Humans lie about everything from sorting recycling to murdering spouses. We do it for love and hate, money and power, convenience and kicks. Lying to the IRS without penalty has become part of the American dream, like having a newly leased Suburban in the driveway. There was already a lot of lying going on in America before Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election. But the consequences of that lie—conjoined as it was with the January 6th insurrection—have changed the country and Americans as people.

In the pantheon of presidential lying, most of it was done for misguided ideology, plausible deniability, or self-preservation: Lyndon Johnson’s insistence that Vietnam was winnable, Ronald Reagan’s insistence that the Soviet Union was going to attack, George W. Bush’s insistence that Iraq had WMD, Richard Nixon saying he was not a crook, Bill Clinton saying he did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Trump’s lying occupies a separate plane: it is foundational to his existence. With the Big Lie, MAGA asserted itself as a cult, because there is always a lie as the premise of a cult. But the Big Lie is not the premise of Trump’s cult. The central lie is this: “I can (and you can with me) will any desired outcome into being.” Anything reposted on Trump’s Truth Social platform is called a “ReTruth,” implying that Trump’s statements become more true the more they are shared. In a sense, if the truth is always what you will it to be, then you actually have no need for lying. You could also look at it as the priest does in Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “It is not necessary to accept everything as true; one must only accept it as necessary.” Necessary for what? I suppose that was already answered centuries back by Hobbes: “Authority, not truth, makes law.”

Republicans were always the party decrying the moral relativism of the left. Politicians like Rick Santorum, famous for trying to get creationism taught in public schools, thought that there was a Christian right and wrong and no extenuating circumstances. Now Republicans are the party of moral relativism. When asked by the media about any of Trump’s lies, Republicans answer by telling you an exaggerated or outright false version of what the Democrats are saying. They put whatever creativity they have into stretching the truth to absurdity, making their whole operation like the old Steven Wright joke: “Everything’s in walking distance if you have the time.”

For one of the most dysfunctional Republican Houses in modern memory, lying is so foundational it has its own genres. Their lies about the debt ceiling are classic obfuscation, whereas the ones they tell to justify their votes to cut funding for President Biden’s $80 billion overhaul of the IRS are as bald-faced as a boiled egg. George Santos, the Republican congressman who’s been shown to have lied about practically every aspect of his life, has rightly become the lightning rod for public revulsion. But the lying of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried is just as disturbing. In some sense, their lying is more pernicious than the bet-it-all-on-lucky-seven motivations of Santos, a working-class immigrant wanting the good life right through the turnstiles. Holmes, SBF, and Charlie Javice (a fellow millennial believed to have bilked Goldman Sachs out of $175 million) present a cultural study in rampant immaturity and white privilege. You can’t say whether their moral corruption was driven by wanting in with the ultra-rich or the desire for approval within elite institutions.

And why not go for it when there are no consequences for affluent white people? After all, Holmes is still living in luxury over a year after being convicted of fraud. And where are the sentences for anyone from George Santos’s Ponzi scheme employer that the Securities and Exchange Commission shut down in 2021?

When lies are as foundational as Trump’s, addressing them means addressing the nature of belief itself. Atheists would argue that religious belief is in conflict with reason and science. But does that mean it is the believer’s conscious intention to be in conflict with reason and science? If you say that God created the world, are you “believing” or are you lying? And yet established religions have outed their own Big Lies, as Martin Luther did with Roman Catholicism. The nineteenth century’s most transformative ideas exposed Big Lies for what they were. To Freud, the Big Lie was belief in God. To Marx and Engels, belief in God was a Big Lie, but the most dangerous Big Lie of all was capitalism.

The global investment markets built by capitalism depend on the temporary suppression of truth, and we long ago reached the point where lying became baked into organizational structures that maintain generational wealth. An enlightening New Yorker article by Evan Osnos walks you through the elite professions that have helped J. Paul Getty and his progeny maneuver trusts to avoid paying billions in taxes over the years. Their foundational lie seems to be that the Gettys earned this fortune fair and square long ago and should not have to pay taxes on investment from this fair-and-square income. OK . . . but the patriarch, George Getty, and his son, Jean Paul, made their first millions in oil before the United States even had an income tax. They never paid taxes on the principal earnings that enabled their vast and lucrative investments. It’s chilling how the family members lie to themselves to preserve and grow mind-boggling wealth.

There’s a long-running joke feud between millennials and members of Gen X about the latter’s naïveté when it comes to making every aspect of one’s life a commodity for extracting income. But research shows that lying is one significant consequence of being made to think about money and profit at every turn. Research published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 2013 revealed that people doubled the number of lies they told in order to earn extra cash if they were first prompted to think about money. In a 2016 study published in Nature, partnered participants played a game involving  a jar of pennies where they would occasionally get more money for lying to their partner. Brain scans of the participants confirmed that people lied more to their partner over time. The amount their brains got desensitized to lying could predict how much more the person would lie the next time. Since the algorithms of capitalism are bombarding us with ways to make our every point of contact sellable, you have to assume that this makes us more prone to lie. Once every social inhibition about the pursuit of money has been removed, lying becomes second nature.

