Social scientists and historians and moral philosophers have claimed for years that the moral collapse in our world has come about because mass propaganda has helped demagogues to discover that their audience is ready at all times to believe the worst – no matter how ridiculous, no matter how hateful or irrational.

People no longer object to being lied to because they hold every statement by any leader to be a lie anyhow. This is what troubles so many of us so much and is so difficult to understand and articulate.

The ideal subject for a demagogue, wrote the moral historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, is not the convinced communist or fascist or racist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the difference between true and false no longer exists.

We see the people who no longer believe in truth every day on television or social media or in our inboxes. They seem almost unfailingly angry.

Honesty is the foundation of both love and life to me. How does one feel good about worshipping a lie?

We have to pursue our ideas about morality and our own lives. Every historian or philosopher I have ever read says truth and compassion always win in the end, because they are the foundation of morality.

I take much comfort from that. Morality is not an argument for it, it speaks to the meaning of my life.

During a Pandemic like a coronavirus, questions of truth and morality and fact and fiction have never seemed more urgent and significant because they are a matter of life and death. And it’s personal because the Pandemic is now a matter of my life and death, truth is no longer an abstract idea.

My choices have consequences.

My new and awkward position as an older person of considerable risk has pushed me towards finding people who will tell me the truth and who believe in facts. And towards appreciating and honoring them.

I’ve said again and again that for me, this Pandemic is a moral plague because it insists I think of people other than myself. I don’t know of any other disease that has done that except the AIDS epidemic, and that awful plague did not shut the country town or affect the lives of so many millions of people.

But in many ways, it was an even more profound moral failure, most of our leaders ran away from it and the terrible suffering it caused.

The coronavirus challenges me to step out of myself and decide who I am and where I stand.

But finding the truth in our world can be mind-boggling, it asks even more of me than the Pandemic itself, and it exposes me and others to the irrational hatred and moral confusion of millions of other people.

Discussion and reason are increasingly impossible. There is no dialogue, no resolution, no persuasion, no coming together.  If you speak your mind, you are quite often an enemy, the very opposite of what the Founding Fathers thought they had done.

Many people reading this will simply assume this is a political position or a conspiracy on my part, they will neither listen to or consider what I have to say, they will simply label me and dismiss me. Thinking is almost a heresy.

This is the demagogue’s genius, everything that is different is a lie,  something to applaud and admire, a defiance of the awful “system.”

I believe this virus to be a powerful truth-teller. I think it will go a long way to show people the difference between truth and lie, fact, and fiction. I think it already is.

What the coronavirus is making more apparent every day as the moral and ethical split in the country widens, is that we are in the midst of moral collapse. Nothing but division has replaced those churches and leaders.

The very idea of right and wrong is no longer a goal, but an argument.

Do we sacrifice the elderly for the economy? Do we sacrifice our neighbors for our comfort and amusement? Or for toilet paper and toothpaste? Is lying okay if you’re basically on my side?

Why is it suddenly okay for politicians and religious leaders to lie?

What does it mean when great masses of people believe everything and nothing at the same time and think that anything is possible, but nothing is true?

How can the “masses” we talk about so condescendingly – and expect to make sound judgments about their health – do so when their so-called leaders lie to them constantly?

The modern demagogues base their claims and statements – their propaganda – on this reality: one can make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and if those statements are proven to be irrefutably false, there is no consequence.

So why not lie?

Last night, I watched a movie about Hannah Arendt (it’s called Hannah Arendt) for the third time (it’s on Amazon).

She is a long-time hero of mine and one of the world’s great moral philosophers.

A Nazi refugee and concentration camp survivor, she made the study of truth and evil her life’s work.

She has helped me understand the meaning of moral choices and a virtuous life, even if I have often been unable to make ethical choices or make moral decisions.

Arendt also wrote convincingly about what can happen in a time of moral collapse, and what can fill the void: anger, hatred, cruelty, divisiveness can fill the void.

Almost daily, someone asks me in anguish how our President, for example, can lie nearly every day, acknowledge his falsehoods, and even brag about them, and his followers love him more and more for it.

Even the President’s staunchest followers admit he lies, yet most are happy to overlook it if he is dismantling a system that they hate, that has lied to them.

They see it as a mischievous tic, not a moral failing, it’s-just-the-way-he-is. How can it be okay to lie?

I can only imagine what the young take from this.

Hannah Arendt’s books have been explaining this phenomenon for years, especially in her landmark work, The Origins Of Totalitarianism, written well before the Internet made propaganda so easy to distribute to the angry, the gullible and the weak-minded.

But nothing is new, even this.

