A lie has many beginnings, but only one end - the total loss of all energy invested in it, and the failure of systems (be they personalities or entire civilizations) whose fate has become dependent on its survival. Lies are structures built on illusions that collapse when they collide with reality, taking with them everything predicated on them and plenty of truth as collateral damage. They begin in our blind spots and neglected reflections, extending assumptions into areas that do not warrant them, creating webs of belief and symbol, and build castles of shadow for the weak and malevolent to rule because they cannot face the open sky. One thing only justifies our claim as liberals to be the light of humanity: We serve the truth. We do not enthrone ourselves as its arbiters, but open ourselves as its students. And that has made all the difference.
Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
--Frank Herbert
The great author above was not exaggerating - if one is capable of believing what one knows to be a lie, denying what your own eyes see and experience informs, then you are incapable of making conscious decisions. A mind, such as it is, would be wide open to external determination by infectious memes, social pressures, and narcissistic rationalizations - little more than a machine to be programmed by instinct and operated by others. There is no room for morality in an existence where truth is determined by the loudest message or the strongest impulse - everything is just an undifferentiated stew of colliding trajectories, reducing the human being to the status of a billiard ball.
While it is true we are all subject to misapprehensions, avoidance, and self-delusion, it is also true that no falsehood is beyond the power of self-examination if the choice is made to pursue it. Any lie within our faculties to understand and believe is within our faculties to expose and dispel, so as with so many things, it comes down to a decision of whether a person recognizes truth as something basic or regards it purely as a matter of leverage - whether they believe in reality at all, or are ultimately nihilistic.
The world is, and has always been, full of lies. And I don't mean that people merely say things that are untrue - sometimes the intended meaning of words is better conveyed by a false literal statement than a direct accounting of facts. I may say that I spilled coffee on my lap rather than admit that I was careless at a urinal, but the salient information is the same: The stain resulted from an accident. The rest is a "fib," or a deliberately incorrect statement that nonetheless paints a correct picture - like the same image with different colors. This only becomes a lie if the details of the accident become a subject of importance - if the spilling of coffee is crucial to an alibi in a criminal investigation, or bladder control is being discussed in a medical context, etc. etc.
The saying "everybody lies" badly misunderstands this: Everybody knowingly makes factually incorrect statements, but they do so in service to the truth. "You don't look fat, honey" = you look sexy to me no matter what you wear, not that something literally does not make your butt look bigger than something else. But it is a lie if she looks repulsive and you simply don't care enough about her to advise dressing differently; it would also be a lie if the question it answers is insincere, and a formulaic response is extorted under threat of doghouse. These are mundane examples, but most people do not lie most of the time - they synthesize the truth into tidy, efficient packages, and unwrap them into more detail only as needed.
Because of the self-destructive nature of lies, time is always weeding them out - the reason behind the "long arc of history" bending toward justice. But at the same time, the most persistent lies continue to mutate and evolve into more virulent, more profoundly malevolent forms. A society may be eminently rational and courageous in a thousand ways, and yet the one way they choose to be deluded moral cowards is the one that sends them on a spiral of monstrous evil. Meanwhile, those offended by the lie may tell their own as a self-gratifying catharsis rather than fighting it with the truth, and soon you have an array of liars unified only by their objection to basic morality because it demands something of them in return for conceding their grievances. Well, I've had enough of lies and people who countenance them because they find their tenor gratifying.
I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?
--Muad'Dib
So I would now like to summarize the major politically relevant lies that are prominent in the world, along with a rebuttal. Prominent does not necessarily mean they are popular or generally accepted, but simply that they are well-represented and have an influential effect on how discussions occur among a significant sector of a population. I will include lies specific to American politics, even if they are not commonplace elsewhere. In no particular order:
1. LIE: Free trade creates jobs.
Free trade moves jobs from areas where high wages and benefits are the norm to areas where virtual slave labor is commonplace. The jobs that grow in the previously high-wage area are those in retail, selling the cheap junk made elsewhere at minimum wage with minimal to no benefits. But even with reduced prices, the reduction in income and rise in cost of living due to absence of benefits is far greater, and far fewer jobs are created than disappear into thin air.
