No.95 - ‘Let me make it absolutely clear…’ Spin, Misspeaks, Obfuscations and Downright Lies. The Election Kicks off!

Dear James,

We know that politicians rarely tell the truth. The phrase, ‘Let me make it absolutely clear…’. usually signals a right old verbal porridge for the obfuscation and confusion of the listener. We grimace, at best turn off the radio and, at worst, throw something at it. 

Stalin and Hitler both claimed monopolies of the truth. Stalin even called his party newspaper, ‘Pravda’, meaning… you’ve guessed it, ‘The truth’. Hitler’s ‘truth’ only emerged slowly. It was called ‘`The Holocaust’. La Vérité, Die Wahrheit, La Verdad, The Truth - every politician in the world ascribes to their ‘truth’ but the word means very little without the personal honesty that should be its anchor. Real truth has little to do with words or reason but, as the philosopher David Hume said, ‘Reason is … the slave to the passions’. He was being critical (everything is subjective?) but also hopeful (without passion there is no life?). Passion is the life force deep within us, beneath words, beneath behaviour, beneath even our own histories. If we go deep enough, most of us know what is right and what is wrong. The problem is that few of us have the time or determination to go deep. We get stuck half way down. In attitudes, in slogans, in fixed thinking, in simplistic but dangerous divisions of the world into them and us.

But attitudes are necessary. They are the short cuts to meaning and the store rooms of our consciousness. We all use them to a lesser or greater degree but today many people live according to attitude alone.  We have stopped thinking. We are polarised. Because the key to healthy attitude is to keep the door labelled doubt, open. And the main instrument for dealing with doubt is critical thinking. Doubt and critical thinking are essential antidotes to living by attitude and, without them, we are all in danger of becoming bigots.

Unfortunately, politics today is based upon the manipulation of attitudes. The least of these is spin. Spin is the depiction of a truth from a particular perspective, drowning out other truth or a larger truth. We all got used to the spin of Tony Blair long ago. It is almost forgivable. But so many attitudes are hidden even unto ourselves. ‘Misspeaking’ is often a give away. When politicians misspeak, they inadvertently reveal much about such hidden attitudes. Jacob Rees-Mogg delivered one of these a few days ago when on LBC radio he told everyone that if the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire had used their ‘common sense’ many more would have been saved. Andrew Bridgen MP compounded the mistake by saying, after a suggestion that Rees-Mogg thought himself cleverer than the Grenfell victims, ”But we want very clever people running the country, don’t we?” Misspeaks may be forgiven but they often reveal deeper truths. For example, that Rees-Mogg and his patrician pals look down on lesser mortals.

Obfuscation or the deliberate confusion of truths is perhaps the most common form of political mistruth. Two days ago the Tory Party doctored a video of Kier Starmer to show him hesitating after a question about getting a good deal with the EU. The original video shows he never hesitated but the Tories refused to disown the video. Here we are in the area of downright propaganda. Dr Goebbels must be laughing in his grave.

But all the above fade into insignificance when compared with the ‘Departments of Downright Lies’. Forget Vladimir Putin, Xi Xinping, and Kim Jong Un, today in the West we have the most egregious exemplar of mistruth in Donald Trump. The Washington Post fact checks Trump and awards scores for his statements. Three Pinocchios for ‘significant factual errors’ and four for ‘whoppers’. According to the ‘Economist’, Mr Trump had made 13,435 false or misleading statements by October this year. Mr Trump is the master craftsman of the downright lie. Boris is his willing apprentice.

But perhaps the real problem today is that voters no longer seem to care about truth itself. Intuitively we know when something or someone is not right and yet so many of us continue with the lie. When we see or hear a ‘truth’ which we know is not true, we look the other way or shrug as if to say, that’s just politics. That is because, for many people, identity matters more than truth and identity depends on finding the comfort of fellow travellers of specific attitude blocks. Trump still has a 43% approval rating.

Truth is never easy. Quantum physics shows us that there are no observable absolute truths, only probabilities. We all know in our heart of hearts that spinning, misspeaking and telling downright lies damages the social fabric. In the end it is only critical thinking, that glorious product of the Enlightenment, that will save us all from entrenched attitudes. How much better the world would be if people sometimes said to themselves, “I might be wrong’.

Ever had that feeling James? That, just occasionally, you too might be wrong?

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent