Some Thoughts About Our Lying (Dying?) Regime

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“We know they are lying. They also know that they are lying. They also know that we know they are lying. We also know that they know that we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”
Anonymous Soviet dissident

One of the salient features of the current political reality that is depressingly obvious to readers of Counter-Currents is the slicksters who operate our regime and its propagandists, the mainstream media, are serial, pathological liars. They lie constantly, brazenly and proudly. Here is the grossly obese panjandrum, Mike Pompeo, in a YouTube video shamelessly bragging about his tenure as the Director of the CIA to the background of laughter and applause from a flock of his selected flunkies. “I was Director of the CIA. We lied, we cheated, we stole […] We had training courses…”

The anonymous quote above – “We know that they know that …” etc. – takes us to the truth in the observation that lies are the foundation of this “liberal democracy” that is so “threatened” by the populist movements and their leaders, and it can only be sustained and perpetuated by regime-orchestrated, regime-perpetuated, regime-enforced lies.

The current regime, as it lurches deeper into messaging incoherence, growing incompetence and ubiquitous corruption, increasingly resembles the trajectory of the stagnating, geriatric post-Stalinist, Soviet regime as it staggered toward collapse. The Pelosi-led, palace coup that removed the decrepit Joe Biden from the Presidential campaign seemed to eerily copy the machinations of the Politburo during the Brezhnev era. Well, except that the Americans had even less talent to make this ham-fisted switcheroo look remotely plausible to the hoi polloi. A one-quarter white, two-quarters Indian, one quarter black babbling brook of inanities who nobody voted for, nobody liked and nobody trusted was “joyfully” stepping up to “save our democracy” from a guy wildly popular with around half the people in the country.

Can this massive edifice of officially-stamped dishonesty continue to move forward for many years with such disastrous consequences seemingly unimpeded? Will the regime dishonesty, as the reality of it becomes increasingly obvious to more and more people, bring it to collapse? Or, is its eventual demise an illusion, and “The rule of the Party is forever,” as Winston tells O’Brian in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I offer below some relevant thoughts on these questions in the form of aphorisms with commentary attached.

Honesty is and has always been the bedrock of human decency and goodness. 

No one can ever be good without being honest. A dishonest person cannot ever hope or claim to be decent. Dishonest people, no matter how talented, intelligent, high minded or greatly intentioned they may otherwise be, corrupt themselves, soil their surroundings, and ruin the lives of people close to them.

Lies destroy the elemental good things that take long, serious effort to build such as friendship, trust, cooperation and affection. Lies harden the hearts of the deceived and turn the willingness to forgive into grudging suspicion and implacable resentment. Liars are reluctantly if at all forgiven because any confession or apology itself may likely fall under suspicion as a lie or a pose. A plea of “I am sorry” from a habitual liar elicits from the petitioned rejection or cynicism, not forgiveness. Marital infidelity, a crooked business deal, the betrayal of a promise – with each, someone looks into the eyes of someone else who trusts them, then lies.

Honesty is also the bedrock of institutional and organizational integrity. Institutions and organizations that are led by liars (as are our two major political parties, the mainstream media and the big corporations) amplify and compound the personal dishonesty of the leaders and stamp it upon the operations. Organizational success depends upon mutual trust both within the organization and in the external relationships. Lying breaks that down. Institutionalized lying pushes it into dysfunction, and toward fatal pathologies.  Institutional missions erode. The goals are compromised and the achievements are tainted or fail to materialize. The dishonesty leads to intrigue, creates layers of mistrust and openings for the worst to rise to the top.

A lie succeeds only if it evades its essence and fronts itself as the truth.

