The Total Lie versus the Big Lie

The Total Lie may be contrasted with both "Normal lies" - i.e. a deliberate dishonesty that has been twisted to serve expediency; yet seeded with truths, to make it plausible... 

And also contrasted with the Big Lie - which has always been possible. 

I would (now) say that the Big Lie is characterized by stunning us with its audacity. 

With a Big Lie, ordinary people cannot believe that anyone could or would lie about such a thing. 

As when someone falsely - for expedient reasons or self-gratification - claims to have cancer, or to have been raped; or that a national leaders would strategically destroy its own people and society, for their own profit and gratification... Such notions are just Too Much for the masses to believe - especially for typical secular-modern-leftist people; whose grasp of the nature and reality of evil is tenuous or non-existent 

There is certainly a significant element of the Big Lie about the vast modern deceptions such as the birdemic, climate change or Fire Nation war - the 'ordinary' (unthinking) person thinks that 'all those people' 'couldn't possibly!' be lying about 'something like that'. 

But there is more to these modern fake reality lies than audiacity; and this is that each Total Lie relies on its being vastly mutually supported by many other lies. 

Each Total Lie comes surrounded by an interlocking shell of multiple kinds of untruthfulness: other lies, distortions, selections, misunderstandings - and supported by a variety of evil motivations (pride, greed, control, destruction etc) and a variety of types of blind incompetence and insightless insanity. 

It is this protective shell of mutually-reinforcing evil, dishonesty and incompetence which makes it, in practice, impossible adequately to address the Total Lie. There are just too many lies-piled-upon-lies for people to believe it possible. 

(Impossible especially given the indifference and impatience of the masses - and their basically wrong assumptions and motivations.) 

In other words, the Total Lie is only possible in a modern totalitarian society; and in a society in which totalitarianism is (in some combination) both accepted and denied: that is; a society where the only truth is external and public truth, and the private individual has implicitly subordinated his inner self to worldly power.