SCALES OF LIES

How America Ended Up Here

They gather at the monument in pelts, raw sheepskin, unrefined, their faces lit by screens— a crowd that knows exactly what it means to stand for something. They have found what's felt

as certainty. Above them, steel and stone: the cross-shaped monument that holds the scale. One pan sinks heavy. Watch the balance fail. The bricks marked "Lies" outweigh what truth is known.

The sun is setting, nearly blocked from view. The sky goes dark but no one turns away. They've chosen what to see, what to obey, what fires to follow, what they know is true—

or what they've learned to call truth. In the glow of golden hour, everything looks right. The skins they wear, the gathering of night, the scale that tips toward what they think they know.

They do not see themselves as following blind. Each one believes they're standing for what's real, that they're the ones who finally dare to feel the weight of what the others left behind.

But from a distance, in the fading light, the crowd looks like a herd, the pelts like hide, the monument a grave for what has died: the common ground. The shared sense of what's right.

The scale tips further. Lies outweigh the small and fragile stack of truth that rises, free from burden. But whose truth? And who can see which pan is which? Who's certain, after all?

History will record this golden hour— the monument, the crowd, the dying sun, the moment when we thought that we had won by gathering our numbers into power.

The chains sway slightly. Everything descends. The question hanging in that amber air: What happens when the scale breaks from the wear of all this weight? How does the fracture mend?

The camera pushes forward through the mass of bodies wrapped in wool-on-hide, their faces set. The monument looms larger. Not yet, not yet— but soon the sun will sink. The hour will pass.