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There is no more mischievous absurdity than this judging
of actions from the outside as they look to us, instead
of from the inside as they look to the actors, nothing
more irrational than to criticize deeds as though the
doers of them had the same desires, hopes, fears and
restraints as themselves. —Herbert
Spencer
TO
understand why presidents lie, following Herbert
Spencer’s advice, judgment must first be withheld, for
above all men (and women, to be gender-blind), they have
different desires, hopes, fears and restraints, although
it is a truth from experience that all presidents, no
matter how saintly (a wrong term to use on them in the
first place), lie. We all lie to protect ourselves, to
console friends and lovers, to unbalance enemies, and
for some of us, for no other reason than we like to. But
that’s beside the point, for presidents are different
from us like the rich are different from us, as F. Scott
Fitzgerald said to Ernest Hemingway, whose testy retort
was that they have more money.
Richard
Neustadt, the American political scientist, gave a
succinct answer to the question: Presidents lie because
their chief power is that of persuasion. As “salesmen”
of policies, they feel they have to use every means of
persuasion, from appeals to reason and the self interest
of the governed, aided, whenever called for, by
horse-trading, various forms of arm-twisting, and, only
in extreme cases, even intimidation—all for the public
good, as they see it.
Their
lies become a special concern in democracies, for the
obvious reason that lying is the least reprehensible
habit of dictators.
There
are lies and lies, however, some of them harmful and
others merely ridiculous. An example of the harmful lie
is the justification for the invasion of Iraq (more of
that later). A ridiculous lie was
Clinton’s explanation of the Monica Lewinsky affair, which, by the
way, didn’t do much damage to the
US as
the lies that surrounded the Vietnam war. In our own
history, there was McKinley’s “manifest destiny”
whispered to him by God to colonize us.
But why
are presidents compelled to lie (assuming that they are
not congenital liars)? “Reasons of state,” as
commentators have pointed out, tracing the exalted
origins of what Swift summarily called political
lying to dear old Plato.
The
Platonic Lie
It’s
said that everything thought of philosophically
originated from Plato. (“Whenever I travel in the realm
of the mind, I meet Plato coming back.”) To the familiar
“Platonic love” there is the Platonic Lie described in
the dialogues Laws and the immortal Republic.
In Laws, Plato made Socrates relate:
This,
said I, it seems likely that our rulers will have to
make a considerable use of falsehood or deception for
the benefit of their subjects. We said, I believe that
use of that sort of thing was in the category of
medicine.
In the
Republic, Socrates concluded:
The
rulers (then) of the city may, if anybody, fitly lie on
account of enemies or cities for the benefit of the
state; no others may have anything to do with it.
In other
words, in a properly governed state, the rulers may
“fitly lie” for the good of the commonwealth, but the
citizens, the governed, may not do so because they lie
only from motives irrelevant to the common welfare.
Lying is
a ruler’s privilege:
It will
be for the rulers of the city, then, if anyone, to use
falsehood in dealing with citizen or assembly for the
good of the state; no one else must do so. And if any
citizen lies to our rulers, we shall regard it as a
still greater offense than it is for a patient to lie to
his doctor, or for an athlete to lie to his trainer
about his physical condition, or for a sailor to
misrepresent to his captain any matter concerning the
ship or crew, or the state of himself or his fellow
sailors… and if so anyone else is found in our state
telling lies, whether he be craftsman, prophet,
physician or shipwright, he will be punished for
introducing a practice likely to capsize and wreck the
ship of state.
From
time immemorial, rulers, leaders, presidents and prime
ministers have predicated their policies, actions and
measures on the general welfare or national interest. It
has been presumed that in any society, there’s one
person, the leader, who knows things that others do not
know, which, in turn, gives him the power to decide on
what citizens should know, for there are things beyond
their ken. No man in the realm has the large apparatus
of gathering and shifting information that the leader,
the ruler, the president, the prime minister, has at his
command.
So it is
in war and in peace. Ralph Waldo Emerson, no warmonger
himself, established the first principle of leadership
when he described how Napoleon “sees where the matter
hinges, throws himself on the precise point of
resistance, and slights all other considerations. He is
strong in the right manner, namely, by insight. He never
blunders into victory, but won battles in the head
before he won them in the field. His principal means are
in himself. He asks counsel of no other.”
That’s
how leaders and commanders see themselves and how their
closest followers, supporters and subordinates see them.
That in
the end Napoleon and all other leaders met their
Waterloo (happily, with presidents they only lose
elections or just end their terms) doesn’t change at all
their propensity for persuading people through lying
when they need to.
Master
Machiavelli
Where
the philosophical leader finds “inspiration” from Plato,
the practical one obviously swears, by instinct or
“education,” by Machiavelli, who wrote in The Prince,
the prudent ruler “ought not to keep faith when by doing
so it would be against his interest, and the reasons
which made him bind himself no longer exist. If men were
all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as
they are bad, and would not observe their faith with
you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them.”
