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When politicians lie to us, they are tacitly calling us stupid and weak. Stupid enough to believe their lies; weak enough to accept them.
As such, lying is a contemptuous act. Humans are social creatures. Lying is anti-social, and a debasement of both human nature and the trust and order on which we have built civilization.
You can’t conduct a sustainable business built on lies. You can’t build a home based on false measurements.
You can’t even plan a dinner with friends if nothing you say can be trusted.
“Yeah, come over at 8 o’clock. We’ll be there this time, I swear.”
At its core, lying is insulting, and ought to be taken as the insult that it is.
Especially when public figures in positions of mass influence are lying on gargantuan scales.
Being a politician is no excuse and it’s disgustingly past time for our popular culture to stop excusing politicians for lying. We need honest public servants now more than ever.
Besides, lying is a cowardly, unacceptable and gross vanity when done merely out of egocentric self-service.
But it becomes unforgivable when their lies cause real-world violence, threats of violence, and harm to others, violating the sanctity of our collective human rights to peace, justice, and security.
The contempt the liar shows is reflected back on the the liar himself.
The liar admits by dint of his tactic he himself is stupid and weak.
It doesn’t matter if the liar is smooth and clever or ham-fisted and sloppy; he is stupid and weak.
The liar insults his audience and their power of reason. Perhaps even more importantly, he insults his own.
He pathetically resorts to the use of deception in place of intelligent argument. When he is proved wrong, instead of acknowledging and learning and growing, he shrinks and narrows himself and his own mind even more.
Falling back on the childish bumper rail cheats of lies and deceit is an admission of incompetence and defeat, of being incapable of making a compelling argument built on facts, evidence, and logic.
Strength of mind is required to stay fastened to truth, to resist false equivalence, misdirection, straw men, red herrings, vulgar name-calling and scapegoating.
Strong will, patience, self-awareness, they are all necessary to hold oneself accountable to the rigorous standards of fact-based accuracy.
Dehumanizing others is a desperate and disturbed mind. Recklessly indulging the easy appeals of wild-eyed exaggeration and hyper-emotional fear-mongering is a lazy mind.
Deep knowledge, healthy skepticism, a good memory, and a skillful, capable intelligence are required to make a cogent, respectable argument.
It only takes a lack of shame to tell a pack of lies.
Any cheap huckster can do it.
Perhaps that’s why lying has always been so popular with politicians, and why politics has proven alluring to some of the most pathological liars in our popular culture.
Con men love an easy mark, and no marks are easier than those frothing and foaming in rabid political fevers.
Through the great span of recorded human civilization, we’ve seen scores of notorious, lusty, vigorous liars, taking advantage of this.
Many scapegoat others to win primitive emotional power over their followers, manifesting paranoia, distrust, and hatreds of perceived enemies.
We call those liars demagogues.
Demagogues divide society into an “us” versus “them,” creating in-groups and out-groups, and “othering” anybody who doesn’t conform.
Similar to psychopaths and common criminals, they target the already-vulnerable. They never punch up. They always punch down.
Some are able to lie their way to power and become despots.
Despots carry out institutional cruelty toward others based on lies as matters of official government policy.
They also use government corruptly to enrich themselves and their friends. They put men above the law and turn justice into a perversion of itself.
Some are able to take control over educational and media institutions to propagandize without facing independent accountability.
This is important to despots and demagogues because to them, lying is not just a political tool, it’s an overt act of power.
Their ability to lie over and over again without paying any consequences, and to force others to accept and defend their lies, is an act and a display of their dominance over their followers.
They’re not just implicitly telling their followers that they are stupid and weak by lying to them; they are explicitly proving exactly who is stupid and weak enough to acquiesce, defend, and regurgitate their lies.
Our modern technology offers them tremendous opportunities.
A galaxy of fame-thirsty egomaniacal strivers, malicious actors, and foreign and domestic propagandists are eager to debase themselves and our public discourse into little more than a bubbling cesspool of noxious lies.
They don’t need to convince, as long as they can confuse and disgust enough people into apathy, inaction, rationalization, normalization.
Some earn their bread by continually dumping truck-fulls of toxic sludge into the sump. Others wade around in it gloriously, slinging gobs of their own putrified filth at anybody and anything that gets close, painting the room with it.
It’s ironic that we can only lie to each other so quickly and so effectively and on such huge scales because our facts, our math, and our science has produced these amazing technologies.
Many thought the internet would democratize information around the world and create a bright new dawn for humanity.
Yet, less than 50 years in, we largely use it to distract ourselves with quick hits of digitally induced dopamine. And that’s the most innocent thing we do with it.
We also use it to stupefy and bamboozle ourselves into hatreds and political madness with lightning quickness and staggering effectiveness.
This endless indulgence of lying, liars, and the lies they tell, it’s how we degenerate and corrode everything we’ve built.
Slowly at first, and then all at once.
How long do the I-beams hold? When do the foundations crack? How much more can we degrade ourselves until our pillars snap and crumble?
We have a world and a history full of examples we can either learn from or ignore.
So what’ll it be?
We’ll all have to find out together.
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