The Great White Lie posted by Richard Seymour

The familiar refrain that all politicians dissemble, newspapers lie, and the pope shits in the woods speaks of a commonsensical realism, all too often taken for cynicism. It isn’t uniformly the case, but at least it cuts through any bullshit. Anyway, they don’t fool us, that parcel of fuckwits. In that appendage, we take some comfort. They can spin all they like, but they won’t fool people for long.

But that isn’t the point. The point of the near-constant dispensation of lies, half-truths and irrelevancies is to create an atmosphere in which it becomes almost impossible to distinguish honesty from deception, fact from fantasy. It is sufficient, if all else fails, to muddy the waters and make the picture seem a lot less clear than certain activists and critics would make it seem. This is usually enough to maintain an inert citizenry, since moral certainty is the backbone of sustained political engagement. There is, in fact, a version of public scepticism amenable to the political Right, which roughly goes thus: there’s never enough to go around, not everyone can be happy, someone will always be left out, and anyone seeking elective office would be commiting suicide to inform the public of this reality. This is enough for some to suggest that any time spent uncovering the various lies of politicians is time mis-spent. It is decidedly small picture, and avoids the larger lie, which often underlies and sustains the whole phoney debate. This can be true, but it isn’t necessarily so. Correctly understood, the careless lies of elected representatives speak more of structure than individual psychology.

To take a few relatively familiar, white lies that have at times diminished the reputations of their authors:

Al Gore claimed to have invented the “information superhighway”. He in fact had a part in inventing the term, but not the thing itself, which was the product of the Pentagon and Geneva.

Tony Blair claimed not to have had any dealings with Peter Foster, when in fact Foster had secured two two flats in Bristol for £69,000 for him and his family.

Bill Clinton claimed not to have had “sex with that woman”. In fact, he had a variety of forms of sex with that woman, once involving a childish game with a cigar.

Bill Clinton claimed to have enjoyed the baseball games of Jackie Robinson, and in particular his stand against racism in the game. He is too young to have witnessed Robinson’s games or to have been politically active at the time of Robinson’s renunciation of racism.

This is a small sample from a literal encyclopedia of dissimulation, and that of a quite ridiculous kind. These lies confer no benefit beyond that temporary ego trip a four year old might get from making his playschool mates believe he was a spy for the Babylonian government. Yet these sometimes outlandish, and always easily checked stories are dispensed with an ease and casual disregard that calls to mind Nathanial Zuckerman’s comment in the Philip Roth novel, I Married a Communist, that anyone who can lie so easily has changed his relationship to the truth. More generally, consider Oscar Wilde’s insight in De Profundis that “every little action of the common day makes or unmakes the character”, and it's clear that a career built on carefully drafted misrepresentation and mendacity will subtly poison the character in this way. In the case of the British front-bench, we are talking of a class of human beings who are a) primarily composed of trained lawyers, b) convinced that their policies are, broadly, the absolute best available under given conditions, and c) apprised of public hostility to these policies.

Hence the in-built tendency to view all problems as being, in nature, ones of presentation rather than substance. If the public rejects a policy, it isn’t because the policy is wrong, it is because the public does not understand its true meaning, its eminent good sense, the unavailability of alternatives. In David Hare’s play The Absence of War, a group of senior Labour politicians, circa 1992, have developed a policy to increase, marginally, the tax on mortgages. They haven’t communicated this to the electorate, but they believe profoundly in its justice as a meliorative measure of redistribution. When the details are leaked to a smarmy, pampered upper-class politics discussion show host, t provokes a crisis of credibility, and contributes to the party’s eventual loss to the Tories. Such an attitude to the public, nurtured for reasons of social democracy, is a contradiction in terms. Either one is for improving the lot of the majority, in which case one should say so, or one isn’t. And therefore, one has either to ditch the condescending attitude to the electorate, or the social democracy.

Casual lying, as opposed to programmatic lying, is in this respect more revealing of the basic structure of establishment ideology. This conscious disavowal makes for a disgusting kind of sincerity, exemplified by the Prime Minister. I learned as a teenager that if I wanted to lie convincingly and successfully, I had only to believe the lie fervently enough, to round it out in my mind with all attendant details, to give it a primary reality. Thus prepared, I would orate my spotty little arse off, a precocious Cicero telling florid, self-serving lies for a delighted audience. When the Prime Minister tells us that he firmly/passionately/fervently believes something to be the case, and then issues some perfectly coherent reasons for believing it, I sense a similar mechanism at work. When Bush painfully breathes, in his State of the Union address, that “we will bring the Iraqis food, and water, and hope”, the sanctimony of the approved charlatan suggests itself.

The relationship between arbitrary, casual embellishments, and ideological lies is thus one in which the latter is the cause of the former effect. Having divorced word from meaning in one’s most ordinary speech, that related to work, it is not a simple matter to remarry them. That the Big Lie is not what Nietzche called “the Socratic lie” – that we can erase pain from our lives and make them less tragic – should be self-evident to anyone vaguely familiar with the common terms of this government’s language. As Norman Fairclough notes, New Labour language typically removes agency – things happen, but they are not done. Job losses are the result of mysterious “global forces” rather than decisions taken at board level. There is no alternative, there can be no return to the old ways, we can no longer sustain a situation in which… etc. The Big Lie is not that heaven can be created on earth, but that hell cannot be eradicated from it – the Nietzchean lie, if you like. This lie, predicated on the free market ideology that needs are infinitely expandible and that therefore there will never be a surplus of goods to share so that the market remains eternally the best mechanism for the allocation of goods, (itself mirrored in the Schopenhaueran philosophy of self-perpetuating Desire, the purposeless purposiveness at the heart of human existence), underwrites all the minor fabrications of opportunist politicians and their court intellectuals.

A story is told of a New York couple who break up, because the husband, Stanley, has informed his wife, Jessie, that for the last year he’s been having an affair. Eventually, as the divorced couple meet after court proceedings, the husband admits that the affair was a lie all along. The wife is astonished:
“I’m heart-broken! How could you lie to me like that?”
“Never mind that.” The husband rages. “How could you have believed it?”

I think he is right.