 All of these issues aside, the most persistent and serious misunderstanding of Strauss is that he promotes mass deception. On this reading, Strauss suggests that the masses simply cannot handle the truth and are in need of a class of political elites who, while themselves pursuing the truth, support the noble lies necessary for any society to function. If this was Strauss’s view then, as Moshe Halbertal has recently and rightly noted, Strauss or “the Straussians are…naïve in believing that genuine elites can be trusted. Trusting the existence of a selected group of wise men who are devoted to the collective good, and who are freed from ambition and self-interest because of their pursuit of truth, is as crude as the belief in a society where masses disappear and deliberation and reason control human’s political choices” (CR, p. 163). Halbertal calls Strauss’s conception of esotericism “instrumental” because it “focuses on the harmful results of the dissemination” [of the truth] (CR, p. 149).