Life & Wisdom Quote by L. Neil Smith

"Drowning" is the right verb because it frames deception as environmental, not episodic. L. Neil Smith isn’t picturing a bad actor telling a few whoppers; he’s picturing a whole atmosphere where lies become the medium you breathe, the water you can’t get your head above. That move shifts blame from individual morality to systems: media ecosystems optimized for outrage, politics built on narrative discipline, institutions that reward plausible deniability. A "sea" doesn’t have a single source, which is the point. It suggests diffusion, scale, and the terrifying absence of a shoreline.

Smith’s intent, consistent with his libertarian-leaning science fiction and polemical streak, is less a lament than an alarm: civilization itself is the hostage. The line is engineered to feel apocalyptic but not mystical; it’s civic collapse as a byproduct of informational collapse. "Human civilization" is doing strategic work here, too. It raises the stakes past partisan scandal or a single era’s propaganda. If the basic inputs are corrupted, everything downstream - law, markets, intimacy, consent - starts to rot.

The subtext is distrust of gatekeepers and official narratives: the idea that modern institutions manufacture consensus by laundering falsehood into respectability. It also carries a self-implicating edge. If we are "drowning", we’re not merely victims; we’re swimmers who kept choosing convenience over verification, story over evidence, tribe over truth. The sentence is blunt because it wants to be unignorable - a flare fired into the fog of competing realities.