We live in an age where falsehood is no longer content to deceive—it demands obedience. Across the globe, power is not merely bending facts but insisting that rational people surrender to versions of reality that are demonstrably false, often absurd, and increasingly dangerous.
Consider the West, where the most fundamental truths of human biology are treated as negotiable. A man, by declaration alone, becomes a woman; and to question this is framed not as common sense but as hatred.
For millennia, across every civilisation, distinguishing male from female required no expert panel—only eyes and reason. Yet today, posing the simple question “What is a woman?” can silence scholars. Stating the obvious is branded as bigotry, while denying it is celebrated as moral courage.
This phenomenon is not confined to cultural debates. In Ukraine, Russia bombs cities in the name of “liberation.” In Gaza, international bodies spoke of famine, yet casualty figures said the opposite.
Authorities can declare peaceful what was visibly violent and claim mass participation where there was only silence. These are not simply lies or propaganda in the classic sense.
They represent something deeper: the institutionalisation of unreality. People are not asked to believe—they are required to affirm what they know is untrue.
History offers chilling precedents. Under Stalin, workers recited production figures they knew were fiction. The Nazi Ministry of Propaganda perfected the “Big Lie” as statecraft.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward was sustained by fantasies while millions starved. In East Germany, the regime published statistics of “overwhelming support” even as the state crumbled. In each case, people nodded in public.
The common thread is clear: power no longer seeks persuasion. It demands surrender. George Orwell captured this dynamic in the book called 1984.
The Party did not merely lie; it insisted that two plus two equals five. Truth became whatever power declared it to be, and dissent was rendered unthinkable. The goal was not deception but the annihilation of independent thought.
So, when do people in power—political, cultural, or institutional—shift to irrationality? Four reasons stand out.
One, during a crisis of legitimacy. As genuine support wanes, a regime increasingly relies on coercion to maintain its grip. While most repressive systems use censorship and violence, but they still operate within a shared framework of reality by trying to justify what they do.
When the pretense is dropped, it signals that the regime no longer feels the need to justify itself using reason. It asserts that its power is its own justification.
Two, that process is accelerated by a state of impunity. When the traditional pillars of accountability—courts, a free press, and a vibrant civil society—are dismantled, the cost of lying becomes zero.
In this vacuum, reality becomes entirely optional. Numbers, events, and even human losses can be declared true or false based on political convenience, with no mechanism to challenge the fiction.
Three, profound fear of weakness. For systems built on the image of invincibility, any admission of error or failure is a catastrophic threat to the illusion of total control.
Consequently, denial becomes an official policy. Problems are not addressed and solved; they are simply erased from the public record and denied in official discourse.
Four, irrationality is a litmus test for loyalty. Within elite circles and the broader bureaucracy, the willingness to repeat the most absurd claims becomes the ultimate proof of allegiance. In such an environment, to hesitate is to reveal disloyalty, making silent complicity the price of safety.
When irrationality becomes systematised, the damage runs deep. Public life decays. Trust evaporates. Citizens retreat into silence. The social fabric unravels as shared reality disintegrates, leaving no common ground for discourse or compromise.
This is a philosophical battle more than a political one. It is a battle over the nature of truth itself.
Is truth something external, based on evidence, witness, and reason? Or is it something that is declared by the government, a product of power?
When a child points at the man in the dress and says, “But that’s a man,” they are upholding a reality we all once shared. When we are told to shush the child, we are being asked to choose power over truth.
The challenge of our era is not merely to expose lies but to resist the deeper demand: that we participate in them. The danger is not that we are deceived, but that we are coerced into affirming what we know is false. That is domination.
That is the final frontier of control. It is not enough to control what you do; they must control what you see and what you know.
To resist, then, is not necessarily to shout in the streets. It is to quietly, firmly, and relentlessly trust your own eyes. It is to remember that a woman is a woman, violence is violence, and a number is a number.
It is to protect the simple, stubborn capacity to call a thing what it is. In a world demanding doublethink, the most radical act of all is to insist that two plus two still equals four.
Charles Makakala is a Technology and Management Consultant based in Dar es Salaam
Register to begin your journey to our premium contentSubscribe for full access to premium content
