Ever try driving at speed at night down an unfamiliar country road while trying to guess the next turn without headlights, but only able to navigate on your memory of a map you didn't even know was purposely falsified in order to lead you to running off the road so a tow truck company could increase the 'value of its stock to its shareholders'?
Well, if you can imagine that in any meaningful way, you have understood
one reason why some specific forms of lying must be criminalized and made open to suing for damages anyone who has used lying to injure or harm someone else in terms of abridging, limiting, or preventing their right to self-governance.
At least if representative democracy is your preferred way for people to exercise their right to self-governance via voting for who they judge is the best person to represent their views in any government office. Hard to do that if anyone is messing up your judgement by lying to mislead you about who best represents your interests or what your best interests really are, or anything else along those lines.
Public lying in a democracy is an existentially dangerous threat to the quality of lives, liberties, and freedoms of every citizen in the democracy, save only those who would be immune to much of anything bad that came of doing it.
It seems to me that public lying in a democracy is at least as arguably immoral as handing out intentionally false road maps. It is comparatively speaking, just as blinding.
And in a country where the most reliable sources in any society on the planet today for fact-based information are the reports, articles, journals, and books produced the societies scholars, scientists, and other such intellectuals, public lying in a democracy more or less amounts to turning the lights out. To making the day turn into the night.
If a society does not have the will to push back against public lying, it does not have the will to survive as a democracy.
Such push back in America is unlikely to start at the top. It must start locally. Even as locally as internet websites. Liars must be exposed and made creditable examples of reasons not lie, beginning on the local level in every sense of 'local level'.
Willfully stupid and ignorant responses to being exposed for even innocently passing along false or misleading information, let alone intentionally passing along the same, confirm that one is a liar. One becomes a liar the moment he or she refuses to believe the reality, if it exists, that they have potentially mislead people, let alone actually.
The Lakota put to death any scout who they could credibly believe had lied to them, and they did it in a society that valued personal authenticity, personal freedom and liberty on orders of magnitude more than any of our societies today do. That was not 'primitive' taboos and superstitions at work there. That was timeless and universal insight and wisdom as applied by a people who had no other custom remotely like capital punishment.
Unless that core understanding, minus the death, of how lying threatens everyone's rights, liberties, freedoms, and quality of life becomes commonsense in a society or nation, no democracy is even close to prepared to defend against it.
Especially not in a day and age when three quarters of the opinions folks post on any internet platform can be identified as similar down to the details with opinions and views popular on media outlets. There are not even on RF many false and misleading views that seem substantially original to whoever posts them.
Humans have always aped each other. The net has made aping viral.
I personally think of the consequences of public lying most often in terms of the quality of life my young nephews will be likely to have going forward in a nation that seems to be diseased by it. This is a hill I am willing to die on.
