The Post-Truth Era by Ralph Keyes · Brojo: Confidence & Integrity

The Post-Truth Era by Ralph Keyes

A great excerpt from a classic book about dishonesty:

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Post-Truthfulness

Even though there have always been liars, lies have usually been told with hesitation, a dash of anxiety, a bit of guilt, a little shame, at least some sheepishness. Now, clever people that we are, we have come up with rationales for tampering with truth so we can dissemble guilt-free. I call it post-truth. We live in a post-truth era. Post-truthfulness exists in an ethical twilight zone. It allows us to dissemble without considering ourselves dishonest. When our behavior conflicts with our values, what we’re most likely to do is reconceive our values. Few of us want to think of ourselves as being unethical, let alone admit that to others, so we devise alternative approaches to morality. Think of them as alt.ethics. This term refers to ethical systems in which dissembling is considered okay, not necessarily wrong, therefore not really “dishonest” in the negative sense of the word.

Even if we do tell more lies than ever, no one wants to be considered a liar. That word sounds so harsh, so judgmental. Men in particular are extremely careful to avoid giving other men any opportunity to say “You callin’ me a liar?” Once those fatal words are spoken, it’s hard for dialogue to continue without fists being thrown, or worse. The word lie itself is both a description and a weapon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this term “is normally a violent expression of moral reprobation, which in polite conversation tends to be avoided.” That’s why we come up with avoidance mechanisms: rationales for dishonesty, reasons why it’s okay to lie, not nearly as bad as we once thought, maybe not so bad after all. The emotional valence of words associated with deception has declined. We no longer tell lies. Instead we “misspeak.” We “exaggerate.” We “exercise poor judgment.” “Mistakes were made,” we say. The term “deceive” gives way to the more playful “spin.” At worst, saying “I wasn’t truthful” sounds better than “I lied.” Nor would we want to accuse others of lying; we say they’re “in denial.” That was sometimes said even of Richard Nixon, the premier liar of modern times, who went to his grave without ever confessing to anything more than errors of judgment. Presidential aspirant Gary Hart admitted only to “thoughtlessness and misjudgment” after reporters revealed Hart’s dishonesty (not only about his sex life but about his age). When, during a primary debate, John Kerry referred to a nonexistent poll that put his popularity well above Hillary Clinton’s, an aide later said Kerry “misspoke.” And it isn’t just male politicians who parse words this way. In the course of writing The Dance of Deception, Harriet Lerner asked women friends what lies they’d recently told. This request was invariably greeted with silence. When Lerner asked the same friends for examples of “pretending,” they had no problem complying. “I pretended to be out when my friends called,” said one without hesitation.

A direct admission of lying (“I lied”) is rare to nonexistent. Those willing to make such a bold statement cast doubt on anything they have said in the past and anything they will say in the future. This is why, rather than open the floodgates and accept lying as a way of life, we manipulate notions of truth. We “massage” truthfulness, we “sweeten it,” we tell “the truth improved.” Britain’s cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong once created an uproar with his droll admission that he’d been “economical with the truth” (a phrase he borrowed from Edmund Burke). Since then, all manner of creative phrasemaking has been devoted to explaining why lies are something else altogether. My favorite depicts a liar as “someone for whom truth is temporarily unavailable.”

When Trump: The Art of the Deal was published, Donald Trump claimed that 200,000 copies had been printed, that The Today Show planned to interview him five times, and that the issue of New York magazine with an excerpt of his book was its biggest seller ever. In fact, 150,000 copies of Trump were printed, Today interviewed him twice, and New York’s sales figures were not available at the time he made his claims. In his book, Trump called this kind of braggadocio “truthful hyperbole.” After The Apprentice became a hit, Trump claimed his television show was the season’s ratings leader (when it was actually #7) and said he was America’s highestpaid television personality. A Fortune reporter who debunked these claims, and many others, concluded that Trump’s boasts about himself were, at best, “loosely truth-based.”

