly their populations believed the lies. They ranged from the Soviet Union, where spoon-fed falsehoods were readily consumed by multitudes, to Poland, where official pronouncements were widely discounted and where, not coincidentally, the unraveling of communism began.
In August, 1980, while covering the strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk that led to the independent Solidarity Union, I had an eye-opening experience. Several days into the strike, as the workers were turning more and more militant, an aircraft flew over the shipyard showering it with leaflets. I grabbed one and was astounded to find the front page of the local communist daily that trumpeted a headline saying the workers had voted to end their strike. They most certainly had done nothing of the kind.
I was perplexed. How was such an outright fabrication possible? Was the paper misinformed? Was it wishful thinking? Was it a blunder? And why deliver flagrant disinformation to the very people who would know it was not true?
The answer, I came to believe, was more profound and devious than I had imagined. Undoubtedly the lie was intentional. The very blatant nature of the falsehood was itself a weapon. It signaled to the workers that the communist higher-ups were very much in command: You may get carried away and hot-headed in your puny few acres of cranes and furnaces but we, the State, control the entire country in all its weaponry and its awe-inspiring instruments of control, including the power to determine what passes for reality.
In other words, taking a lie and proclaiming it gospel is more than a sign of control, it’s a means of control. A lie is not a by-product of dictatorship; it is a tool to achieve and maintain dictatorship. If you can invalidate what the people on some level know to be true, and they accept that invalidation, you have them in your power. And the bigger, the more outlandish the lie being perpetrated, the more absolute is that power.
In the same year that Groucho was cavorting around the filmic bedroom, Hitler was propagating “the Big Lie.” As promised in Mein Kampf, it is a lie so “colossal” that it must be true — for no one would have the “impudence” to conceive of it. A corresponding feature of the “Big Lie” is that to believe it, a population wills itself to become subjugated because it has surrendered rational explanation and freedom of thought for the sake of an ideology that is overwhelmingly compensatory.
To force someone to betray his or her own senses in the name of a falsehood is to invade the mind and occupy it. Big Brother overcomes Winston Smith in 1984 when Smith finally concedes the irrational truth of the instinctual falsehood that 2 plus 2 equals five. He resists it even under torture but when he finally accepts it, the dam of his resistance breaks and he relinquishes his mind.
The process of invalidating what a person knows to be true is a disorientation that reaches deep into one’s sense of self. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her essay “Truth and Politics”: “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 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.”
What’s true for an individual can be true for a nation.
It’s grist for late-night TV comedians when President Trump demands that the National Park Service back up his exaggerated claims of attendance at his inauguration. Or uses a black Sharpie to make his predicted path of Hurricane Dorian appear correct. But it’s not at all funny when he claims that three million illegal immigrants gave Hillary Clinton her popular vote victory, that Joe Biden is a criminal and that the current election is rigged.
Remember, if there are some bumps along the road to a smooth count and he claims the road itself has come to an end, all those photographs of voters waiting patiently at the polls and mail-in ballots being carefully tabulated.
Are you going to believe him or your own eyes?
John Darnton is a Pulitzer-prize winning former New York Times reporter and best-selling novelist
