Published on October 6 on the LEGALGLASS Substack

During the COVID era I learned that truth can die not only through censorship, but through the will not to know.

When official guidance whiplashed faster than anyone could absorb it, many people—good, intelligent people—chose safety in slogans.

They said “I believe in science” not as an invitation to keep asking questions, but as a way to end the conversation.

Early on, the promises of safety were sweeping: stay home, wear a mask, wait for the vaccine.

By the end of 2020, the regulatory filings and emergency-use authorizations were already public. They showed that the first trials had been designed to measure short-term symptomatic relief—not whether the shots prevented transmission or offered lasting protection.

Anyone who wanted to read those documents could; they were posted with the authorization letters and analyzed in outlets such as the BMJ.

Yet public messaging hardened around a different story: the vaccine would stop the spread.

A lie.

Officials repeated it, and most citizens accepted it—some even used it as a cudgel to enforce compliance. Children’s health and schooling were sacrificed on the altar of “saving Grandma.”

When some of us pointed to the original documents, to the gap between data and marketing, friends asked us to stop sending links.

They didn’t want to know; the truth was too wearying, too politically charged, too frightening.

What Václav Havel called “living within a lie” doesn’t always come from fear of punishment.

Sometimes it’s the quiet relief of not having to re-examine what we’ve already defended.

As new contradictions appeared, the pattern repeated.

A fraudulent study on hydroxychloroquine in The Lancet was retracted; leaders who wrote the restrictive “safety” rules were filmed breaking them; the PCR testing regime used to ramp up case numbers was quietly revised; even the “from COVID” death rate—once weaponized to spread panic—was later adjusted without apology.

Each time, the public mood adjusted without reflection. We were trained to move on before questions could take root.

Explanations shifted; memories blurred—or were willingly led astray.

The lie survived not only because it was easily offered, but because people preferred the warmth of belonging to the chill of doubt.

Havel understood this reflex perfectly.

In The Power of the Powerless, he imagined a greengrocer who hangs a Party slogan in his window—“Workers of the World Unite!”—not out of conviction but out of habit and fear.

Our COVID-era slogans were different—“We’re all in this together,” “Follow the science,” “Wear a damn mask.”

To question them, even politely, was to risk social exile.

But were we all in this together? While the laptop class largely enjoyed years at home with full pay, others lost their small businesses, their homes, their livelihoods.

And what did it mean to Follow the Science, really, when it was obvious that dissenting scientific views were not encouraged—or allowed?

So many good people kept repeating slogans that never matched reality simply to stay in good standing.

The New Slogans

The slogans didn’t end when the lockdowns lifted. They simply changed shape. “Safe and effective.” “Vaccines save lives.” “RFK Jr. wants to bring back polio.” Each is repeated with the same certainty—and the same incuriosity—as “Follow the science.” They are designed to end discussion, not deepen it. Real science is a method, not a creed. It advances by asking uncomfortable questions, not by punishing them.

A society that punishes dissent cannot claim to love science, because science dies the moment questioning becomes heresy. And once inquiry is replaced by loyalty, what we are defending is no longer truth but tribe.

Hannah Arendt warned that the gravest danger in modern societies is not fanaticism but thoughtlessness—people who “never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

During the COVID era, that thoughtlessness often donned a compassionate face.

Friends insisted their compliance was for everyone’s safety, yet they refused to look at evidence that complicated the story.

Arendt called the cure “thinking as a moral act”: the inner dialogue that asks, “Is this real? Am I sure?”

When that inner conversation stops, conscience falls silent.

The Moral Frontier of Thinking

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered the simplest command: “Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me.”

He didn’t urge revolt; he urged refusal.

In our time, that refusal might mean acknowledging uncertainty out loud, or resisting the impulse to mock those who dared to ask hard questions.

It might mean admitting, “We don’t yet know,” when leaders claim certainty.

Such honesty is small but revolutionary.

Fear and the hunger for belonging have already delivered us into a crisis of trust. Truth itself has become tribal. We’ve learned to treat every health debate as a loyalty test: nutrition, new drugs, childhood vaccines, even painkillers. Each issue divides instantly into saints and heretics, and few people ever read the underlying data. Algorithms feed each camp a custom gospel of certainty.

But certainty without curiosity is just another mask.

We repeat words that sound righteous—on both sides—without pausing to ask whether they make sense.

What is a decent person supposed to do? People have jobs, children, aging parents, constant noise. Who has time to dig through regulatory filings or raw data? And yet that is exactly the moral frontier of our age: whether we will keep outsourcing thought to “trusted sources” even after those sources have been proven wrong—or whether we will reclaim the work of thinking for ourselves.

Living in truth today does not require superhuman expertise. It begins with humility and a few disciplines:

· Go to the primary sources. Read the document, not the headline about the document. Listen directly to the person being maligned, instead of relying upon someone else’s interpretation of what he/she said.

· Ask, “Does this claim make sense?” Follow logic, not emotion.

· Watch for slogans. If a phrase shuts down discussion instead of opening it, it probably serves power, not truth.

· Hold yourself accountable. When evidence overturns your own belief, admit it aloud.

· Extend grace to those who question. Curiosity is not a crime. Labeling someone a “conspiracy theorist” is often just another way to avoid asking hard questions.

These are small acts, but they are the moral repair work of a free people. Truth can survive error; it cannot survive indifference. If we want a world less ruled by manipulation—whether from corporations, governments, or our own echo chambers—we have to prize honesty above tribal loyalty.

Havel, Arendt, and Solzhenitsyn lived through very dark decades, but the pattern of self-deception never changes. Every society is one declared emergency away from discovering how easily decency bends into obedience. To live in truth now means to keep asking, to keep looking, to keep refusing slogans that replace thought.

The Work of Living in Truth

When he realized he was not standing in truth, Havel’s greengrocer took down his sign. For us, that act may mean reading the study instead of dismissing it, admitting when a comforting narrative is propaganda, or speaking when silence would be safer. The form changes; the courage is the same. Only truth—sought daily, spoken quietly, and lived honestly—can rebuild our integrity and the trust we squandered since COVID. Living that way will not make us popular, but it will keep us human.

Please follow Rita on her Substack for in-depth, medical freedom essays.