By Kieron JH
The Reasonable Adjustment, October 2025
“We know they are lying,
they know they are lying,
they know we know they are lying,
we know they know we know they are lying,
but they are still lying.”Often attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It does not really matter if Solzhenitsyn wrote those exact words. What matters is that he could have. Anyone who has dealt with a government department, a corporate PR shop, or a charity that loves the word values knows the pattern already.
It is not confusion. It is not incompetence. It is ritual. A performance everyone understands, pretending not to.
The Lie Becomes the Default
After a while, lying is not even about hiding the truth. It becomes the house language. Bureaucrats lie to keep their chairs. Executives lie to calm investors. Politicians lie because the truth polls worse. Then everyone else pretends to believe it, because admitting the obvious would force a reckoning with how broken the structure is.
Every “we take this seriously” is a signal flare of guilt. Every “lessons will be learned” is a placeholder for nothing. We do not even get creative lies anymore, just recycled statements and hollow empathy.
Everyone Knows
That is the punchline. The liar knows. The audience knows. Each side knows the other knows. Yet the show goes on. Not because anyone is persuaded, but because stopping the show would mean accountability. And accountability is the one thing the system will not fund.
They rely on fatigue. They bet you will get bored before they get exposed. They forget what happens when trust collapses. Once people stop believing anything, lies lose their power. Truth does not stroll back in after that. It detonates.
Modern Versions of the Same Old Trick
Press briefings that contradict themselves by lunchtime. Charities that preach inclusion while cutting off critics. Corporations that talk about diversity while silencing whistleblowers. Everyone knows. They still double down, because the alternative is consequences.
How It Ends
The cure is not optimism. It is evidence. Radical transparency. Publish the logs. Show the receipts. Name the contradiction. You do not argue with lies, you outlast them. Truth is not belief. Truth is record.
Who Was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and dissident who exposed the Soviet system of forced labour camps. He served in the Red Army in the Second World War, criticised Stalin in private letters, and paid for it with arrest, prison, and the camps. He survived cancer, wrote in secret, and smuggled his work to the outside world.
His most famous books include One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which showed a single day inside a camp, and The Gulag Archipelago, a monumental investigation into the machinery of political repression. That work mapped how small lies become policy, how policy becomes violence, and how entire societies learn to perform belief to stay alive.
For telling the truth, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. For the same reason, he was exiled. Whatever you think of his later politics, his core cause was simple. Do not live by lies. Refuse the ritual. Tell the truth, even when the truth is inconvenient to power.
Final Thought
Lies survive only while they are convenient. Stop playing along and the illusion dies. The liar always needed the believer more than the believer ever needed the lie.
Be First to Comment