Wikipedia on the Pentagon Papers: “The Pentagon papers is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States’ political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study; they were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971. A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration ‘systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.’ ”
Excerpts from Lying in Politics (empahsis added):
Secrecy--what diplomatically is called “discretion,” as well as the arcana imperii, the mysteries of government--and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be surprised by how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand for the nature of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case. This active, aggressive capability is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus.
A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo, to create ex nihilo. In order to make room for one's own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth-the ability to lie--and the capacity to change facts--the ability to act--are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.
Hence, when we talk about lying, and especially about lying among acting men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear. The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt--as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance, the statement that two and two make four.
It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.
The results of such experiments when undertaken by those in possession of the means of violence are tenable enough, but lasting deception is not among them. There always comes the point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive. Truth or falsehood-it does not matter which any more, if your life depends on your acting as though you trusted; truth that can be relied on disappears entirely from public life, and with it the chief stabilizing factor in the ever-changing affairs of men.
Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past, too. Insofar as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist's patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts. Instead, they will be tempted to fit their reality--which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise--into their theory, thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency
Arendt argues that lying becomes counterproductive for the liar once (i) politics has obliterated any distinction between truth and lies, and (ii) belief in lies is a matter of life and death. Once politics has reached that level of degeneration, what comes next arguably is chaos and conflict. If that is true, and despite being awash in an ocean of lies, Americans can still call out political lies as lies and survive. Some might lose their jobs, but at least so far, they won't be forced into poverty, jailed or murdered.
The good news: That implies, (1) American politics still has a fair amount of degenerating to do, and (2) it must lead to an authoritarian government, presumably oversees by a dictator-president. To make belief in lies a matter of survival seems to require a dictator willing to silence opposition by force.
If that logic is sound, we're still in good shape because people can call out President Trump's lies and other political lies and survive.
B&B orig: 7/6/19
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