Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt on Deception, Self-Deception, and the Psychology of Defactualization
Maria Popova - Lying in Politics:Deception, Self-Deception, and the Psychology of Defactualization
“The possibilities
that exist between two people, or among a group of people,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful
1975 speech
on lying and what truth really means, “are a kind of alchemy. They
are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing
sight of these possibilities.”
Nowhere is this liar’s loss of
perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective
progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and
psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a
towering scale. Those forces are
what
Hannah Arendt (1906 -1975), one of
the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay
titled “Lying in Politics,” written shortly after the release of the Pentagon
Papers and later included in Crises of the Republic (public library) - a collection of Arendt’s
timelessly insightful and increasingly timely essays on politics, violence,
civil disobedience, and the pillars of a sane and stable society... read more:
The Pentagon Papers,
like so much else in history, tell different stories, teach different lessons
to different readers. Some claim they have only now understood that Vietnam was
the “logical” outcome of the cold war or the anticommunist ideology, others
that this is a unique opportunity to learn about decision making processes in
government. But most readers have by now agreed that the basic issue raised by
the Papers is deception. At any rate, it is obvious that this issue was
uppermost in the minds of those who compiled the Pentagon Papers for The
New York Times, and it is at least probable that this was also an issue for
the team of writers who prepared the forty-seven volumes of the original study.
The famous credibility
gap, which has been with us for six long years, has suddenly opened up into an
abyss. The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as
self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to probe this material,
which, unhappily, he must recognize as the infrastructure of nearly a decade of
United States foreign and domestic policy. Because of the extravagant
lengths to which the commitment to non-truthfulness in politics went on the
highest level of government, and because of the concomitant extent to which
lying was permitted to proliferate throughout the ranks of all governmental
services, military and civilian - the phony body counts of the
“search-and-destroy” missions, the doctored after-damage reports of the air
force, the
“progress” reports to Washington from the field written by subordinates who
knew that their performance would be evaluated by their own reports - one
is easily tempted to forget the background of past history, itself not exactly
a story of immaculate virtue, against which this newest episode must be seen
and judged.
For secrecy - what
diplomatically is called discretion as well as the arcana imperii,
the mysteries of government - and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the
outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with
us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted
among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable
tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be
surprised how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical
and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand, for the nature
of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought
and word whatever happens to be the actual fact. This active, aggressive
capability of ours is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to
falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever
else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus... read more:
