Living in the Lie
There is a moment in the decay of a democracy when truth stops mattering — not because people can’t tell what is true, but because they no longer care.
We have passed that point.
A growing number of our fellow citizens do not merely believe false things; they want the rest of us to act as if those false things are real. They want us to nod along, to perform agreement, to live inside their fantasy. This is not confusion. It is coercion. A demonstration of power. If they can force you to inhabit their lie, they have already won.
Why Lies Feel Better Than Reality
Button-pushing content works because it connects emotionally. It does not need to be true — it just needs to feel real. Reality is often boring, difficult, ambiguous and unflattering. It rarely makes you feel special.
Lies do.
They are exciting. They flatter the audience. They explain disappointment. They assign blame. They turn confusion into clarity and grievance into heroism. It is far easier to believe an eye-catching lie that makes you important than to navigate a world in which you are not.
This feeds particularly on loneliness. It offers belonging — to something dangerous, radical, thrilling — without requiring anything more than clicks, likes, shares, and every few years a cross in a box next to some far-right chancer.
Participation without responsibility. Identity without effort.
The Demand for Drama
These voters do not want stable, competent government. They want drama.
They want every whim indulged, every fad validated, every grievance elevated. Their ideal government behaves like Stacey and Tracey on a night out: storming off, reconciling tearfully, then starting the whole cycle again.
Competence bores them. Stability feels like betrayal. Calm looks like weakness.
Why Democracy Needs Facts
A democratic society cannot function without a broadly accepted body of facts.
The United States no longer has one. There are red-state facts and blue-state facts; Fox News facts and MSNBC facts. The Watergate scandal — which forced Richard Nixon from office — would barely register today. The right would simply deny the evidence, cheered on by its media allies.
What stands between Britain and that epistemic collapse is the BBC.
That is the real reason the authoritarian right attacks it so obsessively. Not because it is biased, but because it anchors a shared reality that cannot easily be bent to tribal loyalty.
Fear, Violence and the Fascist Script
A core chapter of the fascist playbook has always been the same: convince the public it is living in a state of existential danger and unrelenting chaos, and that survival requires surrendering individual rights to the will of the Dear Leader.
In this worldview, state violence is not just necessary — it is beautiful. The police, the military, the machinery of coercion are to be revered. Violence becomes proof of seriousness. Compassion becomes weakness. Restraint becomes treason.
This is not new. It is textbook.
The Clickbait Economy of Hate
One of the clearest expressions of this shift is the flood of far-right clickbait content, much of it originating in Asia and designed purely to drive engagement and advertising revenue.
It is astonishingly easy to fool people with it.
Alongside this comes an increase in overt hate — racial abuse, conspiracy fantasies, calls for punishment and removal — and an increase in sheer, unhinged madness.
The Reality Behind the Hysteria
Strip away the noise and the reality is far smaller than the rhetoric.
Calls for a “huge nationwide wave” of protests over the last 48 hours produced around 300 people at one locally organised protest in Nuneaton, 19 protests with attendances as low as six people in Wolverhampton, and only four events reaching 100–200 people.
This is the paradox of modern racism.
Less Racist Country, Louder Racists
Every survey and census shows Britain becoming less racist, more tolerant, more liberal and more diverse. It is diverse, liberal, well-educated communities that disproportionately pay the taxes subsidising the rest of the country.
And yet the lived experience of many of my non-white friends is the opposite — particularly online, where racism feels louder and more pervasive than ever.
The explanation is not growing racism overall, but a shrinking minority becoming louder, bolder and more extreme in its demands: deportations, exclusion, ethnic cleansing.
These views are increasingly echoed and amplified by Reform and Conservative politicians, each feeding the other.
This is a particular favourite of mine. From the English Channel to the North Sea is a very small strip of land in North Norfolk, which probably doesn’t contain many Muslims at all. So at least the author has realistic expectations.
It’s Not Just the Old or the Young
This is not just a story about pensioners or teenage boys misled by influencers.
It is my generation — Generation X — that is now powering the populist insurgency.
We have reached the years of anxiety: fear of redundancy and irrelevance, marriages under strain, the sense that the world is changing without us, that our views are outdated and someone is out to punish us for them.
Most people get through this without a political meltdown. But it has casualties — people looking for somewhere to pour bottled-up rage and disappointment that life has not delivered what was promised.
Only 19% of people in their 50s voted Reform at the last election. But a third of those aged 50–64 say they would now, according to YouGov — a staggering shift for the “Cool Britannia” generation that put Tony Blair in Downing Street.
They are joined by an angrier fringe of young men convinced the system is rigged against them — that jobs, respect and romantic success are being hoarded by others.
The Fantasy They Want
They say they are sick of left and right, Labour and Tory. What they claim to want is unity — nostalgia for homogenous communities that looked after each other.
But this unity is really conformity.
It means hierarchy: men above women, white above minority, indigenous above immigrant, straight above LGBT.
Economic threats do not work. Many are retired or insulated from downturns. And in any case they want sacrifice — preferably made by others. They want to belong to something bigger, something righteous.
Their heroes are soldiers, blue-collar workers, nurses, straight men and women in traditional gender roles. They are horrified by a society that treats non-white people or LGBT citizens as equals — let alone heroes.
What they want is stability — but specifically a stability in which their social position is fixed, secure, and no longer threatened by people they regard as inherently inferior.
The Desire for Tyranny
Jean-François Revel observed after Franco’s death:
“Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny — either to exercise it themselves or, more mysteriously, to submit to it.”
Franco believed the same. What people really wanted, he said, was to see and feel themselves governed.
That desire never disappeared.
It was merely waiting for a moment when truth weakened enough for power to replace it.
Closing
The danger we face is not ignorance, but consent — consent to live inside a lie, consent to surrender judgement, consent to be governed by fantasy rather than reality.
Once people stop caring whether something is true, the ground is already prepared for authoritarianism. Facts become tribal markers. Violence becomes virtuous. Rights become conditional.
At that point, the question is no longer how tyranny arrives — only how many people will welcome it when it does.