The Cost of Lies
What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that, if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame.
Those are the opening lines of Chernobyl, the much talked about HBO miniseries. Valery Legasov, the chief of the commission investigating the infamous nuclear disaster, utters them before committing suicide. Even after binging all of the first four episodes (the fifth and final one is on Monday, June 3rd), I couldn’t get those initial lines out of my mind. Continue reading “The Cost of Lies”