The most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he's only a severe example of a common type. The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
Interpretation
This quote prompts reflection on societal acceptance of lies rather than just focusing on the individual who tells them.
Bret Stephens highlights that the focus should not merely be on why a particular individual, like Donald Trump, lies, but rather on the broader societal dynamics that allow such lies to be accepted. This speaks to a deeper philosophical inquiry into truth, perception, and the responsibilities of both leaders and the public in acknowledging and confronting dishonesty.
In practice
During a seminar on ethics in politics, this quote can be used to illustrate the importance of holding society accountable.
I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.
The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own unsuspected biases.
We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.
The American birthright belongs, potentially, to everyone. This is unprecedented. Other countries accept migrants on the basis of economic necessity or as a humanitarian gesture. Only in America is it the direct consequence of our foundational ideals.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.
It is in justice that the ordering of society is centered.
There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.
If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man shall serve his fellow man, the organization of democracy should be gradually adapted to that assumption.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.