The Art of Promoting a Distorted View of Reality, Polite for Lying

 

           1946 Newspaper Ad

“I didn’t do it, mommy.” “It’s a Chinese hoax.” “I’m protecting the Ukrainian people.” 

In the world of military strategy and the gathering intelligence on opponent, the justification for feints and deception is overwhelming. A white lie, like “Sam, that jacket and pants look great on you” when loud purple meets pink plaid, is fairly inconsequential. Lying on mandatory government form or to the FBI can get you arrested for perjury or worse. But every kid in the world has tripped into the world of exonerating distortion at some point. And no, George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree and confess. “Mason Locke Weems’ biography, The Life of Washington, was first published in 1800 and was an instant bestseller. However the cherry tree myth did not appear until the book’s fifth edition, published in 1806.” Mount Vernon.org.

Camouflage to allow hunters and prey to survive in the wild is one of nature’s most sacred lies. When your dog does something wrong, and they know it with tail wagging, their sheepish downcast look when they are confronted tells you that the tail wag was a “lie.” Wow. Can seriously sentient beings live in a world of complete honesty? Humanity has been grappling with “truth” since philosophical thought began. The ninth Biblical commandment admonishes against false witness. 

The ancient Greek traveler/historian Herodotus wrote about a period around 500 BC and is credited as the “Father of History,” but his embellishments and accounts have also earned him the dubious title of the “Father of Lies.” There are modern era genocide distorters – from Holocaust deniers, Turks who claim the slaughter of Armenians in the WWI era never happened to present day Japanese who deny the “rape of Nanjing” and now Vladimir Putin’s take on his war – and abundant stories of politicians blaming others for their most series missteps. 

With the rise of mass media, particularly the need of modern 24-hours-a-day news “channels” to fill time, the institution of lying seems to have exploded. Indeed, “marketing” and “advertising” seem almost elevated – why do we need consumer protections agencies again? – compared to the mangle of political proselytizing and mass media, exacerbated by a seeming uncontrolled, globally manipulated world of social media and bot-driven tailored distortion right down to individual communications.

We’ve been writing books and witnessing scholarly articles about the phenomenon for decades now. Look back just a few years and see how we perceived the wrath of truth in a simpler time. An often-cited book includes News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works, Paul H. Weaver (The Free Press, 1994). His thesis, noted in the Harvard Business Review in May-June of 1995, is: “The U.S. press, like the U.S. government, is a corrupt and troubled institution. Corrupt not so much in the sense that it accepts bribes but in a systemic sense. It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do.

“The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively.” 

Indeed, “marketing” and “advertising” seem almost elevated – why do we need consumer protections agencies again? – compared to the mangle of political proselytizing and mass media, exacerbated by a seeming uncontrolled, globally manipulated world of social media and bot-driven tailored distortion right down to individual communications.

The Trump era, with unbridled support from mainstream news sources, elevated conspiracy theories into the realm of “presidentially endorsed truths,” effectively substituting obvious facts with obvious but soon generally accepted “lies as truth” among his constituents. Like the “Big Lie.” The resulting amp-up of Congressional gridlock, reflecting our rising “irreconcilable differences” polarization, has rendered our federal government useless in domestic policy and barely functional when it comes to existential global issues. Our only recent consensus is that Putin is really bad, and Ukrainians need our help. Without truth and a recognition of genuine threats, how exactly does our government protect us?

Without valid statistics, scientific validity, we actually may push ourselves into an unlivable planet. Governmental inaction is made so much worse by mainstream corporate mendacity on critical issues: “In a new survey of 1,491 executives across different industries around the world, CEOs and other C-suite leaders said that sustainability was a priority. But 58% also admitted that their companies were guilty of greenwashing; among leaders in the U.S., that figure rose to 68%. And two-thirds of executives globally questioned whether their company’s sustainability efforts were genuine.

“The anonymous survey, conducted by the Harris Poll for Google Cloud with executives primarily at companies with more than 500 employees, has mixed messages: 80% of executives gave their companies an ‘above-average’ rating for environmental sustainability. The majority of leaders both at large corporations and startups said that sustainability is a priority for them; 93% said that they’d be willing to tie their compensation to ESG (environmental, social, and governance) goals, or already do. But 65% said that while they wanted to make progress on sustainability efforts, they didn’t actually know how to do that.” FastCompany.com, April 13th. Lies have always resulted in unnecessary pain, suffering and death, but the denial of known and very provable facts could wreak more havoc, inflict more death and pain, than the Earth has ever experienced. In wars. Pandemics. And most of all: climate change.

I’m Peter Dekom, and echoing a slight modified cry from the 1970s, can we just give truth a chance?