 It is axiomatic: truth remains forever intrinsically superior to falsity. Sissela Bok writes:

“[B]efore we begin to weigh the good and the bad aspects of a lie, the falsehood itself is negatively weighted; while such a negative weight may be overridden, it is there the outset.”[1]

The underlying reality of this observation gives the formation and telling of the lie a paradoxical twist. Because the truth holds this intrinsic advantage over the lie, the liar absolutely must represent himself as a truth-teller. The official Soviet news organ which for seven decades consistently lied and distorted about nearly everything the government did was called Pravda, the Russian word for “truth.” The slogan of the Washington Post, one of our own Pravdas, is “Democracy dies in darkness,” adopted by sheer Orwellian coincidence in 2017, the year Donald Trump entered the White House.

For the liar to be epistemologically successful, that is for his communication to be believed, for him to be trusted, he must be perceived to be the opposite of what he truly is. No doubt, Mike Pompeo expected his audience to believe him to be telling them the truth as he swaggeringly asserted himself to be a liar; unwittingly, he had fallen into the self-referential liar paradox.

The “we” who were lied to in the anonymous quote above who “know” in the now defunct Soviet Union were, relatively speaking, of a small number. But as the lies became increasingly obvious and the number of knowers ever larger, at some critical point cynicism completely overwhelmed the entire operation. Here is the point where everybody knows, and nobody anymore believes the official mythology that kept everyone in line. Cynicism is the wrecking ball that takes down lying regimes.

Cynicism is indiscriminate revenge taken against liars and institutions and practices that are immersed in lies. 

 When it becomes apparent to everyone within a regime, such as ours has become, that lying is routine and expected, cynicism rules and destroys its credibility and legitimacy. Things stop working; people start noticing, stop believing, then stop conforming. Members of the ruling class are unmasked as the purest, rawest of cynics, bereft of honor, class and decency, contemptuous of those they lie to and those in whose interest they pretend to govern.

A cynic is one who has given up on the truth. He sees everyone including himself as a liar, a fraud or a dupe. The cynic, unlike the skeptic, is a believer, but can only bring himself to believe the worst of others. The cynic’s failure is to give up on the possibilities of honesty and integrity, to concede the entire expanse of humanity to the liar, like himself and his dupes. There are just two choices left to the cynic: you either take or get taken, lie and cheat or be at the mercy of the liar-cheater, a dupe. No one wants to be the dupe … so, the dupes, lied to and manipulated are destined to become cynics. The dupe’s failure is one of excessive credulity, an eagerness to believe a lie, a lack of critical judgment. He is merely an object to be manipulated by the cynic. Cynicism and dupery are the Scylla and Charybdis of the American political landscape.

Lying becomes a host for other vices.

To a lying disposition many other character defects, failings, and corruptions attach themselves and feed off of it—cowardice, envy and greed. Lies advance the schemes of cheaters and smooth the way for the vengeful, the fakers, and shirkers of responsibility to have their way and to evade detection and condemnation. Lies are essential to the success of collusion, bribery and political corruption. They are the indispensable tools of criminals used to set up their victims and to shield their deviance from scrutiny. The child-seducer, the con artist, the fraudster, the swindler, the bribe-taker, the perjurer, all resort to lies in order to achieve their ends, to gratify gross impulses, to trample, to defile, to steal and to escape detection and rightful punishment. Lying is also closely linked with fanaticism because the fanatic subordinates everything, including a regard for facts and for truth, to the advancement of his cause.

Everyone at some point in their life has likely lied. Not everyone, however, is a liar.

 Some lies are benign. Some are even kind. Some are necessary. Everyone lies sometimes, but not everyone is a liar, characterologically speaking. Most people, I believe, lie sparingly, reluctantly, with embarrassment, with fear of detection, and most are probably poor at it. Physiology, the blush, makes it especially hard for some. “Good lying” usually requires practice (e. g. “training courses”), although like many other human activities, some people and some groups of people are naturally better at it than others.

A liar, however, is different sort of creature, someone who has lying embedded firmly, deeply into his character. Some, like Hillary Clinton, appear to be born liars, cunning deceivers in embryo. She lies reflexively but with skill and audacity. She performs with ease, confidence, and at times evinces a self-righteous indignation – Benghazi: “what difference at this point does it make?” – to help sell the evasions and deflect scrutiny and responsibility.