The mainstream media’s false equivalence of Trump’s fabulism with any imprecision or exaggeration on the part of his adversaries only contributes to the erosion of the moral imperative against lying. This complicity in the context of lying is a shocking turn for the press. Since Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, journalism forged a new public role of identifying and exposing government’s failings and corruption—that is, its lying. It seemed to feel obligated to show our society ways to get back on track through transparency. But this newly minted role imploded in 1987, when Ronald Reagan’s FCC killed the Fairness Doctrine. In just half a generation, the far right and Fox News had pulled off a stunning character assassination of the legitimate press, turning the Fourth Estate into an evil ally of the Nanny State. And nobody wanted the Nanny State telling them what to do . . . or worse, judging them. Fox News viewers were so swaddled in confirmation bias that the cognitive dissonance of reality came to seem partisan.

Despite good reporting from some parts of the press, most of the media not only keep moving the goalpost on the acceptability of lying; they also fail to connect the dots on how our mutual acceptance of lying runs across political, economic, and social life. “We have always been drawn to information that makes us feel a certain way,” the journalist Claire Wardle said in a Columbia Journalism Review interview in 2021. “And in an age where there were very strong gatekeepers and, you know, Walter Cronkite, etc., we didn’t have the choice to seek out information that made us feel a certain way. Now the internet allows us to seek out and feel certain things.”

Writing in The Guardian, William Davies explains that with Big Data, people believed that available information and knowledge no longer needed to be mediated by “professionals, experts, institutions and theories,” that Big Data would simply “speak for itself”: “Our media moment implicitly embraces the ideal of framelessness.” And within this rampant framelessness, the noble role of gatekeeper has disappeared. Not only has the press got stuck in its own trap of objectivity; it has also abnegated any responsibility to connect the dots and show who’s benefiting from the lying. It willingly allowed itself to be duped by Fox News’s “fair and balanced” business model, whereby Fox permits itself to “balance” accurate reporting in the “mainstream media” with alternate information that is completely sourced from within.

America is drowning in lies because we are drowning in frameless content, information devoid of meaning and context. Yes, this comes from the internet, but it also comes from the media’s refusal to judge us: we want to lie on our taxes without being preached to. And with most traditional media having disappeared, the damage is done. In 2017, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked leading technologists, media scholars, and strategists whether the online information environment will improve in the coming decade: 51% said no and 49% said yes. Clay Shirky, vice provost for educational technology at New York University, told the researchers: “ ‘News’ is not a stable category—it is a social bargain. There’s no technical solution for designing a system that prevents people from asserting that Obama is a Muslim but allows them to assert that Jesus loves you.”

Sometimes I think it’s as much television itself as it is Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News that promoted the entertainment value of socially complicit lying. Take, for instance, To Tell the Truth, a gameshow that first aired on CBS in 1956. It revolves around an unusual occupation or experience that is read aloud to the celebrity panelists at the start of the show. Three contestants appear, one of whom is the person described with the other two imposters. The celebrities ask them questions to try to determine who is telling the truth. It seems pretty innocent—merely an extension of the parlor game Charades—but To Tell the Truth is all about exposing imposters, which was also the objective of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Only he called the imposters Communist spies.

Just two years earlier on the same network, Edward R. Murrow famously spent two episodes of his documentary series See It Now attacking McCarthy’s deceitful Communist-hunting tactics as chair the Senate’s Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Then came the televised Army-McCarthy hearings that lasted for 36 days and attracted an estimated (an unheard of) 80 million viewers. That was a big deal for CBS. So you might say that CBS saw the larger entertainment value in people pretending to be what they’re not . . . and also the excitement leading up to the big reveal.

Fox News is living proof of George Bernard Shaw’s claim that “the best way to get your point across is to entertain.” Because on Fox, “your point” doesn’t have to be the truth, and you have an audience always waiting for the big reveal of an imposter (all Democrats are imposters) caught lying (all Democrats are liars). Some of their hosts take on personas that communicate the Soviet-style ruse in their facial expressions and demeanor. Jesse Watters and his perpetual smirk always seem to me something out of The Truman Show, mocking his viewers as if they themselves were the hapless Jim Carey not knowing it was all just a hideous ruse.

And in a sense, we live in a culture where we happily make Trumans out of ourselves. Whether it’s Marvel cosplay or chatbot sex, we lie to ourselves for what we believe are innocent reasons—imagination always, mendacity never. And yet how is an adult dressing up like Narnia any different from someone displaying a mural of Trump as Jesus on a panel van in the front yard? At least Trump’s fans are doing their magical thinking on a real live person, not something someone long dead made up.

Even though the results of the 2020 presidential election are confirmed beyond doubt, high school history books will cover the surrounding events (i.e., the Big Lie) from an “historical” rather than a “political” perspective, with much care taken not to offend the election deniers. It’s hard to determine how high this lie will rank in America’s lying pantheon, but it will surely stand on the shoulders of generations of Big Lies all the way back to the biggest in our history: the objective of Reconstruction. “In the end, we don’t care what the facts are,” Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker, “because there are always more facts. You can’t unspin the facts; you can only put a different spin on them. What we want is to see our enemy—Steve Bannon, Hunter Biden, whomever—in an orange jumpsuit. We want winners and losers. That is why much of our politics now takes place in a courtroom.” Last August, Donald Trump took the Fifth more than 400 times to refuse answering questions from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is investigating the Trump Organization’s business practices. That’s because the courtroom is now the one and only place in America where even liars will refrain from lying. §