Why do people believe in lies?

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I know several law enforcement people whom have lied to improve their record , I know one trio of murders
To lie to avoid prosecution and for profit . Have gone to lawyers to address these issues , only to hear it is not what I do , so lawyers lie . It is mind boggling at times .

The ego.

In my opinion people who believe lies have a too big ego. That ego prevents them from seeing things rationally. That ego will have an evolutionary cause, does not alter the fact that by taking lies as a sweet cake for truth we can even more easily be preyed on by the people who lie. In subjects such as religion and free will I often sense an ego that is too big for people who believe in religion and free will.

There is also a group that lies with the liars. These are not people who believe in lies, they are people who make a lie seem real.

(Cracks knuckles, rolls up sleeves)

Well. This is going to be fun.

Even the most righteous will lie because they believe they are doing God's work. To them, they are righteous, good, heroes of the moment. I got beat and punished for being autistic as a kid. I was taught never to have breakdowns or to get angry or upset at anything. No amount of abuse topped the gaslighting of a Republican woman who didn't want two autistic kids. We were taught to nt like motherf***ers. It was some of the most evil s**t I've ever seen, and I have seen a LOT of evil s**t.

That being said, the thing I put my 10,000 hours in was answering this question, among others, so that I could understand what happened. Here's what I learned -

Ego doesn't exist. You have two regions of personality that people draw their actions from. The first is critical thinking. This is reactive, reactionary behavior. They take in information, process it, then form a response. The second is identity. This is where you run into the "do what we always have done, no matter what" behavior. It serves as a guideline to staying alive. Basically, it is the foundation for how humans developed personalities, and how they managed to stay alive for millennia, despite having the capacity to kill themselves in 78,000 different ways.

You asked how to fight people who lie, like conspiracy theorists? Well, don't fight them based on critical thinking. You must go for their identity. Are you a Packers fan? Well, the Packers are arguably one of the best teams, but statistically, they could be proven not to be the best. In this example, if you were a football fan, and I wanted to convince you to change your mind about your loyalty to that team, I would go after your identity associated with the team. I would not attack your connection based on logic, i.e. statistics.

So, I would find dirt on how your purchase of merchandise enriched a right-wing nut job who supported kids-in-cages, rape, and mysogyny (I don't know if any of that is true). But, I would approach you by talking about how messed up those things are, then drop that the owner uses his merchandising money to fund cult-propaganda or some other thing to distract you from the true agenda. I would sow seeds of doubt, then, once you had the bait in hand, I would demonstrate that another teams owner had used his merch money to help autistic people, a category I know because of where you're posting to leverage an identity shift.

This example is a little far fetched. But it boils down to arguing for an identity shift versus a paradigm shift. If people identify as Christian, Muslim, Autistic, Bulls fans, Republican or Democrat, then you argue like that identity is corrupted. You will never win by arguing the things inside those groups have problems.

I used this strategy to defund Trump's reelection campaign of tens of millions of dollars. I attacked his supporters by pointing out toxic things he did, as a matter of examples that their identities did not align with what he had done. I used solid, inarguable facts (like cheating on his wives with the next wife, or bankrupting his casino while shortchanging his contractors). I used proof like the DOJ.gov website links to the discovery phases of his election fraud court cases, as well as the results of his other lost cases. People were too distracted by sorting out the negative identity I was selling them to actually press the donate button.

Why did I do this? Because I also learned it from Russian agitators sowing disinformation to hurt the US with division. After Hurricane Harvey, I pursued a fake news story spread all around social media by race supremacists looking to hurt "liberals". The story linked a woman in east Texas who had an altercation with workers at a Salvation Army relief camp to fake accusations that aid orgs CEOs were pilfering money. The fake news story caused people to reach out to her to offer all the money they would have donated to the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and Goodwill et. al. I called her and talked to her, and she said thousands of people told her they couldn't trust any of those orgs anymore and that they wanted to send her their money to help. It defunded the Harvey relief funds by $20 million compared to the average of other highly devastating hurricanes. And who did it hurt? The same people they wanted to start believing in Qanon and election fraud. I sought these people, found them, and turned them into the feds. Only, the response from those in charge was "Russian interference isn't real. We don't need to pursue this."

I realized that Trump didn't care how badly Americans on either side got hurt as long as it was good for him. We're talking about starving children hurting. So, I used what they deemed unnoticeable against the people who let it happen.

