The Politics of Lying, An Essay by Henry Giroux

When it comes to politics and lying the two seem to go hand in glove.  We've always considered politicians a bit shady, willing to bend the truth to suit their purposes.  Yet it can be difficult to distinguish outright lying from differences of opinion, selective perception, variances in grasp and understanding.  If I have no grounding in a topic and someone who does makes a claim that I find hard to swallow, I may suspect them of fiddling with the truth.  Historically, our best political leaders have used fibbing to build consensus or at least acceptance of their chosen policies. Those were the good old days.

Today we have become inured to a much different, even malignant form of political lying.  American intellectual and McMaster prof, Henry Giroux, discusses this in his essay, "The Politics of Lying and the Culture of Deceit in Obama's America," taken from his book, "Zombie Politics and the Culture of Cruelty."

Here are some excerpts from Giroux's essay:

In the age of public relations managers and talk show experts, we are witnessing the demise of public life.  At a time when education is reduced to training workers and stripped of any civic ideals and critical practices, it becomes unfashionable for the public to think critically.  Rather than intelligence uniting us, a collective ignorance of politics, culture, the arts, history, and important social issues, as Mark Slouka points out, "gives us a sense of community, it confers citizenship."  Our political passivity is underscored by a paucity of intellectual engagement, just as the need for discrete judgment and informed analysis falls prey to a culture of watching, a culture of illusion and circus tricks...

The widespread acceptance of lying and deceit is not merely suggestive of a commodified and ubiquitous corporate-driven electronic culture that displays an utter contempt for morality and social needs; it also registers the existence of a troubling form of infantilization and depoliticization.  Lying as common sense and deceit as politics-as-usual join the embrace of provocation in a coupling that empties politics and Agency of any substance and feeds into a corporate state And militarized culture in which matters of judgment, thoughtfulness, morality, and compassion seem to disappear from public view. What is the social cost of such flight from reality, if not the death of democratic politics, critical thought, and civic agency?  

When a society loses sight of the distinction between fact and fiction, truth-telling and lying, what happens is that truth, critical thought, and fact-finding as conditions of democracy are rendered trivial and reduced to a collection of mere platitudes, which in turn reinforces moral indifference and political impotence.   Under such circumstances, language actually becomes the mechanism for promoting political powerlessness.  Lying and deceit are no longer limited to merely substituting falsehoods for the truth; they now performatively constitute their own truth, promoting celebrity culture, right-wing paranoia, and modes of government and corporate power freed from any sense of accountability...

When lying and deceit become normalized in a culture, they serve as an index of how low we have fallen as a literate and civilized society.  Such practices also tied to corporate and political power, and sabotaged by rigid ideologies as part of a growing authoritarianism that uses the educational force of the culture, the means of communication, and the sites in which information circulate to mobilize ignorance among a misinformed citizenry, all the while supporting reactionary policies....

Beyond disinformation and disguise, the politics of lying and the culture of deceit trade in and abet the rhetoric of fear in order to manipulate the public into a state of servile political dependency and unquestioning ideological support. Fear (and its attendant use of moral panics) not only creates a rhetorical umbrella to promote right-wing ideological agendas (increased military spending, tax relief for the rich, privatization, market-driven reforms, and religious intolerance) but also contributes to a sense of helplessness and cynicism throughout the body politic...

The politics of lying and the culture of deceit are wrapped in the logic of absolute certainty, an ominous harbinger of a kind of illiteracy in which one no longer has to be accountable for justifying opinions, claims, or alleged arguments. Stripped of accountability, language finds its final resting place in a culture of deceit and arrogance in which lying either is accepted as a political strategy or is viewed as simply another normalized aspect of every day life...

How we define ourselves as a nation cannot be separated from the language we value, inhabit, and use to shape our understanding of others and the world in which we want to live.  As the language of critique, civic responsibility, political courage, and democracy disappears along with sustained investment in schools, media, and other elements of a formative culture that keeps an aspiring democracy alive, we lose the spaces and capacities to imagine a future in which language, literacy, and hope are on the side of justice, rather than on the side of hate, willful ignorance, and widespread injustice.