Living Not By Lies in the Modern West

We flatter ourselves that the West is inoculated against totalitarian impulses. My recent experience in Brussels shows we are not.

Watching Angel Studios’ documentary Live Not By Lies at its glittering London premiere last week felt like less like a history lesson, and more like looking in a cracked mirror. The film, based on Rod Dreher’s bestselling book, charts the experiences of Christians who lived under Eastern European communism—people who were surveilled, harassed, and sometimes imprisoned simply because they refused to parrot the official dogmas of the day.

The truly unsettling part isn’t just what happened to them, but how familiar it all sounds now. We flatter ourselves that Western democracies are somehow inoculated against totalitarian impulses. We tell ourselves it can’t happen here. But the evidence is mounting that it already is.

Dreher’s point is simple: when the state and powerful cultural forces combine to enforce ideological conformity, liberty dies by degrees. Under communism, you had to proclaim the Party’s perfection and pretend that utopian dogma made sense. Today, you are expected to declare that men can be women, that children should be dosed with puberty blockers, and that anyone who dares to disagree is a bigot worthy of public shaming or prosecution.

I had my first personal taste of decrying the will of the State last month, on a busy public square in Brussels. While on a trip to meet with Members of the European Parliament, my friend Chris – known to most as child safety campaigner “Billboard Chris” - and I used some of our free time to go out to the man on the street, and engage in street interviews about the one of the most alarming human rights scandals of our day – child “transition”.

Our signs, reading “children are never born in the wrong body” and “children cannot consent to puberty blockers”, were conversation prompts to invite engagement. But as we stood ready to engage in honest discussion and debate, we were surrounded and harassed by a growing group of individuals who pointed fingers in our faces, sought to intimidate me, and treated us to a host of Flemish verbal abuse. After over an hour of increasing friction, we called the police to protect ourselves from what seemed like inevitable escalation.

4 police vans arrived. 15 police officers. They surveyed the scene – a mob surrounding us, yelling “shame on you”. Us, holding our signs peacefully in the middle. The police presented us with two options. Put away our signs – or come down to the police station.

To put away our signs would be to concede that our message was wrong. That our words were bad. That the crowd – or the arm of the State – could dictate what we believed by fear. So we stood our ground. We went to the station. We were arrested, handcuffed, strip searched, and jailed for the evening.

In any sane society, the sight of police arresting people for saying that boys are boys and girls are girls should be a national scandal. Yet this happened in Brussels – the heart of the EU, a powerful seat of Western democracy.

Some still claim these comparisons to Soviet-style repression are overwrought. The consequence of a few hours in jail is light compared to the lifelong torment of the dissidents in the East. But the logic is eerily similar. Under communism, dissenters were guilty of “anti-Soviet agitation.” Now we have “hate speech” laws that function the same way: to silence ideas that make the powerful uncomfortable. Of course, we haven’t yet descended into gulags. But when police can drag people off the streets for expressing mainstream views, the line between liberal democracy and soft totalitarianism begins to blur.

Live Not By Lies shows how this starts. It doesn’t begin with show trials or mass arrests. It begins when people are told that refusing to endorse a lie makes them dangerous. When saying “I don’t agree” becomes a threat to public safety. When the authorities decide that the state has the right to manage not just your actions but your thoughts and words.

Dreher’s documentary recalls the courage of those who refused to comply—people like Vaclav Havel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who understood that totalitarianism relies on everyone playing along. You don’t have to believe the slogans; you just have to repeat them. That’s how lies become institutionalised. The only way to resist is to refuse to mouth them in the first place.

Yet how many today are willing to do that? We live in a culture obsessed with signaling virtue and terrified of sticking out. The new heresy hunters no longer wear commissar uniforms. They work in HR departments, social media mobs, and yes, police forces, eager to stamp out the slightest flicker of dissent. For all our talk of tolerance and progress, we are becoming a society in which disagreement is treated as deviance.

Our story from Brussels was a temperature check. If you say what you actually think—especially about sex and gender —you will be targeted. It is the same impulse Dreher documents: to root out independent thought and replace it with an enforced consensus. If you don’t comply, you’ll be labelled a threat.

This is why Live Not By Lies matters. It isn’t just a look back at totalitarianism in the 20th century. It’s a glimpse of where our own culture is heading if we don’t rediscover the value of freedom. No government should have the power to punish citizens for peacefully stating what most people quietly believe. No law should compel anyone to affirm ideas they know to be false.

We don’t need gulags for society to become unfree. All it takes is enough people too afraid to speak. The choice is ours: live by the lie, or stand up—peacefully, but without apology.