“But because fraud is man’s peculiar vice, More it displeaseth God; and so stand lowest The fraudulent, and more woe assails them.”
~Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto 11)~
In the cool, merciless light of Attar’s allegory, we find a map for navigating the darkest passages of our shared delusions. The Conference of the Birds, written in twelfth-century Persia by Farid ud-Din Attar, is more than a lyrical pilgrimage; it is a relentless diagnostic of the human tendency to dress fear and vanity in the robes of truth. Thirty birds set out, each a personified excuse, each teaching the reader how the ego invents tolerable fictions to avoid the pain of transformation. The Hoopoe, fierce, wise and insistent, serves as the Sufi guide who will not be flattered; he names the valleys a seeker must endure: Quest, Love, Knowledge, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, Annihilation. The last valley, fana, is not a nihilistic void but a radical loss of self that allows for true connection. When the birds finally peer into the Simurgh, they behold not a separate godhead but their collective reflection, the truth that had been behind them all along.
Attar’s poem matters today because it vividly describes the spiritual and psychological mechanics of why people refuse to face reality. The birds cling to comfortable lies: the nightingale to romantic attachment, the peacock to public adoration, the parrot to parroting. The Hoopoe’s insistence on stripping these away is not gentle. It is a lesson in how societies must sometimes be painfully honest with themselves if they are to survive. The ancient parable reads like a mirror held up to our era, and what it reflects is frightening: instead of the disciplined, self-questioning flock that Attar imagines, we increasingly resemble a flock in thrall to spectacle, soothing narratives, and manufactured reality.
Imagine the present moment as if Attar’s valley of Bewilderment had been industrialised: fact receding behind the theatrics of power, evidence diluted to the status of opinion, history repurposed to fit a headline. This is the world in which the old warnings about propaganda and power become urgent rather than academic. The collapse of truth is not merely a moral failing; it is a structural hazard. Societies whose leaders weaponise narrative rather than govern by facts risk the same path walked by vanished empires: unravelling from within until catastrophe renders them unrecognisable.
There is a paradox often overlooked in casual metaphors about lying: even the archetypes of deception maintain rules. Folklore and epic suggest that lying without restraint corrodes the liar’s own community. Dante’s devils know whom to attack; Milton’s fallen angels preserve certain honesty among themselves because they, too, must count on predictable selfishness to coordinate their wicked ends. The point is not to redeem the damned but to observe that a functional system, even one built upon violence or greed, depends on predictable signals. When leaders make truth fungible, when narratives can be rewritten to escape accountability, the coordination problem explodes. Trust dissolves. Institutions that depend on mutual expectations, courts, markets, bureaucracies, begin to misfire.
History offers a long, brutal catalogue of societies undone by this misalignment between rhetoric and reality. Weimar Germany’s collapse into Nazism is a primary example: the republic’s fragile wounds were exacerbated by lies that fed resentment and scapegoating. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine did not simply persuade; it created an alternative public language in which persecution and conquest became claims of purification and destiny. The Nazi catastrophe was not only a moral abyss, but a civic failure of epistemology: once public discourse permitted mass falsehoods to go unchallenged, atrocities became implementable policy rather than the stuff of horror stories.
The Soviet experience furnishes a complementary lesson. For decades, the state smoothed history into stately narratives of progress and unity. The photos were retouched, the enemies were airbrushed from public memory, and show trials produced falsified confessions that nationalised terror. These practices bought a fragile compliance at terrible human cost, and they ultimately proved unsustainable. The cover-ups, particularly of events like Chernobyl, created a feedback loop in which information scarcity produced policy blunders and intensified public cynicism once the truth leaked. In both twentieth-century totalitarian projects, the lie was the glue that held an edifice of power together; when reality seeped through, the glue burned everything it touched.
Ancient and medieval history echoes the same theme. Rome’s use of propaganda to vilify political enemies created short-term advantages but long-term instability. The spread of the “Lost Cause” narrative after the American Civil War remade public sympathies in a way that justified systemic injustice for generations. Colonial powers used invented atrocities to rationalise repression, which then produced cycles of violent reaction that would feed independence movements decades later. The medieval blood libel tales wrought social fractures that endured in the cultural memory of entire regions. From Athens to the French Revolution, the rhetorical weaponisation of fear and grievance has had predictable outcomes: temporary gains followed by deep social corrosion.
