Fascist Governments need a public threat (real or imagined) in order to pull of their totalitarian policies. Otherwise no one would tolerate it! Fear is the tool used to make otherwise good people capitulate to mass hysteria and groupthink. For the nazis it was the “Jew problem” – an imagined threat. No one saw a […]
The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago — one continuous, extended scream of outrage — are, paradoxically, brilliant, bitter, disbelieving and infused with awe: awe at the strength characterising the best among us, in the worst of all situations. In that monumental text, published in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn conducted “an experiment in literary investigation” — a hybrid […]
They say the more audacious the lie, the more people are likely to believe it. Combine this truism with the fact that human beings prefer to move in herds (i.e. “go with the flow”), and you have some pretty interesting societal norms that develop over time. Now add one more interesting factoid to the equation: […]
