Afloat In A Sea of Lies

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

On Monday the host marched through the interview former POTUS Barak Obama did over the weekend and noted how often the former president just flat out lied.  It is disheartening.  The day before, in church, one of the pastors repeated one of the lies Obama told, not citing the former president, but simply presenting the lie as fact.  Think about the lies and fraud we live in.  People defraud the government.  Smaller government defrauds bigger government.  We’ve been lied to about weed for years now.  The entire Biden administration was a lie – it wasn’t the Biden administration; we’re not sure whose administration it was, but it sure as heck was not Joe Biden’s.  Sometimes it seems as if we are afloat in a sea of lies.

It is a marvel to me that in an age when more information is at our fingertips than at any previous time in history the lies have grown in frequency, volume and audacity.  While the internet has indeed put more information at our fingertips, the sheer mass of that information has made truth much harder to find.  Rather than purvey truth, the internet has turned truth from difficult to access to being a needle in a haystack – nearly impossible to find in the noise.

But truth has always been an elusive commodity.  Long before the internet, there were entire nations built on lies.  Solzhenitsyn’s massive famous essay “Live Not By Lies” is all about how the Soviet Union would die in the face of truth.  He was right.  When the accident at Chernobyl exposed the lies of Soviet regime it fell with remarkable rapidity.

Go back further in time and the truth was held exclusively by a tiny nation on the shores of the easter Mediterranean – a nation surrounded by great and shifting empires, alternately conquered and freed for centuries.  Eventually the greatest of men came along and liberated truth from that small nation and released it into the world at large.  But still the world threatens to swallow that truth.

Going back to Solzhenitsyn, his essay contains near prophesy if not actual prophecy.  This passage in particular strikes me:

We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence.

The truth is a disrupter and the lies continue to march because as Solzhenitsyn said, we want to “avoid disrupting our meager existence.”  The world supports the lies because it too wants to avoid the disruption.  But the lies eventually fail us.  As the accident at Chernobyl proved the inadequacies of the Soviet government, so the massive increase in mental illness is proving the lie that was marijuana legalization.  The fraud is costing us more money than we can afford.  So it goes.  When the lies fail our existence is disrupted nonetheless – and more catastrophically so.  And yet we remain captive to the lies.

Solzhenitsyn had a prescription:

And this is the way to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies. For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.

We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!

This is the way, then, the easiest and most accessible for us given our deep-seated organic cowardice, much easier than (it’s scary even to utter the words) civil disobedience à la Gandhi.

Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge!

“…step back from that gangrenous edge!”  That’s all we need to do.  I think Jesus said it best, “So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, ‘If you continue in My word, then you are truly My disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'”