Political Telepathy

By Crispin Sartwell

 

The last refuge of scoundrels is their own minds.

    Let us consider questions raised by two of our current scandals. First, did George Bush or Dick Cheney lie about Iraq's weapons programs in order to bring us to the point of war? Did Tom DeLay oppose limits on internet gambling because of gifts from gambling interests?

    The answers to these inquiries appear to turn on the beliefs and desires of the people in question. To lie is to know that some claim is false and then to assert it anyway. To be bribed is to take a certain action because one has been paid to take it - it entails that money constituted one's motive.

    Let us suppose that telepathy is impossible. In that event, the only decisive witness on the question of whether you have lied or accepted a bribe is you. When people are accused of these trespasses they typically react with outrage, much as Cheney and DeLay have done, and without the power to read their minds, we're not going to be able to see whether this outrage is feigned.

    The idea that culpability rests ultimately inside people's heads seems irresistible. Intention, for example, is the difference between murder and not murder. But the idea also has deeply paradoxical consequences.

    Lying requires that I believe that what I am saying is false. So if I could convince myself that it's true, or even merely confuse myself about whether it is true or not, I wouldn't be lying. That is, evaluating actions by intentions rewards self-deception.

     That is the function of things like extremely poor intelligence, in every sense of the term. It may be that only an idiot would believe the testimony of the Iraqi dissident code-named "Curveball" to the effect that Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs. But if you are that idiot, then you're not a liar when you use this testimony to justify an expenditure of lives. You are exactly as decent and honest as you are stupid.

     It is a truism that a quid pro quo is impossible to prove. Tom DeLay has built a career on this fact. If he can convince himself that he's not making direct exchanges - that he'd do the same anyway, or that he's been convinced by the arguments - then he can in perfect innocence keep the cash flowing like champagne.

    No one can come to believe something just by wanting to believe it. But you can cultivate evidence on one side and ignore evidence on the other. You can listen to people who say what you want them to say and ignore or bludgeon people who disagree. Once you cultivate such a technique, you have opened a path to perdition.

     Here is one important lesson of such observations: Virtues that concern human action presuppose virtues that concern human beliefs. You cannot be a decent person without a capacity for withering self-reflection, and the necessity for such virtues increases with the power you have over other people's lives. 

     Most of us are skilled at exonerating ourselves, at believing anything that props up our self-image in the face of the evidence. You believe your own excuses, or you re-describe your actions: you were drunk, it was silly, you didn't want it to turn out that way, you couldn't help it, you meant it in a good way. For the most part such things affect only a few people and are relatively harmless ways of preserving one's self-image.

    But when your decisions affect everybody, average self-deception becomes the destruction of actual people.

   If you do not examine with an especially critical eye evidence that favors your own position, if you do not train especial suspicion on your own beliefs and actions when they enrich, flatter, or excuse you, you've got no business running the country.

    Indeed, in comparison with someone who cultivates the art of self-deception, an outright liar is straightforward and relatively innocent.

     So let's stop asking whether Cheney or DeLay are lying and start electing people who display some rudimentary capacity for self-reflection.