2. LIE: Free trade grows economies.
Free trade liquidates economies and sends their value to economies that have absolute price advantage. No net growth occurs, and in fact net economic contraction is in evidence from the ensuing collapse of the consumer base. The entire world has been devastated by unlimited free trade, and the only people who have benefited are the ultra-wealthy and the authoritarian government of China. The theoretical basis of free trade was the principle of comparative advantage, but the policies as implemented subverted the principle by mobilizing capital - IOW, world governments sold free trade on the basis of a theory that didn't apply to what they were doing. It was a bait-and-switch.
3. LIE: The illicit drug trade causes x deaths and y dollars in damage every year.
Enforcement of drug prohibition causes these deaths and economic damage, not the drugs. If they were legal and regulated, the violent sociopaths who rule the illicit drug trade would not have billions of dollars in revenue at their disposal and would have to revert to far less profitable lines of business. Those people could not succeed in a legitimate business environment, and however scummy corporate executives are, no one in their right mind would choose to deal with drug cartel bosses over pharmaceutical executives.
Inner-city streets would become livable again almost over night because the street dealers would disappear, the violence they inflict would go with them, the illegal gun trade they fuel would contract, and the property crimes committed by addicts would go down as the prices of addictive drugs fall through the floor in generic form. Only a tiny fraction of the money saved would be needed to provide needle exchanges, health monitoring, treatment, and prosecuting the handful who still buck the law by dodging regulations, driving under the influence, or becoming violent due to irresponsible use.
4. LIE: Marijuana is dangerous in any way.
The US and other governments continue to spend billions of dollars crushing the cultivation, sale, and use of marijuana despite trivial evidence of harm (at best) and prodigious evidence of benefits under some conditions. They continue to seize assets and throw people in prison for doing something there is no rational basis for condemning. They continue to spread propaganda on the subject, and take official positions that are straight-up lies to justify maintaining such policies.
They continue to ignore and deny overwhelming scientific medical consensus in the process, and feed a commercial drug-testing industry that - in terms of detecting marijuana - serves no purpose to society while sending people to jail for parole or probation violations that have nothing to do with protecting the public, and penalize athletes for using substances that are, if anything, performance-impeding. No one has ever died from a marijuana overdose, traffic accidents caused by marijuana use in the absence of other drugs are statistically trivial, and violence is not associated with its use (unlike alcohol). Moreover, THC, unlike nicotine, isn't a lethal neurotoxin. This lie has gone on long enough.
5. LIE: Morality has anything to do with religion.
It doesn't. Religions are authoritarian ideologies based on a fantasy of supreme power assumed by human philosophers, artists, nutcases, and charlatans to express their own fallible views, opinions, and emotions. They tell you thus-and-such is "right" or "wrong" because if you do or don't do it, something more powerful than you will wreak vengeance against you - an inherently amoral conception of righteousness. When the only basis for an alleged moral scheme is obedience to power, it isn't a form of morality at all. Religion claims that no act is inherently right or wrong - anything can be right if God says it is, and anything can be wrong if God forbids it. This is essentially nihilistic, and merely substitutes an external power in place of one's own id for justifying whatever impulse prevails.
A believer in God is only moral if there are things their God could command them to do that they would refuse. The Old Testament tiptoed in the direction of this realization with the story of Abraham and Isaac, but sullenly clings to the wrong conclusion by having God back down at the last moment to avoid negative publicity. Abraham's willingness to murder his son out of loyalty to power is the height of amorality, and God's flip-flopping on the subject is a pitiful platitude intending to show that the alleged lord of the universe is really just insecure rather than actually evil. Religion and morality are unrelated: Religious people are no more moral than anyone else, and in some cases far less so if they believe their decisions hold divine imprimatur.
