I just heard a radio interview with
Paul Ekman, who has been studying lying for decades. He concludes that there is
no biological tell,
no Pinocchio’s nose. No matter how sophisticated the polygraph or how astute
the listener, there is no magic formula to unmask liars.
I’ve also been reading “I
Spy: How to be Your Own Private Investigator” by Daniel Ribacoff. He
has also spent years thinking about lying, and lying himself, in pursuit of
true information. He outlines the obvious physical and verbal tells. These can
be applied by anyone to any case, from what relatives say to the Brett
Kavanaugh hearings. By those professional standards, Kavanaugh’s testimony is
not very believable.
Lies are not any old untruth. Ekman
developed a careful definition: “a lie is a deliberate choice to mislead a
target without notification”.
We spend a lot of money and time
being misled by people we pay to mislead us. Last night I saw “The
Devil’s Own” with Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford in their younger days.
Pitt was an Irish terrorist, but a good guy. He worked hard to make me and
millions believe that. But we had been notified: it’s a movie. Or it’s a play,
it’s a sitcom. It’s a novel. We expect a fictional narrative to be a fiction,
an attempt to convince us to believe just while we’re reading that these people
are alive and real.
The line between fact and fiction
has been getting blurrier for decades. But when authors at reputable
organizations tried to hide the liberties they took with the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth, they have been exposed
and punished. Fact-checking still works.
This election campaign brings us a
special seasonal offering of nationwide lying, the attack ad, on behalf of
people hiding behind the people in tiny print. An attack ad does not have to be
untruthful. If “opposition research” meant what it sounds like, it would be
useful. We need to know as much as possible about candidates who want to run
the country. But the “research” is dishonest at the start: what can we discover
about our opponent that can be transformed into an untrue but effective TV ad?
By using character assassination to
slip ahead of their opponents, politicians of all stripes debase our political
system and tarnish themselves, too. They say, “It’s just my campaign. I must do
this to get elected. Other people were trying to help me. I was misquoted.”
Lies on top of lies.
I don’t mean to blur the differences
in untruthfulness among attack ads. We must distinguish between stretching the
truth and creating a big lie. The Swiftboaters spent millions to create a big
scurrilous lie to influence the presidential election. As a “private
citizen”, Trump heard about and spent millions to propagate a
big lie about Obama’s birth.
But with a dose of naive optimism,
we hope the campaign liar will become the honest government official, and
that’s especially true about every President. A President is in a unique
position to know anything. We get more political news from him than from any
other person. Every president lies, and some have told whoppers of great
significance. In his farewell speech in January 1961, President Eisenhower gave
a
remarkable warning about the dangers of our developing
political-military-industrial complex. But it was drowned out by John Kennedy’s
campaign insistence on a fictional missile gap.
Johnson told lies about Vietnam
that resulted in thousands of American deaths and many times more Vietnamese
deaths. Nixon was a crook, who got his start by employing dishonest
attack ads in the 1950s.
Perhaps we are naive no longer.
Trump is different, lying automatically about everything, from inconsequential
but easily verifiable things, like the size of his inauguration crowd, to
dangerous attacks on our democratic system, when he says that leftists and
illegal voters rigged the election he won. The best minds in America, led by
Kris Kobach, couldn’t turn up any evidence for that, either.
He lies and calls anyone who
catches him a liar. Since he lies so much and so insistently, he ends up
calling nearly all major sources of news our enemies.
Conservatives have been calling the
most dedicated seekers after truth, scientists, professors, and journalists,
who all tend to produce public information conservatives don’t like, liars for
many years. On the other side, the most dedicated purveyors of falsehood have
become conservative heroes. The media savvy outrager-in-chief Alex Jones and
the seemingly academic Heartland Institute have both been peddling one big lie
after another to self-selected conservative audiences with great success.
Can I learn anything from attack
ads? Yes, but not what their creators intend. We shall know you by what you say
about others. Compare what candidate A pays people to say about candidate B
with what other sources say. Think about evidence. Candidate A says much about
himself by trying to mislead you without notification. It takes more work, but
we need to put in more work to know how to vote.
If you vote for perpetrators of
political assault, eventually they will assault you.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October
2, 2018
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