Price of the Lie

By Crispin Sartwell

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch argued that human virtue is a transparency to reality, that truthfulness is at the bottom of all virtue. When one floats into a solipsistic world of lies and fantasy, one loses the sense of the reality of other people and can be tempted into any enormity.

What was most pathetic about the Nixon White House in its waning days was the ever-growing detachment from the world: the isolation, the fantasies, the grandiosity that were proportional to the false image of competence that was being presented. As the external presentation became more false, the reality became ever more tawdry, ever smaller, ever more ill.

Secrets and lies - the primary forms of human deception - are aspects and products of power relations. Among the powerful, they are techniques to try to consolidate and expand power indefinitely. It is a political axiom that if you control information you control people and situations. This mode of usurpation has been practiced more thoroughly by the current administration than by any American government since Nixon's, and underneath the apparently complex matters of the circulation of intelligence and awarding of contracts, underneath the backspin and the cliche-ridden language of patriotism, lurks a greed and lust for power that, unchecked, are completely incompatible with the idea of democracy.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and obviously the people looking for them have begun to suspect that there are none. But their reports show, according to Bush, that Saddam presented a terrible threat to the world. By that standard, most governments present a terrible threat to the world, and so, I suppose, most countries should expect to be invaded.

If there is a strategy at the White House to deal with the fallout of their own deceptions, it is to scapegoat "failures of intelligence," as though the slop presented by the intelligence agencies weren't an attempt to meet the demands of the White House in the first place. Were I the CIA, I'd be irritated with the White House, since I was trying to justify their war. And I'd be irritated too that they were trying to destroy my agents to wreak revenge on the people exposing their lies. The response to the leak of the agent's name is Nixonian: deny everything, then assure everyone that you're perfectly well-placed to investigate yourself and that you will cooperate fully with your own investigation.

If there is a fallback position on the justification for the war, it is the conquest of Iraq is a key moment in the "war on terror," though it is not possible to say exactly why.

Dick Cheney has "no financial ties" to the company he used to run, Haliburton; rather, he simply continues to be paid by them. Haliburton has received billions of dollars worth of contracts to help rebuild Iraq. One begins to think of Operation Iraqi Freedom as a slightly sophisticated form of plunder.

When people keep catching you in lies, they stop believing what you say. At this point Bush's speeches, beginning to end, sound like so much meaningless claptrap; I've stopped believing him even when what he says is obviously true. People get tired of being manipulated.

And in a democracy, when people stop believing you, they ought to stop voting for you, and generally will, because they begin to understand that they have become unreal in the minds of the liars. Bush & co. have given up trying to persuade and inspire - that is, they've given up leadership - and dedicated themselves to manipulation. At this point, and despite the fact that for obvious reasons he has infinite cash at his disposal, I would be surprised if Bush were to be re-elected.

But more deeply, perhaps, it would be a good idea for Bush, Cheney, and company to begin to think about what their secrecy and lies are doing to themselves. For a constant deception of everyone around you is a symptom or a cause of self-deception. The external lie - whatever the liar might believe - pollutes the inner self.

Once you get to the point where you will say anything to maintain or prop up your deception, there really is nothing left inside you: no core of pride, no genuine power of personality. And it is all too easy to reach that hell by a series of incremental steps; a thousand small lies add up to a collapse of the self and then to real, personal evil.

The Bush administration is quickly entering the hell of solipsism that Murdoch describes, losing its own grip on the truth and hence contact with whatever virtue could still exist in the people who compose it.

If the administration weren't so heavily armed, it would be merely pitiable.

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Crispin Sartwell's book "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives" will be published later this fall. c.sartwell@verizon.net