As we’ve seen with the “what difference does it make” modus operandi of the Clintons, successful lying and the confidence that arises from it breed arrogance, and so sometimes they lie even when they do not need to, from habit, for practice or just for the hell of it. Their careers followed a trajectory of increasingly ambitious mendacity fueled from his growing confidence in their lying skills, imagined superiority, and contempt for the “deplorables” who remained skeptical. Over time is was obvious: a mounting arrogance, a personal recklessness and contempt for the boundaries of conduct that with most people are enforced by probity and integrity.

The confirmed, artful liar achieves his success and builds his life around lying. The liar cannot breathe without routinely mangling and twisting the truth. I have observed people like this. They are often intelligent, charming and even charismatic, but virtually everything they say in some way effaces the truth, distorts reality and deceives. Liars achieve success, that is, the lies they tell are taken to be true, and they are perceived as truth-tellers because most people operate on a daily course with the assumption and the trust that those around them are in fact truth tellers. Thus, one grimly contemplates and rues the opportunism and predation of the liar who takes full advantage of the natural and routine trust of others. All successful liars are in a sense “confidence men”, individuals who prevail in deceit because they usurp the trust and good faith of others and turn them into lamentable defects of good faith or lapses of judgment. One is tempted to say that the entire expanse of what the ruling class calls “our democracy” is an elaborate confidence game – phony candidates, pretend debates, fake elections – those who pay get to play.

The liar cannot help but fear and shun the truth and hate the truth-teller.

The liar inevitably comes to the loath the truth-teller for being what he himself can never become and thus, the self-righteous, faux indignation, the resort to defamation and vituperation that are the stock of the inveterate liar. The truth-teller becomes the object of fear and resentment because he threatens to expose and undo the liar. The liar exposed loses status, control and power. So, knowing what exposure means to him, the liar harbors malice toward truth-tellers, those he impersonates, but those whose ranks he can never join. The liar, whose nemesis is the truth teller, turns into a hater and maligner as well. Communism’s long history of defamation and hatred comes from its lying and the natural fear and loathing of the liar for the truth teller.

The mass hysteria manifest in Trump Derangement Syndrome in its intensity and seething vituperation, particularly among women, appears to be a phenomenon unique to the history of American politics. The unprecedented demonization and hatred that rains down on the Orange Man from every fixture of the establishment suggests that the anger exploding against him is because he says what the oligarchs who fund the uniparty and enforce the speech codes cannot abide – the truth about the ruling class and its contempt for the people who put them in office. Trump, imperfect a vehicle as he is for challenging the ruling class liars, continues to threaten the anti-truth regime which is why it hates him, why it is trying to imprison him, and perhaps trying to kill him. It means that he and his “irredeemable, deplorable” followers will never be regarded as loyal opposition or even controlled opposition. They are “enemies of the people,” “an existential threat to our democracy.”

The philosopher, Harry Frankfurt writes: “[L]ies are designed to damage our grasp of reality. So they are intended, in a very real way, to make us crazy.”[2] Thus the seemingly inexplicable irrational level of loathing and revulsion for Trumpism is confirmation that the Trump Derangement Syndrome phenomenon is nothing less than the concentration of all the forces of the regime to bombard us with lies and drive us crazy. The regime will continue to lie, defame the truth-tellers and drive us crazy until enough of the ruled-over have stopped believing the lies and recover their sanity.

It behooves us to study the Soviet Union as a dying political organism aa it may provide insight in planning for the future.

Notes

[1] Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, New York, Pantheon, 1978, p. 50.

[2] Harry Frankfurt, “On Truth, Lies, and Bullshit,” in The Philosophy of Deception, edited by Clancy Martin, New York: Oxford, 2009, 38.