Quiz: True or false: “All politicians lie.”
Answer: This is a trick question. There is deep subtext to the statement in quotes above, namely: “All politicians are equally bad, so it makes no difference who I choose to vote for.” It is most often spoken by lazy persons who want an excuse for voting with their gut instead of their brain.
Can we postulate that Barack Obama lied when he claimed that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would permit everyone to keep their doctors? And can we also agree that Joe Biden lied when he told stories about his grandfather and his father.
By issuing these acknowledgments (that Obama and Biden sometimes lied), we have immunized ourselves against the habit of adopting lies and endorsing liars. We don’t need to hopelessly condemn our 44th and 46th presidents to the junk-heap of history because they lied ... but we must be honest about their (relatively minor) instances of dishonesty. Most of the time, we can use our powers of observation and our logical brains to evaluate politician’s statements as being true or false — and this is what makes us good citizens: using our brains, even when we’d rather not.
On the contrary, Americans who refuse to admit Trump is a prolific liar who tells the most heinous kind of lies (and those who also damn Obama and Biden for their relatively inconsequential lies) are profoundly guilty of participating in the destruction of our nation and our Constitution. Without our Constitution, America is nothing.
While admitting our respect for free speech, these lie-friendly citizens should not get a pass by asserting a legitimate preference for low inflation, low taxes, smaller government, and/or fewer regulations (...even when such legitimacy rests on information they received from the same pundits and talking heads who adopted and endorsed Trump’s lies early and often). Holding such opinions is not a crime against America, but if a citizen fails to judge liars who are spewing dangerous lies, they have moved away from the umbrella of free speech. The guilt we must ascribe to these wrong-headed citizens resides in their willful ignorance of the universe of wise words from American heroes such as George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address, which specifically warned us against leaders like Trump:
...cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and so usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
So how can we help our disinformation-prone neighbors begin to build a new world view that is unabashedly hostile to lies, lying, and liars?
First, help them understand that liars are personally disrespecting them and selfishly defrauding them. Convince them that anyone who purposely lies about democracy and/or the U.S. Constitution is evil. Nearly everyone has been burned by a liar in their life — probably multiple times. Help them see how personal such lying is and how believing someone else’s lies can damage their humanity and their well-being.
Second, share part of your life-story with them in a way that they can see its obvious truth. If you are a person of faith, acknowledge how that belief directs your actions along a path of benevolence. If you are formerly a member of what has become the misinformation party (i.e. the GOP), let them know how difficult it was for you to begin adopting a new worldview — and how gratifying it ultimately was to make that leap.
Third, let them know there are tools out there to help them discover and reject blatant lies and habitual liars. Here is an example of a neutral source (i.e. one with no political agenda) that can help people develop greater skills to catch liars in their tracks. Some of the tools addressed in the linked article involve looking for:
- Inconsistencies
- Contradictions
- Insincere emotions
- Micro-expressions
- A sense of unease
Fourth, we of the liberal persuasion should be willing to blame some of our philosophers and pundits for destabilizing (and frankly, disrespecting) the concept of truth starting in the 1960s and continuing through the Trump era. These philosophies were generally lumped under the mantles of relativism, post-modernism, and post-truth, and they continue to inflict confusion into political discourse.
While these philosophies have validity and value in limited domains, they can be responsible for fatalism and laziness on behalf of far too much of the citizenry. “It’s all relative” is basically an excuse for not doing the hard work of disallowing anything into your life-mind-structure that’s not factually valid (with the exception of thoughts that belong to the domain of opinion rather than fact). Our judicial system is absolutely beholden to the primacy of facts and if liberals disrespect the concept of “truth” (e.g. because it has a Biblical undertone) we are cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
Since many of us find it hard to share this type of advice with family and friends who have fallen for the cunning charmer (#45), perhaps you could share it with a few school teachers you know? They might find it radical and exciting enough to introduce such an important concept into the mindset of students from K to 12.
“How can a citizen protect themselves against liars and misinformation?”, might be the best civics lesson we can adopt for the twenty-first century.