Whose lies would you tolerate: your doctor’s, about the state of your health; your car mechanic’s, about repairs to your car; your grocer’s, about the freshness of his vegetables, or any politician’s, about his political statements? Most people might look for a new doctor, mechanic, or grocer if these were caught out in a lie.

But politicians too often get a free ride. They seem to come out of nowhere or are brought forth by political machines, with increasingly odd or archaic views, and if they win their election, then we are stuck with them, whether they lie or not and whether we like it or not.

They were not chosen the way we chose the doctor or the mechanic or the grocer, and they are notoriously difficult to be rid of, even when their ignorance or mendacity become plain to all but their choir. We are left to wonder whether there were no better persons who could have presented themselves for our vetting in the primaries. The rule seems to be that the deficiencies of the politician more or less match those of his/her constituency.

  Let’s look a bit more at mendacity, which is just a polite way to say “lying”. The question I want to ask is this: if your generic politician lied and was caught in the lie, does that matter to you?

I don’t mean private affairs; I mean work-related stuff, legislative matters, committee work, campaign statements, and the like. These are different than lies about private affairs, if for no other reason that they point to or at least suggest a willingness to compromise truth for political gain; there is no political gain in a private affair, only embarrassment if exposed.

In a 1932 lecture, Sigmund Freud said that “If it were really a matter of indifference what we believed, if there were no knowledge which was distinguished from among our opinions by the fact that it corresponds with reality, then we might just as well build our bridges of cardboard as of stone...”.      

Is it acceptable for politicians to think that lies don’t matter, that they just represent “politics as usual” and that the other party will do something similar? Do lies matter to you? If not, why not?

If you don’t care whether what politicians say corresponds with reality, why would you care if the highway engineers decided to build bridges out of cardboard? One answer could be ignorance about why bridges are not made of cardboard; another answer is hypocrisy. You expect the work of the engineers to correspond to reality, for their work to not be a lie, but you hold the work of the politician to no such standard. Indeed, the politician is with you in this, for he does not hold himself to that standard either.          

It is certainly a strange view that does not correspond with reality, but why would you want that in your leaders? Unless, perhaps, facts and correspondence with reality do not matter to you either. Where do you stand when a political pollster says that “We are not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers”. Why wouldn’t you care whether the fact checkers were on your side?

Many of you are headed down a road with a cardboard bridge along the way.



Dick Marti

Tifton