Machiavelli wants his apostle leader to hide this part
of his nature. Not that there is anything that can be
hidden or dissembled without being found out in our time
(considering gossip and media), although most often the
people can’t do anything about it.
The
British writer, Peter Osborne, in his book The Rise
of Political Lying, found a modern counterpart to
Machiavelli in Leo Strauss, regarded as the grandfather
of the so-called neoconservative movement “which is now
in the ascendancy in the United States.”
“Strauss,” wrote Osborne, “was a philosopher who fled
Germany to escape the Nazi Party in 1938, and after
World War II taught at the University of Chicago.
Horrified by what he had seen and experienced in prewar
Germany, he rejected the enlightenment dogma that the
universal spread of truth was the great liberator of
mankind. On the contrary, he feared that “its hard light
dissolved the bonds of society and placed too great a
burden on ordinary people.”
Strauss
did not believe all truths to be harmless, and his
student, the American liberal turned neoconservative
Irving Kristol, approvingly wrote, “Strauss was an
intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could
make some minds free, but he was convinced that there
was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and
political order, and that the popularization of these
truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of
popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and
religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative
consequences.”
Osborne
pointed out that this “doctrine” has enjoyed enormous
influence and application among the tiny group of senior
advisers in the George W. Bush White House. He could
have added Blair’s Downing and our very own presidents.
Here’s
where we arrive at the
Iraq
war as promised earlier. What truth could George Bush
convey to the American people in the aftermath of 9/11
and his administration’s futile search of Osama bin
Laden? Could he have said anything other than that the
war on Iraq would be swift—assuming that he didn’t
mislead himself?
Oh, yes,
indeed, presidents can be misled. Cronies, courtiers,
advisers, associates, subordinates, lie to presidents
whenever they find it safe to do so, but this is no
excuse, for more often than not presidents don’t want to
hear bad news and contrary opinions, and when they ask
questions in the form of counsel, they persist until
they get the answers they want in the first place. Those
who brag that they can tell their president anything,
frankly and honestly, are also lying to themselves. But
even granting them that privilege, the truth of Harry S.
Truman’s motto holds: The buck stops here.
Misunderstanding Plato
But
Plato’s privileging the ruler’s “noble lie” has been
misunderstood by commentators. They failed or omitted to
see the philosopher’s qualification of rulers, or as
they are called in the Republic, “guardians.”
These were elders who from their youth had to undergo a
series of tests of knowledge, probity, discipline and
all those qualities that we associate with “saviors.”
They have an unerring knowledge of justice that it has
become second nature to them. However, Plato’s
vulgarizers have come to the conclusion that since they
were popularly elected, they were “the best and the
brightest,” and therefore the contemporary equivalents
of philosopher-kings because they are at the top of the
apparatus of power. In the same vein that Tevye sang
“when you’re rich, they think you really know,” these
philosopher-kings believe that when you have the power,
you really know.
Such a
pretension is impossible to sustain in a democracy in an
age of mass communication. Transparency, even if more
real in demand than in reality, doesn’t make it easy to
make a leader look or sound better than he or she really
is. Appearing without being is the strongest motive for
lying. Machiavelli and Strauss may be sanctified in the
dubious altar of lying. Not Plato, of whom Huntington
Cairns clearly wrote: “To understand Plato is to be
educated; it is to see the nature of the world in which
we live. The vitality of what he has to say is due to
one factor. He took his point of departure from what is
and not from what man wants. One by one he took up the
greatest problems and if he did not solve them he left
them at least a framework in which subsequent ages could
see them in their essential nature. He has been
misunderstood, and adapted to points of view completely
antithetical to his own; but these aberrations have
always run their course, and it is by a return to
Plato’s insights that the thought of the West has
continually renewed itself.”
Osborne
was wrong in putting Machiavelli and, particularly,
Strauss on the same level. While Plato confessed
ignorance in the persona of Socrates, he believed that
men must seek and are capable of seeking truth. Unlike
Machiavelli, he did not believe that men were
essentially cowardly and evil, but rather are capable of
being courageous and good.
At the
end of Book IX of the Republic, when the perfect
state has finally been imagined, one of the participants
in the dialogue, Adimanthus, said, “I think that it can
be found nowhere on earth.”
Socrates
replied, “Perhaps there is a pattern of it laid up in
heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it. But it
makes no difference whether it exists now or will ever
come into being.”
And why?
Because the Republic is not only about the ideal
(just) state, it also lays down a standard for human
life. To order a state rightly men’s souls must be
raised to behold the universal light. There is truth
beyond this shifting, changing world, and men can seek
and find it.
“The
just state,” wrote Edith Hamilton, “may never come into
being, but a man can always be just, and only the just
can know what justice is.”
A stiff
standard, surely. But we know that in every political
contest, especially in a democracy, citizens are always
curious about which candidate is being truthful or not.
It’s not an easy task telling one from the other, for
which reason, cynics just want to figure out which is
the more expert liar, as evidenced by the good-humored
presumption that campaign promises are meant to be
broken.
The
complicity of citizens is one reason presidents lie.
Presidents see no reason to end it. |
