Lies That Bind: From Pool Tables to Gulags

Today I’m going to be cribbing from a great article by Jon Miltimore’s Substack, “The Take”, which I highly recommend. It’s called “Sin City, Solzhenitsyn, and the Power of Deceit”. I’m drawing from this article, but I’m not doing it justice. Check it out for yourself.

In this piece, Miltimore highlights the great movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s even greater graphic novel series Sin City. More specifically, he focuses on the primary villain of the piece, the evil and corrupt Senator Ethan Roark. At one point in the film, Roark tells us the secret to his power — lies. Big ones.

From Miltimore’s article:

“Power don't come from a badge or a gun. Power comes from lying. Lying big, and gettin' the whole damn world to play along with you,” Roark says. “Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you've got 'em by the balls.”

The senator then tells Hartigan that he could “pump you full of bullets right now” and not face any consequences.

“Everyone would lie for me, everyone who counts,” Roark tells Hartigan at gunpoint.

Miltimore then pivots to the real-life horrors depicted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn’s time in the horrific and dehumanizing Soviet labor camps taught him a very similar truth: for violence and evil to really take root, they require mountains of lies.

From Solzhenitsyn’s Live Not By Lies:

“When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: 'I am violence. Run away, make way for me — I will crush you.' But violence quickly grows old, after only a few years it loses confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally—since violence can conceal itself with nothing except lies, and the lies can be maintained only by violence.”

This is key. For violence and control to last, both perpetrator and victim must embrace and amplify what they know to be false, that they “participate in falsehood”.

So, what should we do to combat this evil? Again, in Live Not By Lies, Solzhenitsyn tells us:

“The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.”

Which brings me to the real topic for today. One particularly egregious example of the pile of lies we are being asked to go along with.

A few days ago, two men faced off for a women’s championship title at the Ultimate Pool Women’s Pro Series Event 2 in Wigan, UK. Harriet Haynes and Lucy Smith, both trans-identified males, beat all female competitors to take the spots in the women’s final event.

Haynes won the final match and the £1,800 prize. Smith won £900 for second. Both defeated 4 women en route to the finals. Sixteen participants, 14 women, 2 men. And as a surprise to absolutely nobody, the two men took the top two prizes.

Most of the online discussion about this travesty has been about what is “fair” vs. what is “inclusive” and whether men have an advantage in pool/billiards or not. Clearly they do. They are taller, have more power in the break and in draw and massé shots.

Plus, men and women are just… different – and in more ways than the obvious: speed, power, and height. Men/boys tend to be overrepresented in things that require you to hyper-specialize. There seems to be a greater variance in male temperament and one of the consequences of that is that most careers which require intense, singular focus on a narrow field are overrepresented by men.

For example, there’s no obvious reason why men dominate women in chess… except they do. Maybe it’s just because you have to be a little nuts to study chess openings maniacally enough to be truly excellent. Maybe women have less propensity to be that obsessive about the game.

Who knows? But the broader point is that we carved out women’s spaces for a reason. That reason never went away, so let’s abandon this trans-inclusive insanity, shall we?

And even more important, don’t lie. As Senator Roark and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have shown us, lying is how we destroy ourselves and our society. Don’t do it.

I mean, this old Bud Lite commercial from 1995 was supposed to be a joke, not a recommendation.

And never forget Voltaire’s wise warning, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

It was true then. It’s still true now.

Naturally,

Adam