Falsehood Flies, And The Truth Comes Limping After It

These are strange times. Times of big words and small words. Thin words and fat words. Tall words and short words. Truths and alternative truths. These are indeed strange times. The strange times of social media where everyone has everything to say.

We are living at a time where “close friends” would rather share your story on social media with total strangers than tell you on one-on-one what they think or how they feel. They sleep while on social media and wake up with their phones logged in.

In this age of social media, where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you.

Renowned Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie seems to have had enough of the hypocrisy that human beings have online of late. In an explosive 3-part piece to vent her disappointment, Chimamanda unmasks the true hypocrisy of the current human.

“When you are a public figure, people will write and say false things about you. It comes with the territory. Many of those things you brush aside. Many you ignore.

The people close to you advise you that silence is best. And it often is. Sometimes, though, silence makes a lie begin to take on the shimmer of truth,” she writes.

Read More: Are We Defenseless In The World Of Technology And Cybercrime?

Chimamanda writes:

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness.

People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter.

People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

Here is the full version of her post:

Chimamanda by Soko Directory