6. LIE: Free market.
How exactly is a market "free" if one side of the transaction has all the leverage? If someone has a gun to my head, I can theoretically tell them to go fuck themselves, but in practical terms (indeed, in legal terms as well) I have no choice but to comply with their demands - which is why robbery is a crime. But what about if the gun is just a water pistol full of urine, and all they demand is to cut in line ahead of me? That's still a crime, but a lesser one because the imbalance of leverage is smaller. And yet corporations have far more power to injure, endanger, inconvenience, and harass people than some stupid kid with a "pisstol". They have near-absolute power to set hourly wages and benefits in non-union industries, and even in unionized industries still bear the overwhelming bulk of the leverage.
The only way one can call a market free is if it's regulated in ways that ensure transactions occur with leverage-parity - otherwise it's not a market at all, but simply a more advanced form of feudal system where prices are set by the relative power of supply and demand rather than by the intersection of their respective curves. You have to make a market free - it isn't just free by virtue of there being no government interference.
7. LIE: The science of climate change is inconclusive.
This is an example of using technically accurate language with the intention of creating a wildly false impression - as much a lie as saying that the death toll of the Holocaust is "controversial." If one estimate holds the toll is 10.2 million, and another holds it is 10.3 million, then a Holocaust denier could use the technically accurate statement that opinions differ on the toll to construct the absurd argument that the fundamental details of the atrocity are vague or in doubt. Global warming is an observed fact via continual record-breaking temperatures. The heat-trapping properties of greenhouse gases are an observed fact. The ongoing release and record atmospheric concentrations of these gases are an observed fact. And consensus is achieved that climate change is dangerous to humanity.
8. LIE: Evolution is controversial.
No, it isn't. I can debate 2 + 2 = 4 if I'm feeling suitably contrarian, but that doesn't make the sum "debatable." I can question whether the Sun will rise tomorrow, but that does not make the idea "questionable." And I can contradict random statements like the famous Monty Python skit, but that does not in itself confer "controversy" on the subject. The central implication of controversy is that an issue is unsettled, not merely that some political interest refuses to acknowledge that it is settled. The Earth is round, it orbits the Sun, and evolution is the origin of species. Denial of this fact has only one significant meaning: The speaker is either ignorant, mentally ill, or a petulant liar defending a political ideology against reality.
9. LIE: The rich are more deserving than others.
As we see with religion, this idea is an amoral reinforcement of happenstance: Whoever wields the power, deserves the power. Whoever wields the money, deserves the money. It doesn't matter to this mentality how it came to be that way - the fact that it is that way is sufficient grounds to demand that it stay that way. If you are born into money, then you deserve to keep it and build on it, even if the only way to do so is to mooch off society without giving anything back. And if someone actually did put in some work and creativity to become rich, then forget even the pretense that they acknowledge owing anything to anyone other than themselves: They live as gods in their own imagination, and remember their accomplishments as being immaculately conceived in a vacuum by their own genius with no input or contribution by others.
The fact is something cannot come from nothing, and everyone - be it the owner of a factory in the middle of a developed city, or a woodsman living alone in a cabin - owes what they have to other people, and has an absolute and irrevocable obligation to society and the world at large. Even if it were theoretically possible for an individual to learn every last thing they know independently as a feral wolf-child and still end up a civilized, prosperous, healthy person (it isn't possible, of course), they would still owe something back because their very existence arose from the benefits their ancestors derived from others, and because they cannot avoid having an affect on their environment in the present day. Everyone lives in concentric systems from which we derive benefit, and to which we owe responsibility. People who derive more benefits, have greater responsibilities.
10. LIE: The poor are less deserving than others.
Poverty is a circumstance, not a determination of merit. Stupid, repugnant people are born into rich families all the time, but their environment protects them from the consequences of their character. Mediocre rich people find it even easier to manufacture false merit through the work of others. Meanwhile, intelligent, selfless people are born into poverty all the time, but their environment impedes their merit from benefiting them, and mediocre poor people have to work harder and make smarter decisions just to survive than mediocre rich people ever have to make in their entire lives.
