Slate - depressing, worthwhile - Why Trump Lies

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/05/why_trump_lies_it_s_not_to_hide_the_truth_it_s_to_alter_reality.html

It’s not just to hide the truth. It’s to alter reality.

By Brooke Gladstone

This article is adapted from The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time.

In 1985, critic and educator Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, the most incisive, impassioned warning label ever issued on our media diet. To illuminate the danger, he contrasts two pivotal works of dystopian fiction: George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

In Orwell’s vision, he notes, we are crushed by a merciless oppression imposed by others, whereas in Huxley’s vision, we are seduced, sedated, and satiated. We enslave ourselves.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.
In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us …
Orwell, who in 1948 was fixed on Nazi devastation and Soviet ascendancy, seemed to have nailed it. But 37 years later, Postman saw that in our time and place, it’s unquestionably Huxley. He portrayed a world that leads ineluctably to the election of Donald Trump.

snip - lots more to read at the above link