From Galileo’s telescope to George Orwell’s typewriter, history has shown that truth is never fashionable. In fact, it is tolerated when harmless, punished when powerful, and buried when profitable. So, here is the timeless paradox: why those who speak the truth are rarely celebrated, and often condemned. There is a narrative that today traces a line from the heresies of science to the hypocrisies of modern social media, organizational hierarchies — large and small — arguing that truth remains mankind’s most dangerous act of rebellion — because it ultimately unmasks the illusions holding society together.
In this essay, I will go back to 1633, when Galileo Galilei stood before the Catholic Inquisition. Just like today, his “crime” was not moral, but intellectual — declaring to the ignorant in high places, the reactionary, backward “influencers” of the day and the cronies of the status quo that Earth revolved around the sun. Despite proof through mathematical calculation and telescopic observation, the Church and its stupidly blind minions demanded his complete silence. A version of today’s STFU. It was not because Galileo was wrong, but because he was right too soon. This kind of censorship is not a relic of centuries gone now perfected, re-tooled and adapted to modern day governments, religious institutions, civic and cultural organizations, and just about any groupings of humans in every society on earth.
In a real sense Galileo Galilei in the footsteps of the great philosopher Socrates was a martyr for truth, principle and what is right. His truth-telling disrupted the cosmos of power; made it uncomfortable. It dethroned theological certainty and replaced blind obedience with observation. To preserve its authority, the Church forced Galileo to recant, confining him to house arrest for the rest of his life. His voice joined the long procession of those sacrificed at the altar of comfort. In fact, The Inquisition became the first corporate PR department in history — protecting the illusion, not the faith.
The Modern Inquisition: Censorship by Approval
Four centuries later, the scaffold has gone digital. Today’s truth-tellers, principled leaders who “speak truth to power” are not imprisoned by popes but flagged by algorithms, shadow-banned by platforms, and sanctioned by organizations — large and small — and public opinion. In Orwell’s time, the boot crushed the face; in ours, it smiles. The new Inquisition is bureaucratic benevolence — human resource memos, community guidelines, and the mob of curated outrage that enforces the ideological purity of the herd. To dissent or err on the side of principle, evidence, objectivity and fact is to quote certain ostracization, anger and the collective rebuke by “the herd.”
Today, in 2025, you no longer risk burning at the stake for defying institutional and organizational dogma, collective mindlessness and the stupidity of the herd; you risk being uninvited from the table and considered an “outsider.” The system has evolved:
- Power no longer silences with force. It redefines dissent as rudeness; improper language and behavior not in keeping with the status quo of the group. To go against established groupthink is to risk the collective admonition of the lemmings-collective.
- Ideological and popular conformity is marketed as virtue. Critical thinking and objective are seen as hostile, suspicious behavior and the trademark of the “opposition.”
- Groupthink approval, not truth and principle, have become the moral currency of intra-group survival.
The result is an atmosphere where we self-police our honesty. As Orwell foresaw, it’s not the tyrant who censors you — it’s your need to belong. In other words: do not rock the boat, remain silent when injustice reigns, and principle becomes an afterthought so that you “belong,” are an “insider team player” who can be depended on to “look the other way” as part of the group. In this scenario stupidity — not a lack of intelligence — is the guiding program where humans in organizations, governments and civic associations behave like “dumb driven cattle” bereft of scrouples. It is this mind of normalized behavior and actions that gave rise to the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in Germany where a sophisticated, educated and intelligent populace traded uncomfortable truths and objective principles for comfortable easy lies and the security of the masses.
Psychology of the Lie: Comfort Over Confrontation
So, why do societies instinctively reject truth? First, people don’t hate the truth because it’s false — they hate it because it’s disruptive. The truth is a mirror, and for most, reflection feels like accusation. So, accepting it means acknowledging self-deception: that one’s beliefs were naive, that complicity replaced conscience. The ego faces annihilation in the presence of reality. To avoid this psychological dissonance, people attack the messenger rather than examine the message. When “everybody says down is up and up is down — then it must be true.” Welcome to 2025.
Second, truth creates friction; lies — conscious or unconscious — create harmony. The liar flatters, obfuscates and confuses; the truth-teller confronts. In workplaces, organizations, governments, families, and nations alike, peace built on pretense always wins over progress built on discomfort. In organizations “getting along” creates a sense of belonging and unity that is built on a carefully constructed moral consensus that excludes anything that threatens to disrupt the harmony of the collective. In this climate, objectivity, fairness, good governance and principles are sacrificed for the reactionary enforcement of the status quo.
Orwell’s Blueprint for Control
George Orwell anticipated every mechanism of modern illusion in his seminal work 1984. He explained that power sustains itself not through truth, but through narrative control — and narrative control begins with language. Through Newspeak, Orwell showed how words could be reduced, meanings inverted, and thought itself constrained. Once language collapses, freedom follows. The system doesn’t need to ban rebellion when it can simply erase the vocabulary to describe it. In the 21st century here is what Orwell spoke about:
War becomes humanitarian intervention.
