Baldwin held private self-deception and national lies to be inextricably linked.

Evidence

Lies, he maintained, gave birth to more lies. He insisted that we see the connection between the disaster of our interior lives and the mess of a country that believed, for some odd reason, that if you were white you mattered more than others. What we made of ourselves in our most private moments, we made of the country. The two were inextricably related, because the country itself reflected those intimate terrors that moved us about. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 60

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘The lie’ — the second core term of the reader’s task — defined here as the nation’s self-deception rooted in intimate evasion.