I’m so sorry she didn’t live to see the rise of the Internet as the arbiter of modern morality and truth, and the birthplace and nesting place of instant conspiracy theories, which deny the very idea of truth and defy it.

The newest and fastest-growing one has the virus coming about because of 5G technology made in China.

“Instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them,” Arendt wrote of the rabid followers of liars and demagogues, “they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

And so, they are doomed to become victims once again.

The moral collapse began in the 1960s, write social historians when the mostly Judeo-Christian institutions and ethos that shaped our country – especially religion and politics – started to decline in credibility and popularity.

People spent more and more hours in front of screens, disconnecting from one another and their communities. And no one even imagined how much dislocation and screen obsession was to come.

The prominent Disney idea of technology – new tools to help us live longer and safer and that saved our mothers from hauling water for miles each day – gave way to television, the Internet, and social media.

Technology became many different things, many of them disturbing, hostile, and divisive.

Ethics and morality are hardly ever mentioned in our educational system, certainly not on Facebook or Twitter. In most schools, honesty and decency are simply not taught on any meaningful scale.

The Judeo-Christian idea of virtue – honestly, empathy, compassion, care for the poor, has been replaced by the cold ideologies of the “left” and the “right.” We are learning the hard lesson that to be religious is not always the same as being moral.

But lying in public was not something a leader could do without consequence.

These are now the labels that so many Americans use and choose to pin on themselves and one another. Each side presumes itself to be morally superior to the other.

The young have mostly abandoned these irrelevant and bankrupt old institutions, seeing them correctly as corrupted and outdated. They are much more likely to draw their values from popular culture – Instagram, late-night TV, music, and social media.

There is nothing hip and appealing about the old notions of morality, even as the young appear profoundly more moral than their fathers and mothers, the right to marry whoever we choose, and embracing climate change, immigration, diversity, and personal tolerance and freedom.

I met the Rev. Billy Graham and traveled with him as a journalist and rode around with him. He was a moral man. Religious leaders had not yet become hypocrites on such a grand scale.

At almost every religious gathering, he preached against mixing religion with politics, warning it would drive millions of converts away from Christianity and damage our democracy.

He also preached tolerance and compassion for refugees and gay people. To him, that was what it meant to be a Christian.

He said again and again in interviews and sermons, and to me: “The hard right (now called the far right)  has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”

Yet his son Franklin, a leader of the “hard” right and other prominent evangelical leaders say again and again – without challenge by journalists or other Christian leaders – that they reflect Billy Graham’s  – that religion and politics should mix, that homosexuality is a sin.

The son betrayed the father – a great sin in the Bible. And he lies about it. And that’s just fine.

His father urged gentleness and tolerance when it came to gay rights and sexuality; he ministered to Jews, Christians, Democrats, and people who disagreed with him.

Franklin and other “Christian” leaders banded together to denounce the recent presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, declaring his homosexuality to be a “sin, something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised, or politicized.”

According to the Atlantic Magazine, President Trump has repeatedly lied about the coronavirus. According to the Washington Post, President Trump made 16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years.

I can’t speak to whether or not he is a good President, that’s for others to decide in November.

And I don’t care much about what the “left” or the “right” have to say about it.

I care about lying, it’s important to me, and I have no inclination to argue about that or apologize for it.

I learned not to do it, I tried to teach my daughter not to do it (she doesn’t do it), and I don’t tolerate it from my friends or in my life. I can’t say I have never lied, only I try very hard not to do it.

I  am condemned to preach to the choir. One side no longer listens to the other.

Everything is possible, and nothing is true.

So why do so many other people tolerate this brazen lying, often with enthusiasm? Why do morality and truth have so little value in our time?

I think the lack of outrage about lying from President Trump’s followers is perhaps more upsetting to me than the lies themselves.  Can’t he be a faithful President to his followers without lying?

On both sides of our cultural and political divide,  there is no longer any shared idea of what being moral is. Yet, I am beginning to understand what that means for me and to my life. And I am no moral philosopher or theologian.

I don’t lie.  My life is open, and I face the worst parts of myself. I have no secrets. I feel obliged to care for the needy and the vulnerable. I admit my own vulnerability and acknowledge the worst parts of me. I take responsibility for my life. I make many mistakes.

I try to do good. I support my wife in her ambitions.

I practice empathy and compassion. I consider getting angry part of being human, but immoral when used too often or in a cruel and harmful way.

I try to pay people fairly, treat people decently, learn empathy, and embrace solitude. I often fail, but I don’t and won’t quit in my search for a moral foundation for my life. I think the answer for me now is inside, not outside.