Surveillance becomes safety.
Obedience becomes maturity. Dissent becomes treachery.
This process, happening in real-world media and institutions today, is what Orwell warned was the “moral anesthesia of civilization.” People stop lying consciously because the very concept of truth loses definition; belief itself becomes obedience.
Doublethink: The Art of Self-Deception
The most insidious technique of modern control, Orwell wrote, is Doublethink — “to hold two contradictory beliefs in your mind simultaneously and accept both.” It’s the psychology of the modern citizen:
- To know censorship exists while insisting on free speech.
- To decry manipulation while defending the manipulators.
- To recognize corruption while voting for it again — and again.
- To finger and apportion blame when uncomfortable facts disrupt long-held norms and processes
The modern mind doesn’t need to be brainwashed — it is trained to compartmentalize. “The system doesn’t tell you what to think — it teaches you what not to think.” Reality becomes optional when comfort becomes the highest value. People perform belief rather than possess it; ideas are judged not by accuracy but by tone. Civility replaces sincerity.
The Ecosystem of Falsehood
Today, several modern forces collaborate in making lies, and deceptions more appealing than truth:
1. Media — incentivizes outrage, simplicity, and slogans. Truth is nuanced; lies are clickable. “Engagement” replaces accuracy. Entire communities, organizations and institutions have lost the capacity to think critically and have internalized an aversion — even a hatred born from intolerance — of those who think critically and project a sense of objectivity. Facts and evidence are viewed as suspicious enemy actions.
2. Education — even at the highest level rewards compliance over curiosity. Students are taught not how to think, but what to repeat. The ability to question dies young. This breeds intellectual intolerance and an elitist mindset that somehow equates credential accomplishments with wisdom.
3. Algorithms — manipulate exposure by rewarding emotional validation over intellectual depth. Digital platforms act as echo chambers where the loudest most stupid of voices become cultural leaders. Loudness is now seen as accomplishment.
Thus, truth becomes uneconomical. It is slow, complex, inconvenient to the supply chain of dopamine and profit. Loud, angry, grievance-laced and subjective attacks are scalable, especially within an echo-chamber filled with people with similar attitudes. Truth isn’t.
Fear and the Cost of Clarity
To tell objective truth based on evidence and facts is to invite exile and ostracization. Truth-tellers lose jobs, audiences, reputations. They are labeled — “problematic,” “negative,” “too intense.” The system disciplines not with chains, but with disincentives. Speak up and you lose social capital. Stay silent and you earn safety. This psychological architecture has created a new class divide — not between rich and poor, but between the clear and the compliant. Galileo’s telescope showed us the heavens; Orwell’s mirror shows us ourselves. Both reveal uncomfortable constants:
- Systems fear transparency more than failure.
- Audiences reward charisma over correctness.
- Lies spread because they sound like teamwork.
The penalty for clarity has not weakened with time — it has simply been made polite. This cultural hostility to honesty and principle leads to a tragic cycle. The wise retreat, exhausted by misinterpretation and the constant bombardment of the collective. The shallow and loud take the stage, rewarded for confidence rather than comprehension and competency. In fact, the vacuum left by silenced thinkers fills with entertainers, charlatans, incompetents and propagandists. Society becomes a marketplace of feelings disguised as facts. This is not dystopia — it’s performance art at scale.
Orwell wrote that totalitarianism doesn’t succeed when people are forced to lie, but when they forget what honesty feels like. Today, manipulation has evolved into mimicry: virtue signaling replaces virtue itself. The result? Entire societies of actors, fiercely defending scripts they never wrote.
The Moral of Courage: To See, Not To Please
My arguments here are based on the fact that truth-telling is an act of personal survival rather than public heroism. Truth — in ordinary everyday undertakings, in your organization, sports team or even in government — will not make you popular, comfortable, or safe — but it will preserve something more sacred: the integrity of your perception.
To go along, to get along, to cast a blind eye to unprincipled and self-serving acts, even for group approval, is to dismember your consciousness piece by piece. It destroys your capacity to recognize reality at all. “Protecting what is right, isn’t about being a hero. It’s about survival of the self.”
For me, this is the spiritual essence of Orwell’s insight. The struggle is not just political; it’s existential. Truth-telling restores the faculty to see clearly, to stand on something solid in a world of shifting narratives. Galileo, Edward Snowden, and George Orwell each paid with status, comfort, and safety — but not their sanity.
Clarity as Rebellion
In the end, the most revolutionary act is not protest, but refusal — to repeat, to pretend, to play along. Truth doesn’t require rage or martyrdom; it requires a quiet fidelity to reality. Each person who stops reciting and embracing accepted nonsense, or refuses to “go with the group’s jaundiced position,” restores one fragment of collective sanity. Understand, you cannot dismantle propaganda by shouting over it. You dismantle it by standing still in the storm of persuasion, and saying nothing false.
The world may punish truth-tellers and critical, objective thinkers — but it collapses without them. Because every civilization that confuses comfort for wisdom dies not when its people lose their freedom, but when they lose their appetite principle and for the truth.
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