Stop Lying
Chris Johns
Could lying be at the heart of all our ills?
Politicians have lied to us forever.
Cynicism is older than democracy. Dictionaries give us two versions of the cynic: the classical Greek definition that refers to the school of thought founded by Antisthenes which held in contempt ostentatious pleasure and desire for comfort. The more common definition, today at least, sees a cynic as one who sees nothing but self-interest in human motivation. This is most commonly observed with regard to our views about politicians, in particular, who can never see, let alone do, the right thing. The two definitions of the cynic have obvious overlaps.
When it comes to our politics we are all cynics now. We see nothing but venal, populist men and women without beliefs or values, merely currying favour from shifting interest groups. More than anything else, we believe the entire political class to be be liars.
Those interest groups know they are being lied to. They just prefer the lies of one politician rather than the lies of another. Cue the rise of identity politics.
Politicians have lied to us forever. It’s nothing new. My thesis is this: the sheer scale of modern political lying lies at the heart of most of our ills.
If we believe that politicians lie all the time, where should we seek the truth? If the answer is social media then we have a simple explanation for the rampant conspiracy theories that sully everyday discourse. We get to choose our own facts. A la carte belief is all the rage because the truth is unknowable: we trust nobody to give us facts. Michael Gove, practitioner of these dark arts par excellence, put it well. As Sting put it a good few years ago
You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me
Eminent authors write books about political lying. Here is an old, brilliant, example of the genre, attributed to Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels fame. More recently, Peter Oborne has written extensively about the rise and rise of political lies.
A fascinating conversation between Eamon Dunphy and Peter Oborne can he found here. The blurb on the front cover of Oborne’s latest book puts it well: ‘The Emergence of a New Barbarism’. Barbarism indeed.
Examples of lies are legion. We all have our favourites. In the UK, Boris Johnson’s latest broken promise hardly amounts to the biggest porky he has ever told but, because of that simple fact, hardly merits a headline. The Tory government’s promise to never raise taxes is about to be broken.
Like all great lies, this one comes wrapped around a kernel of truth. It actually makes abundant sense to spend more on social care. The current system is a complete mess, causes unnecessary stress, anxiety and hardship, especially for the elderly. Because it - the decision to raise national insurance contributions - is ‘just another lie’, nobody pays it much attention. The fact that it also makes no sense whatsoever hardly merits a mention. One lonely analyst has tried to show it up for the nonsense it is, here.
Chris Giles of the FT makes the point that if Johnson had only followed the advice of his experts he could have raised taxes in the next parliament (thus honouring his promise not to to raise them in this one).
… it appears that the Treasury has not been tasked with finding the best way to finance social care reform. Instead it has been asked to justify an increase in a narrow tax on jobs and earnings not paid by pensioners. When asked, even the smartest people in the Treasury struggle to explain why higher national insurance should fund better social care.
Giles suggest that the politicians demanding that anybody but pensioners should see their taxes rise have abandoned simple arithmetic, if not mathematics. The key objective is to not put taxes up for a demographic that generally votes Tory. ‘Only’ putting a tax on jobs up by 1% (for employees) means that the original promise has only been broken a little bit. In the grander scheme of things it’s not such a big lie. In any event, we’ve known ever since President Bush (the first one) said ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ that such promises are always lies, never believed. It’s a common refrain.
Giles and plenty of others point out that the National Insurance system is itself an example of a big lie: the idea that British taxpayers ‘pay into’ a fund that is then set aside to pay for things like health, unemployment benefits and social care. There is no such fund: it just all gets spent on whatever the government of the day feels like. It’s the same with Ireland’s PRSI and many other national systems that fund pensions and the like with ‘pay-as-you-go’ financing.
If you think your state pension is safely ring-fenced because you have paid into it for years you are sadly mistaken. And quite likely to be severely disappointed - the lies will become evident - when you retire, particularly if you are young.
Peter Stefanovic has a neat little video that contains a decent collection (by no means exhaustive) of Boris Johnson’s lies. Stefanovic is clearly baffled by two things. First, why there isn’t a popular revolt over the blatant lies and, second, why broadcast media isn’t all over the lies.
Almost quaintly, and certainly touchingly, someone has suggested a parliamentary petition to make lying in parliament illegal.
Out of a population approaching 70 million, only 130,836 people could be bothered to sign this on-line petition. Was anyone surprised when the government responded thus:
Lying corrupts everything. The more of it there is, the more corrupt things become.
Lies come in many forms. John Kerry, is the first US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. He tours the world telling everyone to do what the United States utterly refuses to do. No politician has come clean about how to make the world clean.
‘Pretence of knowledge’ is another form of lying. My own profession is spectacularly guilty of this. Long dead economist Friedrich von Hayek wrote about it extensively and delivered his Nobel lecture on the subject. He meant it in the context of how communism and central planning embody the lie of pretending to know how the economy functions. To be fair, economists are much more humble these days. That’s what a global financial crisis that nobody saw coming - many said it could never happen - will do to you.
We used to have ‘celebrity economists’. They have shuffled off the stage, thank goodness, as the tasks of economic prediction and management have shown up their models for what they are. But now we have celebrity epidemiologists, who, one presumes, will one day also be held to account for their models, their predictions.
I find the scientific consensus persuasive and was doubly jabbed at the earliest opportunity. I encourage anyone who will listen to me to do the same. I disagree utterly with anti-vaxers but can understand at least some of their doubts when they assert their belief that they are being lied to. I think they are nuts, but can understand why they are confused. If you know that you are lied to almost all of the time, why believe anything you are told? How is one to distinguish between facts and fantasy if traditional sources of truth are no longer to be trusted?
Many years ago, over a beer in Cape Town, I once asked a South African acquaintance why he had accepted without protest the apartheid regime. ‘My priest, my parents, my friends, my newspapers and my government all told me it was the right system’. I responded to his answer the same way you would have done: '‘why didn’t you think for yourself, didn’t ordinary human decency, the presence of sanctions and Nelson Mandela tell you anything?’
Today, in an age of utterly conflicting information and rampant official lying, how is anyone to be expected to think for themselves? Where do we get our facts? Is this the age of the unenlightened?
Can I substantiate my claim that lying is now orders of magnitude worse than it has ever been? Probably not. But this is my blog so I will merely assert it and leave to others to refute.
The absence of truth leaves a vacuum to be filled. The wicked actors jostling to occupy the space vacated by truth are visible in plain sight.
Until we stop lying about everything we cannot pretend to have a value system worth defending. The Chinese, of all governments, can point to us and laugh. The West, they say, is decadent. Not caring about being lied to is the most obvious manifestation of our decadence. We are satisfied with bread and circuses, just as the Romans were. Money and celebrity are all that matters, the modern forms of that bread, those circuses. Democracy leads inevitably to the lowest political common denominator. The decline of the West is self-evident and going the way of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Who am I to argue?
As long as the traditional media endorse everything the politicians say … the lies will continue. Why are politicians not challenged? Who is stopping the querying by those with microphones in their hands??