Vox Populi
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David Ades: Extracts from a Liar’s Notebook
If you tell the lie, tell it slant but with a direct gaze, with utter conviction, tell it as if you believe it is truth, again and again – and in the telling watch it transform, watch it become truth, become certainty, immutable, as if it were never other, and in this way fool most of the world, save those nearest ones who taste the lie, who feel it in their guts, who tremble, wounded, diminished, whose love wavers, becomes muddied, conflicted; and then tell yourself another lie in the same way, justifying the first if it is not yet truth, if any doubt lingers, so you become blind to the damage you have wrought, the damage you will repeat, the devastation all around you.
Copyright 2015 David Ades. First published in Verity La – Heightened Talk.
Vox Populi 
Yes., and if the lie assuages the guilt of the listener, they will raise you as a savior.
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