If you want to see the depths of treachery in not addressing this, go look up Hebe World on Facebook. They've got pornographic images of children's genitals for everyone to see, run by a Russian who used the page to push fascist ideals to extremists here in the US. This went so far up to and including sharing a story about how he kidnapped his neighbors' child to a non-extradition country to marry her, at 9 years old. He was teaching others from the US how to achieve the same results with kids they wanted to molest. Thousands of people reported the page, and after almost 2 years, it's still up.

So, I found this guy. And he never lived in the US. He never kidnapped a neighbor's kid. He wasn't a pedophile. He was a Russian Federation Government employee. Big surprise.

You asked why people lie? Because they have needs. Identify those needs and you'll find a bevy of explanations, evil or good. You know what they can't lie about? Joy. Find that, and be prepared to defeat anyone who tries to destroy it.

Let me answer that with a personal experience. When I was in School, people made up all sorts of fabricated Bull**** about me. I was the only autistic in that school.

Dogma (religious dogma)

Psychological manipulation

Rigid Thinking (one for us Aspies)

Large age differences can also be a cause of lies believing. And I mean a child of about 5 years old with someone 35 years older. If a 40-year-old had told 5-year-old Albert Einstein that the planet is flat, it seems very likely that little Einstein would have taken this for the truth. In most religions it is also started at a very young age to condition the brain towards the theses of the religion.

Hopefully as the child ages he is able to discern the truth ..... but these things passed down from older people can occasionally be harmful . Sometime , maybe not ?

Stupidity?

Trolling?

Denial?

And some people just lie.

Facts have far less meaning to these types than ideology and personal beliefs. I had to drop a Facebook friend who I used to be actual friends with back in junior high (middle school to the younglings) because he absolutely refused to believe Biden beat Trump fair and square, that white nationalism is a danger, and that people in need are worthy of help, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Something extreme, like Flat Earthism?

One group of folks who are drawn to FlatEarthism do so because of religion.

Every major discovery in science in the last five centuries has pushed mankind further and further away from the center of the universe, and therefore away from the center of creation. We now know that the earth goes round the sun(and not the other way around), and know that the earth rotates (so the stars dont really rotate around us- that they appear to do that is an illusion). And we now know that life forms evolve over eons, and that nothing, including our own species was specially created. For SOME folks its hard to keep their faith in a creator knowing that we are not the center of creation. So they latch onto things like ...Darwin denying YECism (for starters), and some go farther and latch onto geocentrism (go back to the earth centered solar system), and even to flat earthism (which was already debunked two thousand years before the rise of modern science five centuries ago (the Church opposed Galileo but never denied the earth was round)..

A WP member who presented flat earth videos was asked "why would the powers that be lie about the shape of the earth?". His answer was "for the same reason they lie about the solar system and evolution...to destroy religion!".

Its the fault of the Illumanatti. I suppose.

Because lies can be attractive.

We could just as easily say that being an "anti-conspiracy theorist" is an easy, risk-free, effort-free way to make yourself feel superior to certain other people ("conspiracy theorists" in this case). It's an easy way to convince yourself how well-adjusted you are, and - yes - how "nuanced" your understanding of the world is, rather than making the effort to assess each argument on its own merits. I used to be one such person myself, so I know something of what it feels like.

So just as there are "conspiracy theorists" who see ridiculous conspiracies around every corner, there are also "anti-conspiracy theorists" who refuse to look at things on a case-by-case basis.

So if these are the facts , is there any hope of a middle ground . . . This stuff sounds as if to require a good bit of investigation to get at the heart of the matter ... And even then would that satisfy the requirements for getting at the truth of a matter ?

Fear

Besides a big ego and a big age difference, I also see fear also as a trigger to believe in lies.

There are people who are afraid of dying. As long as humanity has existed, no one has ever gone on living after death. Still, some people believe they are going to go on living. I see this as believing in lies because of fear. Now this form of believing in lies does not necessarily have to be negative, however, in this way you are another person's puppet.

Stalin.
During Stalin's regime, fear was also exploited to make people believe in lies.

I am not sure iff its a lie or truth that Orwell did really did say, i mean that not everything is written on the internet about famous people have to be true.
Anyway, i agree with the words in the picture.