The public at large happily swallows the official narrative, because acknowledging the reality of a broader systemic failure would be too threatening, too unsettling, too much work. It is this tendency towards lethargy, conformity, and self-deception which is responsible for the failure of what arguably is the most famous WikiLeaks slogan: ‚If wars can be started by lies, they can be ended by the truth.‘ Unfortunately, as a general rule, the problem is not that we do not know the truth, but that we do not want to know it.

—Nils Melzer, The Trial of Julian Assange, (London: Verso, 2022), 23-24.

I was glad to read Melzer on this. The WikiLeaks line is regularly displayed by people posting on social media. It seems to be a sort of a mantra, similar to Christians invoking biblical or papal quotations. The truth will out, period, full stop. The truth quite demonstrably does not out, however, and the incessant invocation of saints, religious or secular, just leaves me with the pretty justifiable impression the petitioner is living in a sort of psychosis. A tendency towards self-deception because acknowledging the reality of a broader systemic failure would be too threatening, too unsettling, too much work, indeed.