The mechanism by which these mythologies take hold is familiar to psychologists. Cognitive dissonance, conformity and motivated reasoning combine to make communities particularly vulnerable to repeated messages that explain complexity in a single, blame-ready image. Festinger’s insight about cognitive dissonance describes not only our individual mental gymnastics but also wider public processes: when an explanation reduces internal conflict, it spreads. Social media algorithms further accelerate this by converting psychological comfort into the currency of engagement. When platforms reward outrage and certainty, they amplify narratives that soothe cognitive dissonance, regardless of their relation to evidence.
The 2008 financial crisis is a modern example of the economic consequences of sanctioned falsehoods. Rating agencies, incentivised by flawed structures and conflict of interest, rubber-stamped toxic assets and turned once-discrete mistakes into a global systemic failure. Enron’s collapse showed that corporate narratives have social consequences: when leaders and institutions lie about solvency, livelihoods are destroyed and markets contract under the weight of distrust. A polity that tolerates such distortions in commerce or governance sets itself up for recurrent crises that are harder and harder to repair.
And so we move from Attar’s spiritual hygiene to a case study in political theatre: the rise of a leader who treats truth as optional and spectacle as sovereign. Whether one reads contemporary events as a chronicling of a specific presidency or as a contested chapter in an ongoing political struggle, the relevant fact is that political figures who cultivate an alternate reality undermine the shared assumptions that allow democracy to function. The rhetorical strategies are consistent: delegitimise inconvenient sources, crown sympathetic outlets as the sole credible channels, and recast dissent as a form of traitorous otherness. Language becomes a tool for consolidation rather than conversation.
When political elites consistently refuse to accept verifiable evidence about governance, economy, and public welfare, they create two overlapping problems. The first is instrumental: policies built on false premises fail and produce harm. The second is existential: a political community loses its capacity for coordinated action. If half the nation believes a lie so fundamental that it contradicts an obvious reality, then public policy cannot be made without the constant negotiation of basic facts. This friction is the currency of dysfunction. It is not the mere presence of different opinions that harms democracies; it is the rearrangement of truth itself to serve narrow power interests.
The media ecosystem plays a crucial role in this dynamic. Historically, robust journalism has been the public’s oxygen – documenting abuses, demanding accountability, and providing a shared evidence base for civic debate. But that oxygen can be throttled by concentrated media ownership, political lobbying, and platform design choices that privilege sensationalism over verification. When major outlets fail to provide context or reduce complex crises to false equivalence between responsibility and denial, they erode the public’s capacity to respond coherently. The tragedy is that societies can end up debating not the substance of problems, but who has the right to name them.
Nowhere is the danger of narrative control clearer than in zones of acute violence. Take Gaza, where claims and counterclaims have turned human suffering into a media battlefield. When coffins are measured in thousands and entire neighbourhoods are reduced to rubble, the first casualty is the capacity for neutral reporting to influence policy. Instead we are left with a struggle of frames: is this a lawful military campaign, a humanitarian crisis, or a genocide? The answer depends less on the anguish of the victims than on the authority and reach of the people who control the dominant narrative.
Propaganda in wartime is not merely the preservation of a nation’s dignity; it is an instrument that can enable policies that would otherwise be unacceptable. Labelling civilian victims as combatants, insisting on moral equivalence for asymmetric parties, or invoking the language of self-defence to foreclose moral inquiry all serve to prevent a society from facing the full implications of violence. When global institutions, international courts, human rights organisations, impartial media, struggle to make their findings heard over the din of political theatre, justice stalls and suffering deepens. The moral cost is compounded by the strategic: unchecked brutality breeds extremism, erodes prospects for reconciliation, and hardens identities into permanent grievance.
All of this folds neatly into a modern reading of Orwell’s 1984. Orwell’s warnings are not metaphors about a distant dystopia; they are procedural descriptions of how power can rearrange reality. Newspeak narrows language so that certain thoughts become unsayable; doublethink teaches people to hold mutually contradictory beliefs without noticing their contradiction. The power’s aim is not to force agreement but to make disagreement incoherent. When political actors embrace this logic, declaring “alternative facts,” discrediting basic institutions, and establishing new categories of outlawed speech, they do not merely change policy; they change the conditions that make politics itself possible.
