Quotes from Valery Legasov character in HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl (2019). An apt reminder for our current times, lies have a price.
Episode 1
What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left to abandon even the hope of truth and 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?” In this story, it was Anatoly Dyatlov. He was the best choice. An arrogant, unpleasant man, he ran the room that night, he gave the orders… and no friends. Or at least, not important ones. And now Dyatlov will spend the next ten years in a prison labor camp. Of course, that sentence is doubly unfair. There were far greater criminals than him at work. And as for what Dyatlov did do, the man doesn’t deserve prison. He deserves death.
Episode 5
I’ve already trod on dangerous ground. We’re on dangerous ground right now, because of our secrets and our lies. They’re practically what define us. When the truth offends, we—we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is…still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how…an RBMK reactor core explodes: Lies.
When you wriggle a nail that’s stuck in a hole, it doesn’t just move to the polar opposite of where it was originally. It also loosens its stuckness in the hole more generally, and each shift keeps loosening until one day the nail pops out into a whole new context not defined by the wood it was previously embedded in.
Kill your darlings, and not just the peripheral darlings that haven’t yet made it into the core of your being. If you want to expand your sense of who you are, and what you’re capable of, expand your capacity towards the opposite extremes you’re uncomfortable at, like ideological exposure therapy, until you no longer need to retreat to the comfortable side.
You will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say… ‘I now see that I spent most my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’
– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
via LessWrong