Euphemasia

Dishonesty inspires more euphemisms than copulation or defecation. This helps desensitize us to its implications. In the post-truth era we don’t just have truth and lies, but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall short of a lie. Enhanced truth it might be called. Neo-truth. Soft truth. Faux truth. Truth lite. Through such aggressive euphemasia we take the sting out of telling lies. Euphemasia calls up remarkable powers of linguistic creativity. In addition to golden oldies such as “credibility gap,” “reframing,” and Winston Churchill’s “terminological inexactitudes,” consider the following examples of post-truthful euphemisms:

Lies

poetic truth

parallel truth

nuanced truth

imaginative truth

virtual truth

alternative reality

strategic misrepresentations

creative enhancement

nonfull disclosure

selective disclosure

augmented reality

nearly true

almost true

counterfactual statements

fact-based information

To Lie

enrich the truth

enhance the truth

embroider the truth

massage the truth

tamper with the truth

tell more than the truth

bend the truth

soften the truth

shade the truth

shave the truth

stretch the truth

stray from the truth

withhold the truth

tell the truth improved

present the truth in a favorable perspective

make things clearer than the truth

be lenient with honesty

spin

Eventually euphemisms themselves develop connotations and spawn progeny. As an executive tells employees in a New Yorker cartoon: “I’m not spinning—I’m contextualizing.”

Ledger-Book Morality

Honesty was once considered an all-or-nothing proposition. You were either honest or dishonest. In the post-truth era this concept has become more nuanced. We think less about honesty and dishonesty per se and more about degrees of either one. Ethics are judged on a sliding scale. If our intentions are good, and we tell the truth more often than we lie, we consider ourselves on firm moral ground. If we add up truths and lies we’ve told and find more of the former than the latter, we classify ourselves honest. This is ledger-book morality. Conceding that his magazine soft-pedaled criticism of advertisers, one publisher concluded, “I guess you could say we’re 75 percent honest, which isn’t bad.”

In terms of values, this approach denotes a significant shift. Previous generations tended to think you were virtuous or you weren’t. Morality was not assessed by tallying assets and debits on a spreadsheet of virtue and hoping to come out ahead. Another analogy would be that we have shifted from set menu to buffetstyle ethics: picking and choosing which ones to abide. This approach allows for the “compartmentalizing” at which Bill Clinton was said to excel. Abraham Lincoln would not be impressed.

Rising dishonesty has less to do with declining ethics than with a social context that doesn’t place enough emphasis on truthfulness. There has never been a shortage of unscrupulous people. Wherever there are those who think they can get away with lying, there will be liars. The question is: What circumstances foster getting away with telling lies? Apart from sociopaths who make no real distinction between truth and lies, most of us are more honest in certain circumstances, less honest in others. Circumstances that condone dishonesty have risen while those that nurture honesty are in decline. If we do lie more—and I believe we do—it’s because the context of contemporary life doesn’t do enough to penalize dishonesty. At times our culture seems to do just the opposite. Lies pay off, the truth pays a penalty. Whistle-blowers get reprimanded, those on whom whistles are blown get promoted. The army’s chief of staff was rebuked, then hounded out of uniform after his prescient observation that many more troops would be needed to occupy Iraq than to invade that country. A government actuary was threatened with dismissal for suggesting (accurately) that the overall cost of a Medicare prescription-benefit program would be far higher than the figure propagated by the White House. By contrast, known liars such as Monica Lewinsky, Geraldo Rivera, Oliver North, Mike Barnicle, Jayson Blair, and Joe Klein were rewarded with television or radio programs, book contracts, and magazine columns. Being notoriously deceitful can make the deceiver famous, a celebrity even. On our media-driven scale of values, celebrity trumps honesty.

Any Psychology 101 student knows that reinforced behavior is likely to persist. We get the society we pay for. In this case, that means a post-truthful one. Even if more lies are being told than ever, I don’t think there’s any greater human propensity to tell lies. What I do believe is that an age-old willingness to deceive others is being facilitated in new ways. To get a better handle on the prevalence of dishonesty today, let’s first take a brief look at the history of lying.

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