Institutionalised Lying

Chris Snowdon:

Not a day goes by without some outrageous lie being told about e-cigarettes in the USA.

What’s been remarkable about the e-cig saga, as it has unfolded over the past few years, is that it has been possible to witness in real time blatant lies being hurriedly assembled to counter this unforeseen technological innovation.

It’s all been happening in public. Tobacco Control was left in disarray by the arrival of the new e-cigarettes. Their discomfiture was painfully obvious. Some of them approved the new smokeless device, and some disapproved. But the emerging consensus seems now to be that e-cigarettes are the exact same thing as cigarettes, and just as dangerous.

There isn’t a shred of evidence for this. But truth doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the continuation the antismoking denormalisation programme, which cannot be allowed to be derailed. So ‘research’ was instantly commissioned to find the danger of vaping, and ‘research’ results were instantly produced with the approved conclusions.

That’s how ‘research’ is done these days. The conclusions – that e-cigarettes are as dangerous as cigarettes – were foregone. The task of the ‘researcher’ was simply to find plausible (or even implausible) reasons for supposing that e-cigarettes were dangerous. We’ve seen this sort of thing  before, when “intelligence and facts are fitted around the policy,”

What’s breath-taking about the lies being told about e-cigarettes is that they are so patently obviously lies.

But I’d like to suggest that lying is actually the normal modus operandi of Tobacco Control, and indeed of all social engineering programmes. After all, if you are engaged in a social engineering programme intended to change people’s behaviour in respect of smoking, drinking, eating, or anything else, does it really matter whether or not lies are employed to achieve these aims? What if it’s lies that work best in changing behaviour? And if you primarily want to change people’s behaviour, you want to override their personal autonomy in any way you can. Personal autonomy is something you want to destroy in people. You don’t want any truths or facts or debates to hinder the process of gaining control over them, and making them do as you desire.

The e-cig  saga now sees Tobacco Control blatantly lying. But it’s not the first time that they’ve told lies. The earlier secondhand smoke scare was another lie. But, unlike the current rush job on e-cigarettes, it was one that was carefully concocted over a decade or more, in order to establish a body of ‘research’ that showed the danger of passive smoking.

And 20 years before that there there was the firsthand smoke scare, backed by the research of Doll and Hill, Wynder and Graham, and others, all published in reputable journals, with statistical analyses attached.

And 20 years before that, there was all the antismoking research (now largely forgotten) carried out in Nazi Germany by the likes of Fritz Lickint and Franz Müller and others, some of it personally financed  by Hitler.

And the entire process has always been fixed around the policy, which is an eugenic programme to eradicate smoking. The facts and research have always been fixed around this policy. It was always the primary task of the ‘researchers’ to find dirt on tobacco and smoking. And of course they always did find it. It was what they were paid to do, after all.

The Tobacco Control programme has always been about constructing elaborate (but plausible) lies about tobacco. The eugenic programme has always required lying. And so it has always used lies. If anything has changed, it’s that the early lies were the most elaborate, carefully constructed, and plausible lies. The quality of the lies has gradually deteriorated since. If the case made against firsthand smoking was mathematically statistically significant, the case against secondhand smoking never was, and there are no statistical studies whatsoever in the case of e-cigarettes.

This shouldn’t be at all surprising. Once any great lie is told, it will always need subsidiary lies to be appended, often at very short notice. And in the case of e-cigarettes, we can see the latest lies being cooked up before our eyes.

But the success to date of the tobacco Big Lie has encouraged the use of the same method in other social engineering projects. For example, the global warming/climate changc lie is another piece of scaremongering aimed at changing people’s behaviour. Much like with tobacco, it started life with impressive ‘research’ in the form of computer simulation models showing the dangers of  increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That the Earth has failed to warm as these computer models predicted has resulted in subsidiary lies being appended to the first big lie, such as that the missing heat is to be found deep in the oceans. The failure of the predicted global warming to manifest itself has even resulted in the ‘global warming’ scare being renamed as the ‘climate change’ scare (itself another rather remarkable kind of lie, a bit like first name a ship the Unsinkable, and then renaming it the All-Too-Sinkable after it fails to live up to its name).

It might even be suggested that the Lie has now become the principal instrument for advancing any sort of policy whatsoever, including political programmes like the EU project.  Such projects cannot be allowed to fail, and so any lie whatsoever can be used (nay, must be used) to prop them up. And if most politicians are now widely perceived as serial liars, it’ very probably because it’s exactly what they are. Lying has become second nature.

Lying can often be successful in the short term. But in the long run, lies are unsustainable. The process of lying always requires subsidiary lies to be appended, in exponentially multiplying numbers, at shorter and shorter notice. Inevitably, some of the new lies contradict each other, and the entire edifice of lies becomes increasingly unstable and implausible, and the entire bubble bursts.