“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. Such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, are, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.” -Hannah Arendt.

Hannah Arendt is among the few best-selling moral philosophers in American History. A refugee herself, she narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Nazis, some of the world’s most determined and successful liars.

I don’t have much patience for people who compare politicians they hate to Hitler, but I have a lot of respect for Hannah Arendt, whose work guided my moral sense of right and wrong.

And I also see that, knowingly or not, the tactics that worked for Hitler and Mussolini are creeping into our political system. I’m thinking most recently about the hateful persecution of the Haitian refugees in Ohio.

I was taught that lying was a dreadful thing to do, the difference between a worthy or moral person and something else, something that would haunt Jews and many others forever.

Truth matters. It is, to me, the glue that holds people together and guides them towards humanity.

It’s a more significant issue than politics. Politicians have always lied and always will. Some stretch the truth; some invite an alternate reality. I’ll leave it to the voters to sort that out in November; it’s way above my pay grade.

Truth is in flight all across our country.

Corporations and half of the people on Facebook or social media lie routinely. Facebook, for one thing, is a vast lying machine that helps countless people look better and happier than they are. Social media has become the best vehicle in history for lying and slandering without risk of retribution or punishment.

People lie about me every day and tell the truth about me every day. At times, I haven’t been sure which to believe. I’m not alone or even necessary.

For me, truth is not about what we say and what they say; it’s about something much bigger: how we wish to live as humans in the world with other humans and how we can trust one another.

Lies corrode truth and are the fuel of hatred.

Perhaps we can’t be truthful. I sometimes wonder. I still have hope.

When religion dominated our moral culture, people were afraid to lie, and priests and rabbis condemned dishonesty.

The Jewish Bible threatened death to liars; the Catholics promised Hell. Like it or not, it was a deterrent.

Now, many Christians have embraced lying and are using it as a political hammer to dominate women and anyone who believes in something else. Politicians can insist that savage immigrants are eating people’s dogs and cats and jack up their never-ending fundraising.

I rarely see George Washington, the revered “father” of our country, quoted. But he said some prescient things about the separation of religion and politics and its meaning for the survival of the United States:

He believed that honor, honesty, and duty, not division or religion, were necessary for a democratic republic to survive. He warned that the mixing of religion and politics and the power of political parties would ultimately damage and even destroy the United States.

Evil comes from a failure to think, a surrender to mistrust.

Both the right and the left lie almost reflexively lie, and each condemns the other for being untrustworthy and dishonest.

Truth is failing, even showing signs of vanishing. Yet, for me, truth held it all together. The truth about me saved me; the truth about others held our fractious country together for centuries. The truth was a goal for me, a purpose, and a measure. It was and is a measure of my humanity.

When I learned to tell the truth about myself, I began becoming the human being I wanted to be.

Arendt is right about living in a factless world. When facts and truth don’t matter anymore, pretty soon, no one believes anything, or, put differently, we all lose certainty about who to believe. Walter Cronkite was a journalist, people thought, and when he went to Vietnam and returned to tell the truth, the war was doomed.

We no longer have objective and honest people to believe in; we go online and find reflections of ourselves to believe in, and thus, we can never change our minds or listen to facts.

I suppose I’m in a dwindling minority. I would nominate the emergence of a fact-free culture as the cause of our troubles and disconnection from one another.

Nobody on the left believes what anyone on the right is saying, and no one on the right believes what anyone on the right is saying. How can we be anything but divided?

There we stand, stuck in a quagmire that never seems to shrink. Everyone claims to be telling the truth, and everyone else believes they are lying. Hitler taught us one thing – the Big Lie can work. If people hear something often enough, they think it must be true.

What a more mess that is. Curiously, it’s difficult for people to accept their leader’s lying, even when there is indisputable evidence.

Through all the screens of lies, we will want to believe.

A political science professor in Virginia told a reporter that America has become a “fact-less” world. It was once considered damning for a politician to get caught in a big and severe lie. Small ones were fine; politicians exaggerate and mislead consistently; it’s part of the art.

But now, they tell big lies, and facts don’t matter. Big lies turn people into instant media stars, and politicians raise a lot of money by ignoring facts and telling lies. They can even become Presidents.

I wonder what this means for people like me and the country, people who were taught (primarily by religious people) that lying was a sin, punishable by a hard-ass God or by the Devil himself when we got to Hell.

Superstition and religious belief taught me the truth. I don’t wish to vote only for a label. I want to wish and support the facts. That’s my way out of this.

It begins with me learning to be truthful and authentic. To know and tell the truth about myself. I believe with all of my heart that truth will prevail in human history; it always has.

We have no barriers; we can do whatever we want when we are deprived of the power or will to think and judge for ourselves.

I have come to stand by and for truth. That is the test for me, of myself, and of other people. Truth brought us far, and truth can bring us back.

Hannah Arendt was there; she writes from personal experience, not opinion. She is worth listening to.

That’s my political idea at the moment:

“Good can be radical; evil can never be radical; it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet–and this is its horror–it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.” – Hannah Arendt.