The cost of lies

In this episode, we explore what happens when an entire culture gets caught up in its own feedback-loop of lies…

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been watching and re-watching various clips on YouTube from the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. For me, all of it is brilliant, and also all of it soul-crushing and truly terrifying. Certain of the compilations stand out the most: ‘A Typical Day at Work for Comrade Dyatlov’, ‘Chernobyl management’, ‘This is our moment to shine’, ‘Madness’, ‘Sacrifice’, ‘Truth’, and perhaps most of all, ‘The Cost of Lies’.

Because that’s the real point here: the cost of lies.

And if there’s one place in the world that most immediately shows us the real cost of lies, it’s Chernobyl.

The wrecked Chernobyl Reactor 4 in late 1986 (image: CC-BY-SA IAEA via Wikimedia)

Right from the start, everything that went wrong at Chernobyl was a consequence of lies. Even the test that caused the disaster was the result of a lie: it should have been done before the plant went operational, but the administrators had claimed that everything had been completed on-time and on-budget in order to gain awards and accolades from the state. Lying for profit, again.

And every one of those lies had real consequences. To give just one example, the robot borrowed from Germany to clear the graphite from the roof failed within minutes, because the robot’s electronics weren’t shielded enough from the radiation: the makers had been given ‘the propaganda number’ about the radiation-level, almost ten times lower than the actual level that the robot would have to operate in. The result was that people had to do the job instead, in conditions so dangerous that they could only do it in tiny carefully-choreographed 90-second bursts - and those survived still live with the consequences to this day.

All of this, of course, in a culture in which the lies were so jealously guarded that telling the truth would literally get you shot. As the engineer Dyatlov cynically comments to scientist Khomyuk, in one brief scene from the series:

What, you think the right question will get you the truth? (laughs) There is no truth. Ask the bosses whatever you want and you'll get the lie. (sighs) And I will get the bullet.

In that kind of world, lying was a seemingly-necessary fact of life, a matter of survival; the ones who told the truth were the ones who died.

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Yes, there’s an irony here, of course. The Chernobyl mini-series is itself somewhat of a lie: it’s not a true documentary, it’s just a docudrama, in some places definitely veering away from the real facts ‘for dramatic effect’ and the like. Any nominal quote, like that above, needs to be labelled as ‘attributed to’, because although it’s ‘based on a true story’, it’s ultimately the words of the screenwriter (Craig Mazin), rather than the real person being portrayed.

And all of those adverts babbling away on either side of each clip on YouTube, well, yeah, they’re lies too. To varying degrees, to be sure; but I doubt there’s a single one that isn’t a lie in some way. And yes, there’s a real danger here, as scientist Valery Legasov warns, in a tape he recorded shortly before his death:

What is the cost of lies? It is not that we will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognise the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth, and to content ourselves instead with stories. In these stories it doesn't matter who the heroes are, all we want to know is who is to blame.

So yes, we see that so often here too: so often not even an attempt to reach at the truth, but merely a shallow simplistic search for a single scapegoat, ‘the one wringable neck’, the one person who can be assigned all of the blame for what is usually a systemic issue instead. That’s what our legal ‘justice’-system does: its whole purpose is to find ‘the one to blame’, and never look at the larger scale societal and other systems that created the underlying mess in the first place.

In some ways, if perhaps not yet quite so extreme, our own world is not that much different from the Soviet Russia of the 1980s. In all too many ways, our whole world right now is one gigantic Chernobyl, an intertwined mesh of unstable systems, ready to explode at the slightest mistake; and for the most part we’re unaware or oblivious of the dangers, either because the information we need isn’t there, or it’s being drowned out by the torrents of misinformation, disinformation and outright lies.

(It’s worth remembering that one of the consequences of Chernobyl was the collapse of the Soviet Union itself; at the least, it was undoubtedly a major contributing-factor, as Mikhail Gorbachev himself noted some years later. Some of the lies floating around these days could cost us all a lot more than that…)

And all of that is made worse, and worse again, by how much we live in a paediarchy, ‘rule by, for and on behalf of the most childish’; a world dominated by the rabid self-centredness and lies of people who never grew up beyond two years old. To keep the covert-crybabies quiet, we reward the comforting lies, and punish those who tell the truth. So our own politics and our entire economy now runs on much the same kinds of lies that Legasov warns about, as an expert-witness during the trial in Episode 5 in the series:

[It’s] because of our secrets and our lies: they're practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember that it is even there, but it is still there.

Yeah, “they’re practically what define us”, all of those lies. So, so many lies: the tobacco industry, the oil-industry, so many other industries too; government officials being ‘economical with the truth’; self-styled ‘news’-channels promoting what they knew to be lies, because “the truth offends”. And yet also in that quote, a crucial point that too many still seem to miss:

Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth; sooner or later that debt must be paid.

All of those lies have damaged, destroyed or cost others their lives: tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, and maybe soon billions of lives. That’s a big debt still to be paid…

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For me, if there’s one quote from Chernobyl that hits the hardest, it’d be this, again from Legasov’s tapes:

To be a scientist is to be naïve. We are so focussed on our search for truth that we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not.

The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants, it doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl: where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask, what is the cost of lies?

The bleak reality here is that yes, we do know the answer to that question: we do know the cost of lies. Not always the exact number beforehand for each case, what form the costs will take, and so on; but yes, we do know that there is always a cost, and that there always will be.

In which case, what do we do about that?

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What we do about that? The short-answer is, well, yeah, we do whatever we can: we must always do whatever we can. Lies are for two-year-olds, not for supposedly-responsible adults: we need to rebuild a world in which that fact is plainly obvious to everyone, a world in which lies are exposed, rejected, stopped, and telling the truth is what is rewarded instead.

Without truth, without honesty, there is no way for us to make the decisions that must be made if we are to survive the global-scale challenges we already now face.

In every case, every context, every change, we need to find what the truth really is, and to always challenge the lies, from others, yes, but even more those lies and self-lies of our own. That one task alone will give us the best chance we can have of finding a viable way forward to the future that we all need.

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