Money is a social lubricant, so the rich can do just about anything and slide past the consequences while the poor have to power through every instant as if dragging a mile-long velcro carpet behind them. The only determination of merit one can make is how one uses the resources one has, and we all have an obligation to each other to ensure that good choices have good outcomes most of the time: Something that is increasingly not the case because wealthy people are claiming that their circumstance is a reflection of their moral character, and using the claim to justify penalizing people in different circumstances. That must not be tolerated.
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The above are pretty familiar to people involved in progressive politics, but the problem would be much easier if a lie stopped at itself. Unfortunately, the people hurt and offended by lies may react by telling lies of their own as an act of cathartic vengeance. Such was the case with 20th century Communism - a movement born in humane concern for workers that death-spiraled into a vindictive, mean-spirited, and ultimately murderous attack on everyone above the level of the utterly destitute. Among Lenin's first victims were people called kulaks - more or less poor peasants who owned a little bit of land - and even this so offended the Bolsheviks that they sent death squads to villages to execute them.
The vileness of the perversion was best shown in the Soviet propaganda organ, Pravda - which means "Truth" - a publication that began as an attempt to penetrate the censorship of industrialists and aristocrats with exposes on working conditions and other important information. It had plenty of truth to back up its agenda in the early years when it was fighting the system, but once Communists were in power it became a laughable instrument of totalitarian alternate-reality. The entire Eurasian quagmire of 20th century Communism, swallowing most of the people on Earth, was a case in point of what happens when unfettered reaction to a problem is treated as more important than a thoughtful process of solving them and holding yourself accountable.
That's why, as a staunch supporter of Occupy Wall Street, I look with skepticism on minority attempts to make the 99% agenda into some kind of sanitized Disneyland version of the 20th century Communist message. I look with skepticism on calls to end capitalism, abolish property, and signage that deliberately (and apparently non-ironically) attempts to invoke hostile Soviet artwork with red, black, and yellow color schemes. Those ideas aren't lies in themselves, but the attitudes behind them - the glorification of truly repulsive movements, and embracing of violently hostile rhetoric by a few, doesn't endear the trend to me, even though I appreciate the origin of the impulse. As far as I'm concerned, OWS is an attempt to stop class warfare, not an embracing of it out of pique. But some truly repulsive, idiotic, and mendacious ideas do persist on the left that need to be addressed for the sake of our own effectiveness as a movement:
11. LIE: Democrats and Republicans are the same.
Basically, it's saying that everyone who is not me is the same. Every agenda that is not a Xerox copy of mine is part of the problem. And most perniciously, everyone who comes within a country mile of making a real decision that affects people is automatically a corrupt, inhuman monster if their decision (or even the rhetoric attending otherwise supported decisions!) doesn't align with how I imagine mine would be in their place. Sometimes this attitude is based on some of the most cartoonish ignorance I've ever seen outside a Tea Party - some otherwise intelligent people on the left don't even know we have three branches of government, but think the whole separation of powers thing is just some kind of irrelevant procedural detail that a "real progressive" would ignore.
They also seem to believe that success is a function of desire - if someone "really cares" then they would have achieved thus-and-such by now, or else they're incompetent. There is no recognition whatsoever of how complicated anything is, or the limits of an office and of an individual's ability to both know what to do and how to do it regardless of how talented they are. Nor is any historical perspective apparent. History, if it plays any role in such pronouncements, is treated as a grab-bag of cargo cult fantasies and symbolic historical figures whose real struggles aren't known at all by the people harping on them as examples of why current leaders are trash.
It doesn't get much more polarized than Democrats and Republicans. You have a party of people who are more or less loyal to the better standards and practices of Western civilization, to the principles of the Enlightenment, to common sense and common decency, and to diversity and inclusion; and then you have a party that competes for the gold medal of depravity in every imaginable category - that demands open advocacy of torture from its elected leaders, calls for wars as instruments of economics, holds the nation and all its people hostage to its own power, denies the very humanity of those who stand in its way, and takes bald-faced pleasure in the suffering and hardship of other people. Democrats are not Gandhi, that is for sure, but we are a party of, by, and for the people, and reflects that as far as possible in an environment currently dominated by economic elites and globalized corporate power.
