Why do seemingly serious people repeat crazy political lies? This was the question the American anthropologist and political scientist Lisa Wedeen explored when she studied the Syrian dictatorship in the 1990s. She was struck by how people who were usually rational in private would repeat the utterly absurd slogans of the regime, such as claiming that the dictator Hafez al-Assad was the greatest chemist in the world. “From the moment you leave your house, you ask: what does the regime want?,” a Syrian explained to her. “The struggle becomes who can praise the government more.” The bigger the lie you...