A Beautiful Lie
January 9, 2022 at 1:58 am
(This post was last modified: January 9, 2022 at 2:16 am by Fake Messiah.)
This seems to be a concept that people don't talk much about. I call it a Beautiful Lie. It is when someone says a lie so beautiful that you are a bad person for not believing it, let alone debunking it.
Like you see a photo of a balloon and someone proposes it is a spaceship from an advanced outer space civilization, and people who debunk it get shamed for being a bummer/party pooper.
And of course, we see the beautiful lie from people who are making money off it. Like Elizabeth Holmes who was promising people how she will revolutionize medicine with her impossible invention. She told these sad stories about sick people who will benefit so much from her, and that everyone will be able to detect if they have cancer early on in the game, so everyone will be healed in time and happy. There will be no sadness anymore in the world.
And if you criticized her you ended up being a hater of cures for cancer, not a supporter of women, etc.
Another candidate is Elon Musk who is constantly giving these impossible beautiful lies. Like the tunnels that will revolutionize traffic jams; that he will send up to hundred (or more) people per spaceship to Mars; how he will create the autonomous self-driving electric trucks by 2019 (which were already completely possible by the year 2012 - his own words); the Tesla robot, etc. And if you try to reason with his believers they will just shame you instead of admitting that he is lying.
And, of course, there are other beautiful lies like life after death, miraculous healings, angels, Santa, etc.
Like you see a photo of a balloon and someone proposes it is a spaceship from an advanced outer space civilization, and people who debunk it get shamed for being a bummer/party pooper.
And of course, we see the beautiful lie from people who are making money off it. Like Elizabeth Holmes who was promising people how she will revolutionize medicine with her impossible invention. She told these sad stories about sick people who will benefit so much from her, and that everyone will be able to detect if they have cancer early on in the game, so everyone will be healed in time and happy. There will be no sadness anymore in the world.
And if you criticized her you ended up being a hater of cures for cancer, not a supporter of women, etc.
Another candidate is Elon Musk who is constantly giving these impossible beautiful lies. Like the tunnels that will revolutionize traffic jams; that he will send up to hundred (or more) people per spaceship to Mars; how he will create the autonomous self-driving electric trucks by 2019 (which were already completely possible by the year 2012 - his own words); the Tesla robot, etc. And if you try to reason with his believers they will just shame you instead of admitting that he is lying.
And, of course, there are other beautiful lies like life after death, miraculous healings, angels, Santa, etc.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
