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I still remember the moment I realized how many adults are gainfully employed specifically to lie. At the time, we were doing a sit-in at my college to protest their handling of sexual misconduct and the college president was not handling it well.

In the big policy shift that followed, I realized that the college president's job was not actually running the college, it was largely a PR position. Furthermore, as I watched the president and the college administration spin the whole situation to minimize damage to the college's reputation while also trying to reduce student voice in school policy as much as possible while pretending they were doing the opposite, something clicked for me.

Their jobs were to make the college look good, and to do whatever was necessary to accomplish that goal. Not to take care of the students, not to provide as good of an education as possible, but to protect the institution at all costs. In retrospect it seems obvious, but it was a big shift in thinking for me at the time.

In this specific example, that looked like making a bunch of policy changes that looked good on paper but were mostly temporary ("subject to further review" is the operative phrase) and then wait for the students who organized the protest to graduate and then roll things back, gradually removing student voice from the policy work and firing the staff they had hired to placate said students. Some vestiges remain of our work, but much has been lost in the years since.

It was a dramatic reveal for me personally, and I'll never forget that moment of realization. Nowadays I am fully aware that anyone whose job position includes PR (spokespeople, folks with media training, CEOs, etc) is someone who is paid to lie. That's literally their job. Accuracy/truth doesn't factor into it.

The recent blatant lies of the Google spokespeople about collaboration with the Israel Defense Ministry reminded me of this. It's wild to me how many people will take these liars at their word as if their entire role isn't premised on distorting the truth and protecting the powerful. I think it's important to keep this in mind.