Fake narratives a tool of control

Tyranny favours telling big lies over using brute force

- CHARLIE PIERRO

THE task for those who would challenge the tyranny that threatens our lives is to reject those falsehoods on which that tyranny is built.

It is almost 50 years since Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and dissident who railed against political repression, released the text of his essay Live Not By Lies. While it was written in the context of Soviet communism, it remains essential for helping us understand how political tyranny functions and what we can do in response.

Solzhenitsyn recognised that violence is a crude way for a political regime to implement its agenda and maintain control over a population. Such a strategy not only needs massive resources to police people's conduct, but explicit in its use of brute force, it also risks provoking widespread hatred and massive resistance.

In contrast with violence, Solzhenitsyn suggests that there is a more effective and efficient tool that regimes use to control the lives of individuals: lies.

In doing so, he is not referring to the everyday deceptions that politicians use and with which we are all too familiar the persistent evasions, distortions and omissions.

Instead, to control a population without using explicit force, political regimes create and promote big lies, or what are now more commonly referred to as narratives. Narratives provide an overarching story about certain features of the world. Importantly, they also seek to influence what we are to think and how we ought to behave on the basis of that story.