Constructive criticism is fine, but I think very little of anyone who is actively hostile to the Democratic Party from the left, and nothing at all of anyone who equates us with the GOP. You know who is the same as Republicans? Reckless, mean-spirited liars who think their own level of frustration determines the moral quality of another person's contribution to progress.
12. LIE: Elections mean nothing.
If we probe the "reasoning" behind this self-gratifying rationalization for losing, we find pretty quickly where it veers into nonsense: The system is corrupt, and we all recognize that. But it is corrupt because vast sums of money flow into the system from special interests to determine the outcome of elections. Why would these interests spend that kind of money if elections were meaningless? The answer is, they wouldn't - they have to flood elections with money to keep them corrupted, because elections matter, and the people's voice must be continually drowned out to avoid allowing it to sway the decisions of elected leaders. We saw in 2000 how much apathy, cynicism, and the ludicrous equating of the two major parties did to serve American freedom - it just gave an unobtructed path for the parasites eating away our society to accelerate their schedule. Congratulations, Spartacus - it's a special kind of rebel whose every word and deed further enslaves him.
13. LIE: Third parties are excluded from the process.
Being excluded from the process means your material is censored, your advocates are harassed by police, and votes for your candidates aren't counted. Not that major parties won't facilitate exposure to your candidates by debating them, or that they predicate such debates on having a certain level of support that your party does nothing to win.
In fact, third parties make no effort whatsoever to include themselves in the process, and if they did so competently there's nothing Republicans or Democrats could do to stop them. Folks in these parties think their ideas are so peremptorily powerful that they're entitled to be agreed with, and it's everyone else who has to come to them. Watch a Libertarian or Green Party convention sometime, and tell me there is any semblance of an attempt to attract support from the general public rather than just Keeping The Faith. They barely even know people outside their scene exist.
I once asked a Libertarian how he would sell his ideas to a single-mother working two minimum wage jobs, and he looked at me like I'd just asked him how he'd explain algebra to a gerbil - blank stare - and he just ended up repeating standard lines that had nothing whatsoever to do with the people I was asking about. I've asked Greens about business, and there's a pretty clear undertone (at least with those individuals) that they regarded the entire concept as a moral failure and people who engage in it as sinister. And I've seen their political conventions too - national conventions - and they were conducted in ways suggestive of fan conventions rather than political ones. One Green convention, IIRC, had some people sitting on the floor and beating tambourines instead of applauding. It was embarrassing even to watch on C-Span. Basically, these parties have no interest in participating - they exist as catchbasins for the terminally disillusioned to get together and console each other, or the terminally self-righteous to argue minutiae into eternity.
14. LIE: America sucks.
We know the right equates disagreeing with them as being anti-American, but that's no excuse to actually be anti-American or pretend it's not a common bigotry. Part of the problem is that the left is all about reflection and internal remedy, so there is a tendency to be unfair in judging dominant identity groups - and when you combine that tendency with individuals who have bigoted personalities, sometimes the output is an affront to reality and simple honesty. We know we're not #1 anymore in nearly any metric that one would care to brag about, and that's cause for discussion about identifying why and how to change it - not for jubilantly slamming Americans as immoral, shit-stupid people who are finally getting their "just desserts." I see this kind of remark gut-wrenchingly often, and it has nothing to do with the reality either of this country or any other.
People who have this attitude don't merely reject jingoism - they're literally incapable of appreciating the positive aspects that originally made our society so attractive and still, to some extent, allows it to be admired. The total inability to see worth in a person or group of people who repeatedly demonstrate it is bigotry, pure and simple. The American flag pisses them off, people who love their country strike them as sheep, and everyone who has contributed to the fame and progress of the United States they find some way to denigrate or belittle.
