One of the most astonishing factors about the Trump presidency is his complete lack of respect for truth. This has spawned many articles, some books, and much hand wringing. Sadly, until now it has not seemed to damage the president, and few of these articles or books seem to have workable ideas as to how to respond.
We need truth to operate, because without truth there cannot be trust. It starts with our parents. I am not a big fan of the Santa Claus myth, and my reason is the potential rift in trust that follows once kids find out the truth. I lost a lot of respect for my mum the day I caught her cheating at a card game. As kids, we need things to hold onto as reliable.
Truth is vital in human relationships. In the dating game, there are some rules, and some exaggerations and omissions permitted. It is sort of OK to post a picture from a few years ago. There are even some untruths expected, about former partners for example. But within that framework there is no faster way to kill a relationship than to lie persistently.
It is also true in business. Shell suffered many scandals during my tenure there, but by far the most traumatic was when our CEO was discovered to have been systematically exaggerating our oil reserves, a public number shared with investors. Think about it. In Nigeria, it is possible that poor decisions may have cost lives, or at least ruined an environment. In South Africa, questionable business decisions helped to prolong an evil regime. But, internally, we were able to reconcile these things, because we understood the trade offs that are required in a complex world, some of which might not look so smart in hindsight.
The oil reserves crisis was not like that, even though it just involved numbers in a report and could physically hurt nobody. The reason it was so painful was that it involved lying. And we could understand that to perpetuate the lying meant that several executives would have had to collude or be bullied into the lie. We understood that could have been us. And it destroyed the whole basis on which our relationship with the company had been built. As the replacement CEO said at the time, trust arrives on foot and departs in a Mercedes. The cleansing required much longer and was much more painful, even though on the surface it could be solved by a single firing. As an example, it involved a major initiative about bullying, because a culture that accepts lying will almost always involve some bullying, as indeed this one did.
I believe most businesses value trust and truth highly, despite the reputation for dishonesty that comes from shows like The Apprentice and various scandals. I was horrified in the UK Apprentice show when Alan Sugar discovered a blatant lie on the resumé of a candidate and then promptly hired him! What sort of message does that send? Maybe it is also true that business in the US is somehow less scrupulous. If that is so, it must be partly because consumer protection is so weak here, starting with my old gripe about a stated price being a real price not just something to add fees to.
Our relationship with key institutions, either national or international, is more nuanced, but cannot really function without the trust that comes from truth. Churches are built around faith, which is belief in something that cannot be proven. But we sort of accept that Church leaders are fallible humans, even if sometimes they pretend otherwise, and we can also accept some failings, even something as abhorrent as child abuse, recognizing the sorts of people that gravitate to priesthood and the situations they tend to face. We don’t accept it, but we understand it, and we maintain some trust. What we cannot accept is institutional lying in the form of cover-ups. That is much harder for a Church to recover from, as recent events demonstrate.
Societies break down when basic trust is lost. In the US, our police are not always courteous, and some can be quick to rush to judgement or reach for weapons. But at least I don’t live in Honduras, where the police and gangs could be different divisions of the same organisation. Where justice breaks down, little else can function well. Imagine being in an abusive employment situation or relationship there, there can be no recourse beyond violence.
Which brings me to politics. I used to think it quaint that in the House of Commons in the UK, you could get away with almost anything, starting with blatant incompetence, but you could not survive being caught in a lie to the House. It felt rather old school to me, and it drove a lot of strange behaviour, notably a focus in parliamentary questions on catching lies rather than policy. But now I think I understand the tradition better and respect it more. You cannot have trust with truth, and any claim to any values is fatally undermined by untruth. I was impressed that the tradition seems to be still alive, evidenced by the resignation of Amber Rudd over being caught in a lie over Windrush.
What the British tradition does not do very well is accept that there may be different types of lie. “We don’t pay ransom to terrorists” may well be a lie, but is surely a justified one, as might be other statements relating to security services. Then they may be lies that might be needed to avoid unravelling decades of policy, though Rudd paid for something of that type. You can lies simply from being ill-informed or uninformed, which might be OK if speedily corrected.
Then there are lies about intent or the intent of others, which could be construed as regular political cut and thrust. “In power, my opponents would reduce allowances” is somewhat harmless, as it is an opinion, and indeed one where any sensible person should judge based on statements from the opponents. But that it is short distance from there to “I have evidence that…” or “They reduced allowances before” or “We would increase allowances”, all of which could be straight lies. Most common nowadays are misleading truths, like “this measures would support small businesses”, which often is a poor excuse for “it will destroy fair employee rights, damage competition and is designed for the express purpose of benefiting my donors”. Even then, I guess it is not a direct lie, and it should be up to us (and journalists) to expose the hypocrisy, unless, of course, the same donors dominate newsprint and advertising budgets. This is the situation in an increasing number of countries.
All these lies might be debateable. But then there are other lies that are not. “I had no affair with that woman” became “She was not paid off”, then “Someone else paid her without my knowledge” and then “I reimbursed him”, all within a couple of days, from the lips or tweets of the man currently swinging a wrecking ball at our world. This is one of many examples; indeed there are examples almost weekly. Oh that the British tradition protected us in this situation. Instead, he just doubles down, issues threats, and brazenly marches on, while Republican lawmakers are too cowed and unprincipled to speak out.
The consequence of an organisation led by a compulsive liar is the same as I saw in Shell. Those underneath cannot send out a consistent message because one does not exist. Bullying becomes normal behaviour. And, values having been discarded, it becomes possible to promote policies so abhorrent that previously sound individuals would have deemed unconscionable before, such as the current disgrace at the border.
This assault on truth is a real poison, a poison perhaps more damaging than any individual policy act, and one whose sting will pervade. What I find saddest is how this is happening in the open, with little attempt at disguise, yet lawmakers remain cowards and somehow, 40 million people or so continue to support the man. I can’t envisage supporting such a person, irrespective of any other positive attributes or intentions.
Usually in a blog, I try to finish with solutions and reasons to hope. A lot has been written about social media controls, fact checking apps and so on. These won’t help. And part of me thinks we just have to learn our way through this. After all, I grew up in awe of BBC, which had its own censorship and establishment lies, lies which deferred acceptance of homosexuals, prolonged apartheid, and led to Suez, just to give three examples. We must celebrate the abundance of sources these days, even if, for the time being it is through gritted teeth. Celebrate, and trust the next generation, with better education and fewer prejudices, can rise up in support of truth as a value to treasure almost beyond all other values.
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