A Convenient Political Tool

A woman I was dating a few years ago turned out to be something of a pathological liar.

When confronted with this fact, she said, rather forcefully, “Well, you go by the dictionary definition of a lie as a statement that doesn’t correspond to the facts. To me a lie is a false statement that someone uses against me. If I make a false statement that is to my advantage, that’s not a lie.” Need I say that was the end of that relationship?

So, in the postmodern age, when everything except relativism is relative, a lie tends to be no more than a convenient tool for obtaining what we want. This happens so often in the political realm that right now some people are harming their own cause by putting out “facts” about one candidate or the other that are flat-out preposterous. This tendency in the society at large is so strong that a number of years ago M. Scott Peck entitled his book on the human propensity for evil People of the Lie. When someone writing on one side of the aisle puts out a lie accusing the other side of the aisle of being a bunch of liars, that is hypocrisy of the worst kind.

I know of a university course on television commercials in which the instructor shows a commercial and then asks his class, “All right. What’s the lie in this one?” In some cases the basic lie is right on the surface, for example in an athletic shoe commercial some fifteen years ago: “All men are created equal. Some just work harder in the off season.” Yeah, sure. If I had worked harder in the off season I would have won the Olympic decathlon? Doubtful at best. The more subtle lie was the implication that the shoe in question was necessarily associated with success in athletics. And of course we’re all familiar with the commercials that imply, for example, that if a man uses a certain brand of wax on his car he will be besieged by adoring women, even if he looks like something that washed up on the beach during a storm. Or if we buy a certain make of car the city streets will be deserted except for us and that car. Oh, and how about that magazine ad showing a homely rustic who plans to win a gorgeous diva by learning a few phrases of Italian?

But what do we do with Winston Churchill’s statement that the truth is the first casualty in any war? He and the Allies certainly did a masterful job of convincing the Nazis, with the exception of Erwin Rommel, that we were going to attack at the Pas de Calais, when the actual attack took place at Normandy. The question would seem to be to what purpose an untruth is put forth. On a far less important level than the D-Day invasion, not many of us would refrain from fibbing to a friend having a birthday about our reason for taking him or her to a certain location where a surprise party is taking place. So a lie might really be defined as an untruth told for the purpose of gaining some personal advantage over the person to whom it is being told. This is in total contrast to the belief of the woman I was dating.

In warfare we believe we do have a good reason for deceiving the enemy. The Spanish double agent code-named Garbo fed his Nazi handlers all sorts of false information in order to save many lives in London and elsewhere, telling them their rocket bombs were falling short and so forth. The problem enters when we attempt to extend that principle beyond its use in warfare into more dubious areas. To what extent is it legitimate, for example, for the United States government to lie to the people “for their own good”? Obviously there are situations in which it is necessary, but who makes the final judgment in questionable cases?

In the film Spy Game, the younger agent is greatly conflicted about what he has been ordered to do in an operation, and the older one attempts to explain the rationale for it. The younger one asks, wryly, “For the greater good?”

“Yeah, for the greater good,” answers the voice of experience.

The problem enters when, for example, we treat a political campaign as an ideological war, complete with Churchill’s principle that truth is war’s first casualty. How long is our republic going to last if we allow the idea that a lie is no more than a convenient tool to take hold? Some formerly great newspapers are suffering a serious drop in circulation at the present time, in part because they have found it convenient to spew out preposterous lies in support of their ideological position. As it turns out, many of their readers aren’t being taken in by them.

Back in the sixteenth century, William Cowper wrote the following lines:

He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,

And all are slaves beside.