The lie that kills. Throughout this week, more than once, this theme was present in my reflections, in many and varied ways. My inner child, who enjoys magical thinking, whispers at this moment: it seems your thought magnetizes reality, and events triggered by lies are presented publicly.

At one moment as news, at another as philosophical reflection, in some to stretch the web with more lies.

Lies are, deliberate or not, effective strategies of manipulation and control.

The liar controls the credulous person who, out of fear, out of a belief in their own worthlessness or for not having been taught to question and to think, does not confront what is said with the facts.

Lies keep engendering parallel realities with such intensity that they come to make up the credulous person’s frame of reference like solid bricks of tangible reality. Like puppets, the people controlled by the lies come to carry out maneuvers set by the liar. The liar puts himself on a level of superiority, from which he steers the thoughts, feelings, behaviors and decisions of groups and people.

Little by little, lies take away the credulous person’s ability to think for themselves and, immediately afterward, they pass the lie along, clumsily replicating the powerful one’s action and creating their own claque of sub-credulous followers. In this way we see pyramid plantations of fictions skillfully built to storm minds and consciences.

Little by little, submissive to the orders issued, people with disorganized thoughts lose the ability to understand and manage their own lives. Plunged into failures and defeats, they are told to blame someone, duly planted in their heads by the controller.

It is enough to make one shudder, to chill the base of the spine, when, moving out of concepts, we see reality mirror this sophisticated ballet of power. This week, sharing the shock of a news story with a soul-brother friend, we saw this script, detail by detail, come to life.

A young farmer was tried and sentenced to 51 years in prison for killing two people and attempting to kill others. With legally registered weapons, he hit a woman in the neck and a man in the abdomen, outraged by the election result. In the murderer’s disordered thoughts, the new administration would lead the country to bankruptcy, and he would lose everything: land, animals, possessions, cars and so on. Unable to bear the celebration “from the other side,” he reacted with his legally registered weapons and fled.

The news story is horrifying on its own and frightens me, because it is the predictable escalation of an extremely dangerous maneuver of power, which wherever it goes leaves a trail of blood and viscera, a maneuver organized to destroy the enemy. Murder is a method. A quick glance at the history books and we see the same sequence repeat itself. Unfortunately, even away from the books, one can see it happen in many places.

Before the judge, the murderer, a son, brother, neighbor, acquaintance of people in that small town, repeats and repeats that he lost everything “because of this government that’s in power.” The legal professional taking his testimony, with skill and kindness, asks whether his own actions “perhaps” caused his losses.

No, no! The murderer, energetic and arrogant, does something that seems like science fiction: he tries to convince the prosecutor of his idea, campaigns politically, repeats the carefully crafted and endlessly repeated sequence of lies.

It is one case among many that arise, gain body, are spread and find a welcome, however preposterous, in many minds. Liar and credulous person form a sophisticated system. The liar bets on the effectiveness of his lie, considering the trust it generates. He builds with precision scenes and arguments that gradually dismantle, in the person, the desire to look independently for facts, data, evidence, other ideas, other voices. Because the liar deliberately articulates, plans and designs reasons and motives for a person or a group of people to be named as the cause of all the credulous person’s pains and difficulties.

It is complex enough on its own; imagine if whoever creates the fictional realities is a person of importance, a parental figure similar to those the little credulous one learned to believe in and obey.

It is certain that confronting lies is quite complicated. Because, in the most sophisticated cases, one must strip away layers, examine each fact and take care that the contamination of indignation does not discard the lucidity needed for this delicate task.

Lucidity can be stolen from the credulous person without their noticing and, in a short time, like the young murderer, they will see as absolute truth a fiction carefully implanted in their mental landscape.

Whoever uses lies as a maneuver of power knows where they want to go, knows what they want to get, knows the gains they want to reap. The legion of the credulous hands over its life (and the lives of others) on the altar of these perverse Pinocchios, who use them, wear them down and discard them with ease.

I invited my soul-brother friend to talk about it at length, because I know we may have little concrete to do. But we need to do. Within our mental structure, in our communities, without speeches, without angry words, acting. With coherence and consistency. Often, in the make-believe world being proclaimed, real life seems not very exciting... but it is real! It is real.