“I hate a liar more than I hate a thief. A thief is only after my salary; a liar is after my reality.”
—Curtis Jackson aka 50 Cent
Ronald S. Lauder’s remarks, paired with a June 2026 video for LIKE Magazine by Michael de la Force, land in a moment when lying has become one of the defining problems of modern public life. The subject reaches beyond ordinary dishonesty and into politics, media, technology and the way societies decide what to believe.
Lying is as old as language. People lie to avoid punishment, protect status, escape shame, gain advantage, preserve relationships and shape how others see them. Governments lie for many of the same reasons, but on a broader scale: to maintain power, conceal misconduct, manage crises and control public opinion.
The difference between a private lie and a public lie is often the size of its damage. A personal falsehood may wound one relationship. A government falsehood can distort institutions, weaken trust and reshape civic life. The inflection point comes when deception stops being an exception and becomes a method of rule. At that point, lying is no longer just concealment. It becomes a system.
People also lie against government for reasons that are just as old: fear, resistance, survival, protest and moral opposition. When authority is seen as abusive or illegitimate, deception can be treated as self-defense. But the moral question remains difficult, because a lie is still a lie even when it is told under pressure or in rebellion.
Psychologists have long connected lying to self-presentation, insecurity and narcissism. Narcissism, in this sense, is not only vanity. It is the need to defend an image at all costs, even when reality gets in the way. Its opposite echo is humility: the willingness to be corrected, to tolerate embarrassment and to let facts matter more than ego. That trait is rare in public life, but essential to any healthy information culture.
The history of lying includes some of the most durable myths ever repeated. Ancient and historical falsehoods have survived because they were useful, memorable or flattering to later storytellers. Common examples include the claim that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, the myth that medieval people believed the earth was flat, and the older false notion that the pyramids were built by slaves. These stories endure because they simplify history into moral fables, even when evidence says otherwise.
The modern problem is not only human. Large language models can produce hallucinations, which are fluent but false outputs, and they can also generate misleading responses that steer users toward wrong conclusions. The crucial distinction is intent. A hallucination is usually a failure of grounding. A misleading output may be accidental or strategically shaped. In human terms, lying requires intention. In machine terms, the line is less clear, because current systems do not possess a human moral consciousness, even if they can be trained or prompted to generate deceptive effects.
That distinction matters. Machines do not “lie” the way people do in the full psychological sense, but they can still mislead. They can invent citations, fabricate facts, omit context or phrase answers in ways that exploit trust. As these systems become more embedded in daily life, the danger is not that they will become human, but that they will become persuasive enough to blur the line between error and deception.
Lauder’s role in the public sphere also reflects the power of narrative. He has long been associated with Jewish communal leadership, philanthropy and support for Israel, including efforts to improve Israel’s public standing abroad. That work sits at the intersection of diplomacy, identity and media strategy, where the battle is not only over territory or policy but over reputation, legitimacy and belief.
That is why a conversation about lying cannot stay confined to personal ethics. It has to include politics, psychology, technology and public relations. Lies work when they find an audience ready to believe them, a system ready to amplify them, or a leader willing to use them as policy. Truth survives only when institutions, journalists, scientists and citizens keep testing claims against evidence.
Ronald S. Lauder’s appearance in this setting gives the topic added force. The larger lesson is that lying is not just a moral failure. It is a civic risk, a psychological habit and, increasingly, a technical challenge. In an age of political spin, strategic falsehood and machine-generated output, the defense of truth depends on something simple but hard: the willingness to prefer reality over advantage.
(Michael de la Force, LIKE® Magazine, 6.5.2026)
Source post: https://facebook.com/reel/2192138544882047/