Page 16 - SurprisingTruthSample

The Surprising Truth About Lying
was to build a strongbox of comfortable lies and weld
it shut against the truth.
Today's fire was brought to him by Cerulean
Dynamics. The pill pedlars. His biggest client. They
had been sitting on hard evidence that their flagship
anti-anxiety drug, the one called Slumberol (the “sleep
juice”), didn't just ease your nerves; it was a slow-burn
chemical hook that gave you brain rot and rebound
psychosis if you tried to quit. The evidence had just
busted loose. The panic line was now tracking how fast
the world was realizing they'd been had.
“We need a hard pivot, Henry. Now. The board is
absolutely melting down,” his boss, the CEO of The
Clarity Group, squealed over the speaker. He sounded
exactly like a man watching his second yacht sink in
real-time.
Henry already knew. He didn't need the
melodrama. The Pharma stock was tanking. The real
problem, the millions of people suddenly finding out
they were hooked on chemical poison, was invisible to
the ticker. That was a moral cost, and moral costs didn't
matter here. Only the money mattered. The goal was
simple: kill the panic line. The solution was complex:
craft an apology so airtight and so full of high-grade,
premium bullshit that it made the pain go away.
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