In Seth Godin’s book, All Marketers Tell Stories, Seth offers up that stories are the reason we do anything.
He also says that lying doesn’t work any longer.
Which is actually an interesting hypothesis if you look at our current political climate in the United States.
Today was a pretty good indication of the concept that maybe lies still work, if you work hard enough to create an environment where lies can prosper.
What I am talking about is two things:
First, the farewell address from President Obama.
Second, the revelations that Donald Trump has much deeper ties to Russia than he ever led on during the election cycle, and that these ties could put him in a compromised position. And, that’s just the tip of the iceberg as the revelations game plays out.
But that’s not really the point of this…because what I actually want to talk about for a moment is that we have been throwing around a term a lot in conversation, or at least some of the conversation I notice on the TV and the Internet, about something called “post-factual” America.
I’m not sure that we ever lived in an America that wasn’t post-factual.
Why do I say that?
Well, we can certainly go back in time to find any number of instances where a lie was taken as the truth and run with by people all over the world.
Some of the great lies in history didn’t start in 2016. They’ve been going on forever.
Here are just a few:
There was Neville Chamberlain and Hitler during World War II.