By Roger Scruton
Human beings make rational choices, and choices are rational only if they seek out the truth. But the truth may be uncomfortable, so that we have a motive to avoid it. Or it may be unacceptable to those on whom we wish to impose our decisions, in which case we have a motive to conceal it. Perhaps the deep truth about our condition is so uncomfortable that we stand in need of some collective delusion that will make us governable – so Plato thought, and advocated the ‘Noble Lie’ as a means of crowd-control. The totalitarian systems of the 20th century took this seriously, and rewrote the human condition in terms of mythical ‘struggles’ between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or the master race and the human vermin. In due course the totalitarian project advanced in the way foretold by George Orwell, inventing a language and a doctrine that would make the truth inexpressible, so that people would have to ‘live within the lie’, as Havel put it.
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