Let's be honest, everyone has lied. I think the act of lying can be almost as natural as the act of speaking. None of us wants to admit our penchant for lying, and being called a liar is a horrible thing. But we have to face it, lying comes pretty easy for most people. Of course, I don’t mean that we're all pathological liars or we all lie compulsively. But most of us have a pretty sophisticated rationale for telling lies. We lie about little things, and tell ourselves that it’s OK because this lie ”doesn’t really matter”. If a little lie makes it easier for us to navigate our day and “nobody really gets hurt”, what difference does it make? Sometimes we forgive our own little lies because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. Why crush someone with real honesty when we can just as easily pass off a small “white” lie and spare their feelings? Wouldn't it be just be cruel to tell the real truth? For example we might say, “We found a more qualified candidate for the position”, instead of saying “you were so weird during the interview that you scared us”.
I’ll be the first admit, I’m among the liars. When you get right down to it I can’t think of single person who hasn’t told a lie of some kind. Well intended, or just plain crooked, every one of us has done it. If you think you’re exempt from this most human of behaviors ask yourself if you’ve ever “fudged” your income tax return by over-valuing that charitable contribution, or claiming a larger expense than you really had. Ask if you’ve ever told your kid something you know isn’t true. “Yes Billy, Santa Claus is real”. Did you ever call in sick when you weren’t sick- then tell yourself you’re entitled to a “mental health day”. Did you ever work for “cash” so you didn’t have to claim the income? or pay cash to avoid the sales tax? Did you ever promise you would do something, knowing you were going to get out of it? I could give examples all day, and I know you could too. Lying has become such a common behavior that we have even developed a whole set of commonly used phrases to indicate we aren’t lying. How many times has someone (or you) begun a sentence by saying, “to be quite honest”, or “honestly”, or “the truth is..”. It’s almost as if lying is the norm and we need to qualify our statements by first saying that we aren’t lying- this time. A couple of my favorites are; “to be PERFECTLY honest…” or “to be frank… “
The lies I’m talking about are the ones we use in common exchanges all the time. To be perfectly honest, they can be useful. Little white lies can aid us in the practice of politeness and are often useful in avoiding all-out conflict. Can you imagine what life would be like if all of us were “perfectly honest” all the time? There would be a fist fight on every corner. The trick is to know which lies are important. The important lies are the lies that can change our lives, or lies have significance in our world.
Throughout time there have been some enormous lies that have cost millions of lives. The most notable is the “big lie” Adolf Hitler told about the Jews. He and his propaganda machine became so proficient at the ‘big lie” that it is codified it into the name we use for all such grand misstatements of fact. The Big Lie teaches us to tell a big lie- tell it over and over- and eventually people will believe it. Hitler’s big lie threw his country and the rest of the world into mankind’s most terrible war and cost the lives of over 50 million, including 6 million European Jews. It seems almost every maniacal despot counts on the power of lies to wield control, or subvert the masses and keep control. Lying is a more potent weapon than any other.
Politics and lying seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. In the arena of politics we’ve also developed a commonly used set of phrases to deal with lies, just like the ones most of us use in everyday life. The trouble is that political lies are important lies. They matter, or they will matter to us. Politics has real significance in our world and in our individual lives. So, when we hear phrases like, “walking it back”, or “doing damage control”, or “the campaign has clarified”, we know that a lie is in the air. Either the original statement the politician made is a lie, or the correction is a lie. They are usually so diametrically opposed that both statements can’t be true, or these political types think we’re just too stupid to know the difference. Take the situation where the politician doesn’t realize there is an “open mike” or they don’t think they are being recorded. Is that the time when they’re being honest, or is it the times they are walking it back and correcting themselves? Which one was the real truth? Political lies tend to have two specific purposes. One purpose is to persuade. Usually the lie is meant to persuade the voter to vote a certain way. Persuasive arguments can be truthful, but rarely do politicians stick to the truth, the WHOLE truth, and nothing but the truth. The persuasive lie might include some truth, but not all of it. Gee, is that a lie? (How do we would explain truth to our kids- is partial truth a lie? - We wouldn't let our get away with that.) The other purpose of the political lie is to outright deceive the electorate. When a politician says one thing one day, and the opposite (or very different) thing the next day, that person is out to con us- they are out to conceal their true self from us. They must realize their true self might not sell.
Every time I see a politician with wild swings in position I know that one of those positions must be a lie. Sometimes you can’t tell which position is the real one, so the only conclusion to draw is: (s) he’s a liar (that horrible thing to be called). Being a liar implies all sorts of bad things. The liar is unreliable. The liar is crooked. The liar cannot be trusted. Even though politicians lie all the time, to call them a liar would be insulting. Yet lying in politics is so common that it truly is the norm. There was a great joke told in the dialogue of one episode of The West Wing. President Bartlett was talking to a group of people about honesty in political debate. He described how a candidate made some outrageous statement, when his opponent rose up and said “you’re lying!”. The candidate then camly said, “I know, but hear me out”.
What are we to do? We are fed a steady diet of lies, half- truths, deceptions, innuendos, spin, statistics, and just plain BS. Believe me there are some nuts out there slinging some crazy stuff. We all remember the recent comments about “legitimate rape”. The aftermath of that one was a Super Bowl of lying. Just the other day a Republican state Legislator proposed the death penalty for unruly children; because he thought the reference in Deuteronomy (the Bible) had some real modern-day value; while another Republican state legislator is defending slavery. If these guys are telling the truth about what they believe, we’ve got some serious thinking to do. We have important decisions to make and the data we have available to us isn’t very good. Our media just perpetuates the lies by never challenging the politicians to be honest. So many times I’ve watched a television interview where some outlandish thing is said, and the interviewer just nods and goes on to the next question. They have to know it doesn’t add up logically-mathematically-or any other way, but they just move on. They do a disservice to the truth.
Besides an inadequate media, we as a country have gotten into the habit of living by our beliefs, instead of our knowledge. We’ve allowed ourselves to adopt a certain way of thinking and closed ourselves off to new information, or sometimes from ANY information. We become entrenched in political or religious dogma and we stay stuck there. The primary danger in these dogmatic beliefs is that they make us very vulnerable to lies. All the politician has to do is appeal to that dogma, and we’ll believe anything. We tend to believe- not because we know it’s the truth. We believe-because the lie fits our mind-set.
In these times when important decisions are being made each one of us has to guard against the barrage of lies that blanket our existence. We need to know which are the important issues and actively pursue truth. The antidote to political lies is knowledge. Knowledge in this environment comes from using our faculties for critical thinking, added to gaining the most information we can from as many diverse sources as we can. Each one of us has an obligation to be stewards of the truth, guardians of the truth, and seekers of the truth. We can’t afford to let the 30 second commercials inform us, persuade us, or lie us into a bad decision. Being a more critical thinker will make us all be better off- honest!
Thanks for looking in.
P.S. Candidates, quit being idiots and just presume everything you say is being recorded- because it is! Maybe that will help you be more honest.
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