Andrew Sullivan quotes a teacher from Unfogged.com, complaining that students repeatedly refer to Iraq's attack on the twin towers on 9/11:
The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.
It would be an easy shot—and true—to point out that the Bush administration has pulled off a variation of Hitler's "big lie" strategy with a new twist. They have managed to figure out how to tell the big lie, and still retain deniability.
It's quite a feat.
But I'm more interested in why they can get away with this particular kind of deception, and I think the reason goes back to some false assumptions we're all taught to make, from the time we're young.
The first false assumption, oddly enough, is that lying is wrong.
I would suggest that this is, itself, a lie, and a particularly dangerous one. It has its roots in authoritarian morality, as opposed to the wisdom model, and this goes a long way toward explaining its existence.
Very often the only defense of the weak against the strong is deception.
If I can overpower you with force of one kind or another, if I can arrange the situation so you have very few options and nowhere to run, you can still manipulate the situation by misleading me. "I wasn't in the kitchen when the cookie jar smashed," or "No, we have no Jews hiding here," both come under the heading of self-defense.
But, of course, an authoritarian-based morality is going to view both of those examples as a sin (depending, of course, on who the current authority is). Authorities do not like to be lied to, because lies rob them of power.
But deception is a normal, and even desirable, part of life. Even the ten commandments—thoroughly rooted in the legal model—only forbids "false witness against your neighbor": a very limited and specific kind of lie.
We lie all the time for good reasons—to save other people's feelings, to protect our spouse, to smooth a social encounter, to simplify a complex explanation. "Were you offended by that?" "No. Not at all." "What made you so late?" "Traffic."
The truth is, it's not lying that causes the problem, it's the purpose and context of the lie. It can be right to lie to protect someone's feelings, and wrong to lie in order to cheat them. Keeping you from guessing about your surprise party is a completely different matter from tricking you into support of an obscene war.
If you accept the authoritarian view that lying is by nature wrong, you find yourself in a dilemma. Most people lie, in one form or another, many times per day. A perfect truth-teller, who never gave even a slightly false impression, would have no friends, and probably no career, left within a week.
But we do have to live with ourselves.
So what do people who believe lies are always wrong do? They lie to themselves about what a lie is.
A lie is an attempt to deceive. It doesn't matter whether the deception is produced by words, or body language, or a facial expression. If I am trying to deceive I am lying.
But if I believe that lying is always wrong, I will try to limit that definition. The most common way is to focus on exact words. How many times have you heard the phrase, "I didn't lie," uttered immediately following a completely intentional deception (which just happened not to involve any literally false sentences).
A friend of mine once did me an incredible favor. I had a dog, which I needed to get rid of urgently, but was very fond of. I wanted to turn it in at a pound which I knew had a high placement rate, and a reputation for not putting animals down.
I didn't live in the same city the pound was in, so I had to drive the dog there to turn it in. This would involve a lie, because they didn't take animals from out of town. I had no problem with this (the life of my dog weighed more with me than city policy), but I was an emotional basket case over taking the dog in.
My friend did me the great service of going with me, and made an impossible task more bearable. But she did have a problem with the lie—possibly because it was, after all, technically against the law, and that made it a very authoritarian situation.
Her solution was to have me stop, inside the city limits, while she reached over and lifted the dog off the seat of my car. She then felt that she could say, without lying, that she had picked the dog up near that corner, in the city.
Although it was a little unusual for my friend, this is a common approach to the problem—but, with due respect, she was mistaken. It was still a lie.
The broader problem is that our culture has a large authoritarian component, and consequently a pervasive pressure to believe, out of self-defense, that a lie must involve speaking a sentence which is literally untrue.
The problem with this is that it gives really accomplished liars, like the Bush administration, a free pass.
What they have done is connect Iraq to the twin towers time and time again, in a thousand ways, without actually saying, in so many words, that Iraq did it. They have done this with the clear intent of deceiving the American people (successfully), so it is a lie.
They have done it for the purpose of getting the American people to go along with an illegal and harmful war.
But they get a free pass, because they can claim, "I never said that," and people who have been trained to think that only the exact words matter will believe them.
What's worse, they probably believe it themselves.
The solution is to face the truth about ourselves, and about lying—to stop retreating to a ritualistic accounting of nouns and verbs, and focus, honestly, on the greater matters before us—both in our personal lives and on the national level.
This is not some new-fangled morality, but the ancient human wisdom tradition, objecting, once again, to legal and authoritarian models which attempt to reduce real issues of moral judgment to a set of rules—and loopholes.
It is, finally, the essence of what Jesus had against the Pharisees.
