It Works

I use the word “lie” in a very specific sense. I mean the knowing telling of an untruth with an intention to deceive. At RealClearPolitics J. Budziszewski considers why politicians lie so much these days. Dr. Budziszewski examines multiple reasons including

• Fewer consequences for lying
• Advances in the technology of lying
• Changes in motives for lying

Here’s a key snippet from his post:

Lying could not make way so easily were it not for the fact that we are passing through a pandemic of lunacy, in which huge numbers of people, on both sides of the spectrum, hold beliefs that are not just loopy, but harmful and contagious. In a recent book, I detail 30 of these delusions, but for the moment, let me focus on two that are especially relevant to political lying.

One concerns the nature of right and wrong: Sometimes we just have to do the wrong thing. We think that to make things come out right, of course we may lie. More and more of the things that pass under the name of making things better make them inexpressibly worse. We justify burning down neighborhoods “to advance racial justice.” We lie about political opponents “because they want to do bad things.” We give false testimony “because we just know” the accused person must deserve something bad. We unjustly penalize honest people “just to give others a chance.” We “solve the problem” of unwanted children by killing them all, telling ourselves that they aren’t really children unless we choose to believe that they are. We slaughter countless numbers so that no one will have a “poorer quality of life.” We lie about all of it.

The other concerns the nature of reality: Things are whatever we say they are. It’s easy to be indifferent to the facts if you think saying something makes it true. One day in a university course I teach, we were discussing the nature of marriage. Some students were puzzled: How could marriage have a nature? As one said, “We can define things however we want.”

Being human I lie occasionally. I try not to. To the best of my knowledge I have never lied on this site. From time to time I have posted something that was pointed out to be untrue and I generally acknowledge that.

Does Trump lie? Of course he does. As has every president in the history of the Republic, indeed, every politician. Does he lie more than other politicians? I think he does but that one is complicated. As I’ve pointed out in the past, it has been my observation that people who’ve been rich all their lives live in a different reality than I do, one shaped by their own wishes. That is one of the several reasons I have never voted for him. What looks like lying may sometimes be a refusal to acknowledge disconfirming reality but the effect on public trust is the same.

The notion that “truth is whatever works” is simply too post-modern for me. There is such a thing as objective reality and disprovability. I do not think that when something you believe or that’s worked for you is disproven that acknowledging that is a sign of weakness. Quite to the contrary, I think it’s a sign of strength. Many politicians these days seem to think otherwise. A politics that treats changing one’s mind as weakness cannot survive contact with reality for long.

I am always reminded of the remark made by Paul Samuelson (paraphrasing John Maynard Keynes), “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”.

A strict adherence to the facts can have a cost, not just for those found to have been mistaken (or lying) but for those who point it out. Continuing to support a politician who you know to have lied to you whom you would otherwise support makes you complicit in his lies. A society that tolerates lying eventually loses the ability to distinguish innocence from guilt. We should keep in mind George Bernard Shaw’s observation:

Just as the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.