Trump's most obvious lies (like pretending he never led chants of "lock her up) are perhaps the most disturbing.
Telling lies that everyone knows are lies is a classic tactic of dictators to force their followers to side with them over the truth itself.
指鹿爲馬 is a Chinese idiom that says to point to the deer and call it a horse.
Legend has it that the second Qin dynasty emperor wanted to know which Ministers were loyal to him and which were not.
His trusted advisor, the most powerful eunuch at the time came up with the idea of bringing a deer to the court. He pointed at it and said it was a horse. Then demanded the ministers one at a time to tell everyone whether they thought that was a deer or a horse.
The ones who said it was a horse were ok. The ones who said it was a deer got executed or exiled... in some cases, their entire families wiped out as was common practice at the time with the 9 familial executions.
The dynasty collapsed very shortly after this.
The idiom is now used to describe people who are yes men or people who just don't bother to tell the truth either out of fear or laziness.
It also is used to insult/dismiss useless dead weight in an organization. It is also accepted that when there's too many of these people, organizations/governments will collapse.
@chu @rbreich i can't believe someone did not just come up with this idea, but decided to use it to get rid of the ones ready to take a risk and tell their boss when he's wrong, to only keep the sycophantes!
The worst possible definition of "loyal".
I hope it's only a legend, not something that actually happened. 😅
It's absolutely real.
Here's the wiki page on Zhao Gao, the eunuch who devised the scheme. (Scroll to the fourth section or just do a search for the word "horse"）
Yeah. It's a famous story and gets told slightly differently all the time. As you can see from the section under it, there is debate about whether or not he was even a eunuch.
I probably just messed it up though lol... but the basics are the same. Purge good people = empire collapse.
I also wonder if the fools were really fools or they just acted like fools so they could live after speaking the truth. They could say something outrageous to the king and then play the fool so everybody pleads "oh, he's just lost his mind. don't execute him".
Another famous Emperor story.
This is after the last story and takes place during the Tang dynasty. Eunuchs are once again so powerful they were essentially calling all the shots. Male members of the royal household were getting killed for some made up reason or other (or even "accidents") regularly. One guy who at this point is a royal uncle I think as he really removed himself from the halls of power pretended to be a fool so he wouldn't get killed by his emperor brother and later emperor nephew. After the death of the third nephew, the eunuchs were looking for yet another obedient puppet emperor. They picked this guy because he was a fool and would be easily controlled.
They were shocked when on his first day he understood the rules and procedures of the royal court. He ordered ministers to do competent things and started taking control back from the eunuchs. They were understandably pissed.
He is known as the last decent Tang dynasty ruler as the eunuchs took back control after him and slowly ate at the power structure from the inside out, much like what Trump is doing.
@chu @rbreich oh, i guess we are talking about a different, thing, i mean fool as a very official role, someone here to make people laugh during royal parties, making jokes about people present, and being able to generally say things no one else would dare, because it's understood as their role to be irreverent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jester
But pretending to be a harmless fool, to avoid trouble, and having plotting people try to use you as a puppet is quite the plot twist, too 😆 .
Ah. the court jester. Yes. I read that wrong.
And in case you are curious. The guy I'm referring to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Xuanzong_of_Tang_(9th_century)
I hope you aren't disappointed!
Once over this hurdle truth does not matter anymore. It’s a cult…
@rbreich That’s what happens when you let liars into power: They use the power to create more & deeper lies to gather even more power.
Rinse & repeat.
Once the critical mass is reached, you’ll blink and the world has changed. Now they control the narrative.
"and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the #BigLie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
...Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt & waver & will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, chapter 10, "The Big Lie"
More on that here today:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/03/donald-trump-hitler-similarities
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