THE CULTURE OF LIES

Everybody tells lies, even the saintly tell lies of omission. Lying maybe in innate in people, a former of survival mechanism.  However, most people feel that telling lies is not good and carry a hierarchy of lies in their head from the acceptable ‘white lie’ to the unacceptably dishonest. Historically politicians caught lying were expected to resign, or, when out of office,  to demonstrate an appropriate level of contrition. No longer.

Most historians will see 2016 as the point at which political lying without consequences became the norm. Trump, of course, is the chief exemplar of the new breed of lying politicians, but Brexit and the performance of Boris Johnson and the other Brexiteers in deliberately misleading the public also touched new heights of duplicity, deceit and calculated untruth.

On the left, we have Corbyn, a man who tells lies about his past on a  daily basis, from Northern Ireland to Iran and Russia. Corbyn rewrites his role as cheerleader for violence and reaction and depicts himself as Saint Jeremy man of peace.

And what of the reaction to these lies from the electorate? Well, for the most part, they adopt a sort of shrugged shouldered indifference ‘so what,’ often combined with a sense of angry impotence, to which the balm of ‘wisdom’ is applied, - ‘they’re all the same, in it for themselves.'  On the other hand partisans on either side spew scorn or apologia to either attack the monstrous lies of ‘the enemy,’ or apologia and whataboutery in defence of their own champion.

We pay a heavy price for this constant stream of falsehood, for daily faith in democratic politics is corroded and civic society undermined. Remember too that when it comes to a culture resting upon lies there are all too many waiting in the wings, and they have turned it into an art form. 

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