Licensed to Lie: A Satirical Meditation on the Confidence Trick We Call Public Life – Bolutife Oluwadele

There was a time when a lie was a shameful thing – something said behind a hand, denied in daylight, confessed under pressure. Now it is a credential. The modern liar does not hide the lie; he brandishes it. He does not whisper; he broadcasts. And because we have no Ministry of Truth – only a Ministry of Convenient Facts staffed by algorithms, exhausted moderators, and a public that scrolls faster than it thinks – he issues himself a license. On the front: LICENSED TO LIE. On the back, in tiny print: This license is renewed automatically by your outrage, your fatigue, and your refusal to read past the headline.

The license is not printed on paper. It is printed in us. Every time we share a statistic without asking who counted it, every time we let a barefaced lie pass because correcting it would ruin the dinner party, every time we say, “Well, there’s truth on both sides,” when one side is holding a firehose and the other a candle, we stamp the renewal.

The liar does not need our belief. He needs our exhaustion. Belief is a bonus; confusion is the jackpot. If you no longer know what is true, you stop expecting truth. If you stop expecting truth, the liar governs by default.

Consider the craft. The statistical lie is the aristocrat of lies. It arrives in a suit, carrying a decimal point. “Seventy-three percent of people agree.” Which people? How many? Asked how? By whom? Paid by whom? The decimal point is not evidence; it is incense. It makes the air smell like science while the number itself remains a rumor.

Then there is the barefaced lie, the lie that looks you in the eye and says, “I never said that,” while the video plays behind him in endless contradiction. That lie is not an argument. It is a performance of dominance. It says: I can say black is white, and you will still invite me back. I can rob the language, and you will call it rhetoric.

The fact-checkers arrive, brave and doomed, like sanitation workers after a parade. They sweep up the manure, label it accurately, and publish a correction. But the parade has moved on. The lie has already been folded into a million conversations, a million resentments, a million votes. The correction gets a paragraph; the lie gets a mythology. And the platforms? They profit from both. The lie is engagement. The correction is engagement. The outrage is engagement. The only thing that is not engagement is the quiet, boring, load-bearing work of being accurate. So the algorithm, which has no conscience but excellent instincts, feeds the lie. Not because it is evil, but because we are tired. And tired people click.

But let us not be too quick to sneer at those who believe. People deceived by public lies are not a species; they are a resource. They are not stupid; they are wounded. They have been lied to by people who were supposed to protect them: politicians, priests, professors, parents, and brands. They have learned that the truth is often complicated, slow, and painful, while the lie is simple, fast, and flattering. The liar offers them a world where their anger is righteous, their failures are someone else’s fault, and their tribe is pure. That is not a fact. It is a home. And you cannot fact-check a home.

This is where the disgust deepens. I am not disgusted merely by the lie. I am disgusted by the smirk. By the immunity. By the way a liar can bankrupt a country’s trust and still be invited on television to explain why trust is overrated. I am disgusted by the asymmetry: the liar risks nothing, while the truth-teller risks everything. The liar can always say he was joking, asking questions, or playing devil’s advocate. The truth-teller must be perfect, must have sources, must be calm, must never sigh. The liar gets a license; the truth-teller gets a probation officer.

And the deepest lie is not any single falsehood. It is the lie that truth is optional. That consequences are for little people. That a society can survive on a diet of confident nonsense and still call itself free. It cannot. A democracy without a shared reality is not a democracy; it is a cage match with better lighting. A marketplace of ideas without a floor of facts is not a marketplace; it is a rumor mill with a stock ticker. The liars know this. That is why they lie. They are not trying to win the argument. They are trying to dissolve the ground on which arguments stand.

So what is the rebellion? It is not a new ministry. It is not a fact-checking army, though we need fact-checkers too. It is smaller and harder. It is the habit of asking, “Says who?” before we share. It is the discipline of being boring.

It is the courage to say, “I don’t know yet,” in a world that rewards certainty. It is the refusal to let disgust become cynicism, because cynicism is just another way of letting the liars win. It is the decision to be the person who ruins a good rant with a link – and to do it kindly – because those who have been deceived are not our enemies; they are our neighbors who have been robbed.

Imagine the license revoked, not by a government, but by a million ordinary people who simply stop renewing it. The liar stands at the microphone, holding his card, waiting for the applause. But the room is empty. Not because we have silenced him – he can talk forever – but because we have finally, quietly, without drama, stopped buying. The license says LICENSED TO LIE. And on the back, in handwriting, someone has added: Not here. Not anymore.

©TheVillageBoy.

(The figure man who loves alphabets)