Stamping Out Misinformation Is An Impossible Dream

Dr. Munr Kazmir
5 min readMay 9, 2021

Being wrong isn’t against the law. Neither is lying. Where do we go from here?

There are three types of liars at work in society today; three levels of lies.

The first, most basic type of liar is the merely untruthful person. They mostly lie to other people, mostly about trivial matters. You can probably think of a few examples of these, and you’ve probably told a few tiny little fibs yourself.

People intentionally lie to other people all the time, for all sorts of reasons- to cast themselves in a more favorable light, to avoid trouble. Most of these reasons are harmless enough. Some aren’t. Some of these reasons even make sense from a logical standpoint. Some don’t.

The second-level liar is much trickier, and more dangerous as they will have to work much harder to conceal their lies. They must, because their lies are deeper, bigger, broader. These lies aren’t the work of a moment. They aren’t composed on the spot in answer to an inconvenient question like, “Did you do your homework?” or “Why are you late?”.

The second type of liar lies mostly to themselves.

They fool themselves about all sorts of things- how much money they have, how fit they are, how attractive. They stick their head in the sand, refuse to check bank balances…

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