But it's an attitude reserved for this country - other countries that demand a level of patriotism even goofily jingoistic Americans would consider excessive rarely if ever come to their attention. And the reason is precisely the degree to which their hatred is NOT justified. Because we make a truly uncommon level of effort to be a better country, despite all the problems we face, the hate is merely intensified rather than abated. That's how bigotry works: The less justified it is, the more intensely it is felt. And it's usually motivated along the same lines that attacks on the Democratic Party from the left are - we're not enough of what we claim to be, even if what we are is remarkable.
Every single time there's a discussion on the left about the effect of American foreign policy supporting undemocratic regimes - a valid topic of conversation with tons of legitimate arguments to make - some jackass has to drag it into the gutter and turn it into a Two Minute Hate where we're derided as a tyrannical, monstrous, imperial nation with its foot on the neck of the world, and the Lie is every bit as sickening as the ones that provoked it. I've had to point out - repeatedly - that Google, Facebook, and Twitter are American companies; that they were started by Americans with American money, and became globally dominant largely due to adoption by American consumers; that the internet is an invention of the American military industrial complex; and that the bulk of both innovative technology and democratic political philosophy in existence today still comes from Americans and US institutions. Not much of a substitute for standards of living, but we remain influential, innovative, productive, creative, and committed to the progress of humanity.
15. LIE: Afghanistan/Libya is a war of aggression.
The invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression. No sane, decent person denies it. And that fact is totally irrelevant to the circumstances that both authorized and justified the US overthrowing the taliban in Afghanistan in favor of the UN-recognized government, then known as the Northern Alliance. It was necessary because the taliban state was in league with Al Qaeda, and terrorist attacks on the United States and elsewhere could not be practically prevented so long as they had an entire country at their disposal to plot and train suicide bombers. Every nation on Earth but, IIRC, Saudi Arabia and Sudan endorsed the NATO invasion on behalf of the recognized government.
Now, granted, the events that initiated the invasion were a decade ago. But the situation that justified our presence has not disappeared - if we withdraw, Afghanistan returns to being exactly as it was before we came, if not worse, and we will once again be dealing with attacks on the United States from networks operating in that country. How do we know this? Because identical conditions produce identical results. An Afghanistan ruled by the taliban without contention from NATO will provide a safe haven for al Qaeda, and al Qaeda will use it as a base to launch attacks worldwide - the same as they did before, because that's what worked for them. That's what brought them attention, money, and recruits after the defeat of the Soviet Union cut off their US pipeline.
I've seen claims that Afghans want us gone, but there is no possible way to prove that - those who want us out and say so on camera will not be punished by the US, but those who want us there can't go on camera to say so because terrorists will come to their homes and decapitate them in front of their families. And they only leave the families alive - if they do - to bear witness to what happens to those who speak against God's Warriors. Perhaps we should take the measures they use against dissidents as evidence of how far the Afghan people support the taliban. How much terror does a guerrilla group have to inflict on its own people if they have the support of that people? If they would win a free and fair election, they wouldn't need to murder anyone who speaks against them.
I don't know what the answer is, but I know what the answer is not - pretending the problem that legitimately brought us there no longer exists and would not recur if we left. But that's at least a legitimate discussion. Claiming the US is engaged in "aggression" in Afghanistan, however, or that our military are acting as a "brutal occupation force" while making excuses for the taliban and pretending they're a popular indigenous movement (replete with Pakistani intelligence agents, no less) is a bald-faced lie - one every bit as preposterous and ideologically-driven as the right-wing defense of the Iraq War had been.
The hate and silliness of some of these comments runs so deep that even the recently-successfully-concluded intervention of NATO air support into the Libyan revolution was condemned as some kind of crime. Gaddafi vows to obliterate peaceful protesters with aerial bombardments and helicopter-mounted machine guns, the international community condemns it, the protesters call for support, we provide it, and the mission succeeds when the rebels secure Tripoli and kill their erstwhile dictator. The flags of Western nations flew gratefully in the hands of the people of Libya on that day. Seemingly the only people who condemned it were the ones who didn't know what was going on, claiming we were "invading" Libya, or who straight-up hate the United States. Well, too bad: We did what was right, and succeeded. I'm sure those people are crying in their soup over that.