Might we call this the incredulity of the lambs?

Noted in an account of a book club discussion, by way of Slate: 

I know you are reading quite the tome for your book club right now. How many pages in are you, and have you, uh, been struck by anything in particular?

Luke Winkie: So, yes, our book club is currently about 300 pages deep into The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, the 1960 classic by journalist William Shirer, who lived and worked in Nazi Germany and had an up-close view on the country’s descent into fascism.

By far, the most sobering passage I’ve read is when Shirer articulates the psychic toll of living in a totalitarian, propagandized state. Let me quote him:

“It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that … despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. 

“Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. 

“Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”

When Shirer's opus was published, my mother immediately brought a copy home. I still have that classic volume; when I broke up my parent's house after their deaths over 20 years ago, it seemed important to ship it to California. 

I first read Shirer when I was probably 14. As first hand observation, Shirer has held up well; historians have reasonable quibbles with his view from Berlin, but he knew what he saw.

We too need to believe our own eyes.