Lies, Deceit, and the National Agenda

The world you grew up in is no more.  The world of reasonable honesty and reasonable lies has been replaced by abject dishonesty and blatant lies.

Lies.  Yes. People have always told them.  You have told them; so have I.   We need lies; they are a foundational structure of social living.  They both deceive and protect.  Children tell them to their parents to avoid consequences, like punishment.  Adults tell them to their bosses, to enhance their position and/or avoid consequences of poor performance.  Our bosses tell them to their boards to suggest business is good, the project is on target, or the detractors are wrong.  The boards tell them to shareholders to protect their own credibility and most importantly, stock values.  

Our politicians tell lies to their constituents, though sometimes innocently with them not actually knowing much more than they've been told.  They enhance their positions to the detraction of their opponents and to the inflation of their personal positions. They demagogue like crazy.   The very nature of demagoguery (i.e. a calculated lie) is but a lie to promote one cause against another at an emotional level.  Even our least and our greatest statesmen have enjoined in this practice.  I hesitate to give names.  Our current national agenda is conflated with political ideology, real issues, practical problems, and all mixed with lies, deceitful, dishonest, or disingenuous.   There is more.   Another variation of the lie is the "selected truth," whereby a lie is promoted as true on the basis of selected, incomplete or inaccurate information. 

Gun ownership and control come to mind.  The left wishes more control on guns, their licensing, and even ownership.  The quasi emotional argument is that the recent past tragedies may have been avoided with more control.  Right or wrong, this is truly the current and most blatant argument for further control.  It seems reasonable, except almost all available information argues against its reality and effectiveness.  On the counter side, we hear an argument for armed security at all the schools. Expensive, yes.  Effective, maybe.  How can we know?   Both camps argue for unrealistic possibilities.  Alternatives?  Who’s thinking about this?

Current lies have achieved new levels of venality. Lies are now told without regard to credibility.  The password is that if you can't prove it wrong, it must be accepted.  Or, at minimum, it cannot be denied.  The old "common sense" litmus test no longer applies.

Today, we see the gross example of Notre Dame's Manti T'eo's situation of a girlfriend who died of leukemia on the same day as did his grandmother.  Yet, he plays the game and does well.  But, the girlfriend does not even exist. This is clearly, but has not been established, as a form of "catishing,"  wherein the perpetrators attempt to seduce another in to a love relation though only over the Internet or phone. Personal contact seems missing.   Good or bad?  You decide.   Similarly, we see people re-engineering their FaceBook pages to reflect themselves as someone other than what may be correct. 

Lately, within the college enterprise we see a well documented increase in the level of cheating.  Many students see no value in any level of honesty not required to achieve the desired grade, usually an "A" or a "B."  In my personal world, a teacher at a college, sometime the grade of "D" is all that's needed - at whatever cost.   Indeed, we now see in colleges the phenomena of a "second generation of cheaters," students raised by parents who themselves were rampant and blatant cheaters.  Maybe, even the third generation.  This is distressing as I see students offering excuses that are well beyond the pale of credibility.  It is as if they are offering the same, almost identical, excuses they offer their busy parents.   Any attempt at originality is gone. 

By way of background, according to Why Men Don’t Have a Clue & Women Always Need More Shoes, by Allan and Barbara Peaseare, lies come in at least four varieties,  the White Lie, the Beneficial Lie, the Malicious Lie and the Deceptive Lie. Each have a role in our culture.  

There is another, which is the Self-Serving lie.  These lies attempt to promote the sender as someone they are not. This topic is mostly about this fifth category, one that subsumes the others as components.

What are we to do?

If you're still reading, you may agree with the basic thread of these arguments.  This implies you may wonder how we can steer toward a more traditional compass of honesty in our discourse.  Honesty is paramount.

Society has always had a great capacity for lairs, cheats, and the otherwise immoral.    But there is a tipping point.  We've always had lying politicians, robber barons, profiteers for this war, this cause, or this issue. But the numbers have been manageable.  When the preponderance of citizens act as though immorality is moral, as though dishonesty is "what everyone is doing," as though we should not interfere with another's adjudication of what's right, we hit the tipping point. Possibly we have hit this point.

Who can lead this nation back to a path of common sense and general honesty?  First we look at the major institutions, i.e. the power players in national discourse.

• The Church - Right, left, or center, it has lost it moral authority except for a relatively large minority but minority it is.  This includes atheists, a most fashionable alternative, whose appeal is permanently delimited by their basic tenets.  
• The Schools - Recent evidences shows they lie and cheat just like other institutions.  Consider test score cheating (i.e. lying), teacher licensing cheating, vacillation on curriculum each of which is considered the "new" ultimate solution, teaching lying in the classroom on whatever is their belief over and above the curriculum and facts, changing high stakes testing criteria and modifying passing scores. There are more examples
• The Police - This traditional institution is completely deluged by rampant increases in violations of the statutes. They have little time or inclination or mandate to become the minders of societal morality.
• The Courts - We now see course function merely as functionaries of law, interpreting to the good or bad precisely the statute in question. We also witness courts acting as mini-legislatures where the jurist promotes his/her own individual social, societal, legal, or legislative agenda.  
• The Press - This group has altered between passive adherents to a current political trend to vanguards of justice.  They have, for centuries, been honest, corrupt, or downright vassals of contemporary issues.  They are often tokens used by political power.  The most aggressive of the press use the most venal of lies.  Those of selective truths, those that serve the purpose but deny the alternative.
• The Politicians - Well, they are at the point of the latest lies.  They are the foundational leaders and liars of society.  Politicians tell the most blatant, egregious, and contemptible of lies, but do so honestly because that is their principle tool to maintain power.  Not much help there. 

Who remains?  We can look to the lesser structures, the smaller players in society for help.  Maybe.

• Intellectuals - They are so involved in their own personal agenda that their perfectly reasoned and compelling arguments are only redacted upon considering their premises which are so often weak as to be laughable.  Show me an intellectual that argues a balanced case, and I'll show you an intellectual with no readers.
• Academics - These folks fall strictly into the Intellectual category. This sounds good except they are so pre-determinately slanted, no serious person listens to their general claims.  This applies more-and-more to scientific but questionably technical pronouncements. 
• Secular humanists - Is there hope here?  These folks, like atheists, believe in goodness toward fellow man, fairness of treatment, kindness, and honesty.  And all this is done without religion. On the other hand, they disdain everyone else.  However, they are a permanent minority.   For secular humanists, honesty is restricted to what they believe.   

These new extrapolated, extended lies and half-truths in all facets of the everyday are mostly self-serving.  They promote one the one hand a political agenda, perhaps on another an educational agenda, or most often a personal agenda.  With no common sense allowed toward refutation, with no vigilance on factuality, and with no cognizance of truth, there can be no limit to future excesses. Is there an end to this?  We see so much due-process and delimitation of “rights” abounding these days, there derives no clear outcome. With courts arguing the law though the lens of their beliefs, with congress reacting only to immediate headlines, with the people unable to look down the long road of consequence, it is doubtful.   Correctly or not, it seems the national press must set the national agenda on national honesty.  In this light, there are extant only a few beacons of hope.  However, asking the national press to carry the proverbial lantern of Diogenes is at best, scary.

What is the alternative?