The accumulation of these trends is not subtle. Militarisation of rhetoric, surveillance expansions in the name of security, purges of civil servants who refuse loyalty to a leader rather than to law, and the co-option of legal mechanisms to protect power rather than public interest all together create an apparatus that can quickly outstrip the ordinary checks and balances of constitutional governance. The worst-case scenarios are not only political; they are systemic: once governance norms are eroded by performative loyalty and narrative control, the repair job becomes as much cultural as it is institutional.
If history is any guide, the consequences of sustained narrative corruption are predictable and dire. Empires and republics alike have crumbled when their elites preferred short-term rhetorical control to long-term institutional health. The lesson runs through the ruins of civilisations: untruths by leaders produce disenchantment among citizens, cracks in governance that opportunistic forces can exploit, and eventually a rapid unsexing of order, whether by invasion, revolution, economic collapse or slow attrition. This is neither moralising nor partisan; it is a sober observation rooted in patterns visible across time and geography.
So what is the antidote? The same voice that Attar’s Hoopoe raises against complacent illusion: discipline, humility, and the willingness to endure the pain of truth, even when it destabilises comfortable identities. There is no magic policy that will instantly restore epistemic health. Instead, a coherent strategy must combine civic education that emphasises critical thinking, media reforms that reward verification rather than outrage, legal protections for whistleblowers and independent institutions, and a political culture that prizes evidence over theatricality.
On the individual level, the work is spiritual as much as it is civic. Attar’s valley of detachment is not a call to passivity; it is a plea for the capacity to separate one’s ego from one’s claims to righteousness. A democracy’s health depends on citizens who can revise their beliefs when confronted with evidence, who resist the seduction of easy narratives, and who recognise that loyalty to a country as a moral project requires scrutiny of its crimes as well as its achievements. Empathy plays an indispensable role here: the Hoopoe’s urging to see the divine in others is, in secular terms, an appeal to recognise the humanity of those we would otherwise reduce to caricature.
Institutional reforms are the other indispensable pillar. Transparent, independent media must be defended and supported; public education must reinvest in critical thinking and civic knowledge; regulatory frameworks for platforms must ensure that misinformation has consequences and that truthful reporting is amplified rather than throttled. Additionally, political actors should be held to higher standards of evidence in public claims, with mechanisms for accountability that go beyond partisan courts or friendly legislatures. These are difficult changes, and they require a consensus that is precisely what corrosive narratives make difficult to build. That is the paradox: the work needed to defend truth is easiest to achieve when the public already values it.
Finally, there is a moral imagination at stake. Attar’s Sufis, Plato’s prisoners, and Orwell’s Winston all point to the same essential truth: a human community that abandons truth for comfort ultimately loses more than it gains. The Simurgh reveals itself only when the birds stop searching for external saviours and confront the reality that the power they seek is reflected within. That inward glance is what modern politics desperately needs: the recognition that power without accountability inevitably produces illusions that devour the very commons they were meant to steward.
We are not helpless in the face of this erosion. Civil society movements, investigative journalists, whistleblowers, and ordinary citizens acting with courage have a long record of reversing abuses. The Hoopoe’s method – stripping away comforts, insisting on unadorned realities, and demanding a reckoning with personal motives – is a spiritual technology that, when coupled with institutional safeguards, can restore a shared sense of truth. It will not be quick and it will be painful, because truth is often a surgeon’s blade rather than a soothing balm. But the alternative is to let the structure continue to rot until collapse is no longer a risk but an inevitability.
To conclude, Attar’s allegory, Orwell’s warnings, and the catalogue of historical collapses together offer both diagnosis and prescription. Lies enthroned as policy corrode the webs of mutual expectation that sustain society. Empires and republics that barter reality for short-term control ultimately self-erase. The remedy is a cultural and civic discipline: a recommitment to evidence, to empathy, and to institutional scaffolding that ensures leaders are accountable to what is true rather than to what is expedient. The Hoopoe does not offer comfort; he offers a way out of illusion. If we refuse to listen, then the last lines of his counsel will be the last sound we hear before the structures we inhabit fall quiet and cold. The choice is ours: to fly toward the Simurgh by shedding our excuses, or to cling to them and watch the world we know collapse under the weight of its own falsehoods.
