The most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he's only a severe example of a common type. The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
Interpretation
This quote prompts reflection on societal acceptance of lies rather than just focusing on the individual who tells them.
Bret Stephens highlights that the focus should not merely be on why a particular individual, like Donald Trump, lies, but rather on the broader societal dynamics that allow such lies to be accepted. This speaks to a deeper philosophical inquiry into truth, perception, and the responsibilities of both leaders and the public in acknowledging and confronting dishonesty.
In practice
During a seminar on ethics in politics, this quote can be used to illustrate the importance of holding society accountable.
I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.
The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own unsuspected biases.
We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.
The American birthright belongs, potentially, to everyone. This is unprecedented. Other countries accept migrants on the basis of economic necessity or as a humanitarian gesture. Only in America is it the direct consequence of our foundational ideals.
It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.
A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
And they can appreciate, through personal experience, that the really decisive battleground of American freedom is in the hearts and minds of our own people... Each day we must ask that Almighty God will set and keep His protecting hand over us so that we may pass on to those who come after us the heritage of a free people, secure in their God-given rights and in full control of a Government dedicated to the preservation of those rights.
It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.
I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease.
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