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Three-lie leeway

  • 24 October 2022
Welcome to 'Stray Thoughts', where the Eureka Street editorial team muses on ethical and social challenges we've noted throughout the week.  There’s an old joke – ‘How do you know a [politician/lawyer/banker – insert white collar profession here] is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving.’ On first hearing, this joke and others of its ilk may cause a wry smile. It used to have just enough truth to be recognisable but far enough from people’s reality that it was able to be dismissed as a joke. However, lately it seems politicians are determined to make the above a reality and the joke is now on us. How do we go from insisting our children tell the truth, even if it leads to punishment for breaking rules, to casually accepting a lack of veracity from societal ‘leaders’? Why in this age of social media when the mildest of heterodox comments cause a storm of protest do blatant untruths cause not even a ripple? Why aren’t people angry?

But does it matter? After all, if we expect to be lied to then the onus is on us to ensure we seek out the facts.

First, not all resources are the same, including mainstream news. Stray into the miasma of right-wing opinion and only the lucky escape unscathed by a worldview of fear and trepidation. [There are problems with a left-wing diet too, but they are less to do with scaremongering and more to do with violent shaming of those who don’t cleave 100% to accepted social orthodoxy.] Second, who has the time? Third, if friends and family are all believers what incentive is there to seek a different opinion? Fourth, the problem with believing that everybody lies is that facts that don’t confirm the reader’s worldview can be easily dismissed as propaganda.

The master of the lie (referring to quantity, not quality) is of course former US President Donald Trump. Cataloguing Trump’s falsehoods while in office, The Washington Post Fact Checker team found the former president had accumulated 30,573 untruths. His rate of lying increased from an average of six claims a day in his first year as president to 16 claims per day in his second year, 22 claims a day in his third year, culminating in 39 claims a day in his final year.

Perhaps it’s our fault that his output of lies grew. Instead of dismissing the lies as unimportant, accommodating him or laughing at him, there should have been
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