Joseph Goebbles was the person responsible for carrying out Hitler’s communications strategies with the purpose of controlling the masses and being able to persuade or submit them to his well-known plans. Among his best known phrases is the one that said: “lie, lie, lie, lie that something will remain, the bigger the lie the more people will believe it”.
This character and his sayings came to my mind given what we can see today, in which the post-truth (to my taste a polite way to call the lie) has taken all the spaces. Anyone can say anything, without evidence, without trial, without any support, they are dedicated to apply the principles of Goebbels, one of those responsible for the extermination of millions and millions of people through his strategy of mass propaganda.
We have all heard stories. People share views and opinions with others, and from there we build opinions and believe in things, and most of them are outright lies, but they are building opinions and from there helping or denigrating positions, ideas, people, etc. Today there are many followers of Goebbles, perhaps without knowing it, perhaps in the value union that the end justifies the means, even when the end is the most infamous possible.
We should do ourselves and our environment a favor and move away from these principles. It is so easy to rant falsehoods to cover up the garbage we have under our feet. Not only have I seen it, I have lived it. People blaming the rest for their hardships and baseness, without taking responsibility for anything (not too hard to what we see in the political world).
I hope that we can be disciples of other characters in history, of the Gandi, Luther King, Jesus, of those who fought with the truth in front, with open hands and without having misunderstood what they said or showed. Integrity is based on truth, and this is not relative as we are often led to believe. It is true that everyone has their own point of view, but that does not change the reality of the facts, of the behaviors, of the concrete situations of our environment.
I hope that the evil that Goebbles did with his principles applied to communications will not be part of our behavior, that it will not become part of our conversations, much less of the way we relate to ourselves or to others. Finally, only the truth will set us free.