We all learned in school about young George Washington’s confession to his angry father, which included the famous words "I cannot tell a lie." I don’t know what children are taught these days, but it can’t be that – those words sound too strange to us in 2017. If young George had grown up in our time, even if he had cut down a whole forest of cherry trees, would never respond to the accusation with such a simple confession. He would denounce it as fake news, call an attorney, and take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
Truth was always a scarce commodity in politics, at least since the Emperor Nero denied responsibility for burning the City of Rome in the year 64 A.D. and blamed the Christians. Lies are the oxygen of politics. I just wish our leaders would try harder to make their lies convincing. Sam Goldwyn used to say: “The most important thing in acting is honesty. Once you can fake that, you’re in.” The same is true of politics. But neither our elected representatives nor our business leaders take the trouble to fake honesty any more. It’s no longer even a question of not getting caught. You lie, get caught, shrug, and carry on. Everybody’s doing it.
Airline employees blandly tell us that our plane will be here in half an hour, when they know and we guess that it is grounded in Calcutta until next week. Doctors say, "You're doing very well for your age," although usually they’re looking you in the eye when they say it – something to do with the Hippocratic Oath I suppose. Computer software companies give out telephone numbers where we can get technical support 24 hours a day, but the phones are never answered. Every year we see tens of thousands of advertisements, virtually all lies. We are routinely deceived by big banks, big pharmaceutical companies, car manufacturers, and a thousand other corporate swindlers. Then, every four years, we have a presidential election, preceded by 18 months of whopping, monstrous unbelievable lies from every side of the one-sided political spectrum.
The sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne, who was a politician himself, wrote that “Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words that bind us together and make us human.” But then he admitted that, in the politics of his own time, lying was virtually universal.
Truth is and always has been a minority taste. The truth is usually painful, lies are usually reassuring – you can’t lose on this stock, you’ll soon feel better, the fire is under control, your leaders know what they are doing. That’s what we want to hear. H.L. Mencken, the satirical sage of Baltimore, wrote: “The men we admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men we detest most violently are those who try to tell the truth.”
We don’t have the energy to challenge every public statement from every source and, in the situation where we can’t believe anything, the path of least resistance is to believe everything. Like Alice Through the Looking Glass we’ve passed into a world where lies are true, where illusions are reality, and where faking it is better than actually doing it. Everything’s under control and, any small remaining problems in the real world will be solved overnight by the tooth fairy.
It’s true. Trust me.
Copyright: David Bouchier
