There are two kinds of lie that corrupt public discourse. The lie that is intended to deceive is easy to understand, but the lie that is intended to be recognised as a lie is much more dangerous, because it carries an unambiguous message about power.
In western democracies we are geared up to deal with the lie that is intended to deceive. That is the sort of lie that will finish your career if you are found to have told it to parliament, and it is also the kind of lie that the media dreams of exposing. In these cases we talk about truth as a light, or truth as a disinfectant: metaphors which suggest that the falsehoods will shrivel and lose their power when they are confronted with the truth. The protections against this first sort of lie don’t always work. They work best in artificial and highly organised contexts such as the law and science. Even then there are miscarriages of justice and frauds: perjurers are believed and faked results go undetected. But for the most part we can trust the findings of fact that come out of such inquiries.
Without a formal institutional structure such as a law court or the process of peer review, there is no effective defence against a lie that people really want to believe, as the EU referendum made clear. £350m a week for the NHS was by any reasonable standards a deliberate and highly effective lie, whose perpetrators will never be punished even by loss of office, since they had no elected offices to lose. It deceived the people who wanted to believe it and helped to bring about a disastrous result for this country. But that is an unusual case. In general, where politicians are supposed to have been caught lying they pay for it later in loss of public confidence, and for a very long time, as those in charge of the Iraq war can testify.
The first kinds of lies all spread because, to some degree, people enjoy or collude in them. The second and more insidious kind spread against the judgment or instinct of the listeners. This is a statement of pure power: that the speaker can force the listener to repeat it and thus to lie too. The classic example comes from O’Brien’s interrogation of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently. ‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’ ‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’”
This second style of lying is intimately linked with torture and not just because torture is sometimes used to compel it. In both cases, what is being demonstrated is the primacy of power over truth. Torture may not make its victims tell the truth, but it works wonderfully to make power relations clear.
When George Orwell wrote, he was depicting the style of lying in Moscow. Now it is the fashion in Washington as well. When the White House press secretary was sent out to lie to the media about the size of the crowd at the inauguration, when both he and his audience knew he was lying, we entered a new world. The truth here seems helpless against the assertion of the thing that is not so. But there is no need for despair. We are not tortured prisoners, as Winston Smith was. When asked who we believe, “me, or your lying eyes”, we defend our imperfect democracy by trusting our lying eyes.
