Stop insulting the intelligence of Albanians!

2026-07-06 19:21:00, Opinione Ardi Stefa

Stop insulting the intelligence of Albanians!
There is a limit to poverty. There is also a limit to patience. But the limit that Albanian politics seems to have completely eliminated is that of respect for the intelligence of citizens.

Not poverty! Not corruption! Not propaganda! These are the consequences. At the heart of it lies the arrogant belief that the citizen can be lied to endlessly, that his memory is short-term, and that the truth can be eternally replaced with a lie.

History is full of politicians and governments that have fallen into this trap. And, since I always like to refer to literature, when George Orwell wrote that “freedom is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear,” he wasn’t just talking about dictatorships. He was also warning democracies that could one day turn propaganda into a form of government.

In the novel “1984,” the Ministry of Truth had a simple mission: to rewrite reality. Today, there is no need for such ministries. Screens, armies of propaganda, statistics chosen according to interest, and lies that cover up the facts are enough. The lie no longer needs to be credible; it just needs to be repeated until fatigue replaces reason.

Even Hannah Arendt understood this mechanism. She wrote that the ideal subject of propaganda is not the one who believes everything, but the one who no longer believes anything. When the citizen loses faith in the truth, he becomes manipulable. That is where the triumph of power over reason begins.

This is why “insulting intelligence” is not a communication error. It is a method of governance. Every promise that contradicts reality, every statistic that is used to hide the truth, every absurd justification that is repeated over and over again, has the same goal: not to convince, but to tire. To create a society that gives up on the search for truth and accepts the official version as the only reality.

Every day Albanians are asked to believe what they see is not true. They are told that they are witnessing success when they feel failure. They are told that the economy is booming, while families are scratching their pockets. They are told that justice is independent whenever it strikes an opponent and caught whenever it touches them. They are told to believe that prices have not increased, when they pay them. To believe that corruption is being defeated, while scandals multiply. To believe in meritocracy, when appointments depend on loyalty. The truth no longer matters; it only matters how many times the lie is repeated.

Regimes of all times have not survived by force alone. They have survived by convincing people to doubt their reason. When power tells you that black is white and expects you to applaud, it is asking you to surrender your judgment.

But you forget something. Citizens may forgive you for your mistakes. They do not forgive contempt. And there is no greater contempt than treating a people as incapable of distinguishing truth from propaganda.

Albanians are not as naive as propaganda makes them out to be. They can be fooled for a while, but not forever. They can be silent, but silence is not consent. Albanians are tired. And when the fatigue of a society turns into anger, then politics must prepare the spoils!

Precisely because it has treated the citizen as a spectator of a propaganda show, not as a person who compares, remembers, and reasons. Every recycled promise, every embellished statistic, every absurd justification is based on the same arrogant assumption: that people will forget yesterday as soon as they hear today's new justification.

But memory is more stubborn than propaganda.

A democracy doesn't just die when votes are rigged. It begins to die when it becomes normal to arrogantly insult people's intelligence.

And when a government begins to insult the intelligence of the people, it has begun, without realizing it, to write its own epilogue./CNA