All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Schopenhauer.
Berdyaev: In what is the cause of the exceptional role of lying in our epoch? This is connected with a change in the structure of consciousness. The extraordinary increase of lying in the world and of the justified lie, not considered a vice, is determined first of all by an exteriorising of the conscience. When the conscience, producing moral judgements, is carried over from the depths of person to the collectives and in the dynamic of the collectives into history, then how readily the lie can seem justified. But even in the past the lie was justified not by the personal conscience, but by the conscience of the collective, by a conscience that is national, churchly, state, military, class, party, etc. But never yet in such proportions has there occurred the withdrawal of conscience from the depths of person and its transference to collective realities, as in our time. The personal conscience, the personal moral judgement not only are paralysed, but they demand of them that they be paralysed. The personal conscience would never recourse to suchlike a lie, to which recourses the conscience of the state, the nation, the party, the class, etc. In the name of the interests of the German race or of the proletariat can be permitted the grand and organised lie, which would nauseate the personal conscience of the individual German national-socialist or Russian communist. The denigration of the structure of consciousness is explicable in this, that for the individual consciousness there is denied the right furthermore to define the realities and distinguish them from the fictitious, and this right is acknowledged only but for the collective consciousness.