Clinging to the truth in an arena of lies
George Orwell wrote that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Credit: ullstein bild via Getty Images/ullstein bild Dtl.
The most difficult thing to write about these days is truth.
Because half the people think you’re lying.
Admittedly, that percentage is probably — hopefully — a bit off. But that largely is our sorry state these days. I get emails containing contentions completely unmoored from reality — from readers responding to something I wrote that they say is completely unmoored from reality. We both know we speak the truth and the other is lying. Except that I know deep down, a stone-cold-hundred-percent, absolutely positively hand-on-a-Bible uber-certainly that I speak the truth — a certitude matched by the opposing readers.
These days, it’s as though truth lives on alternate planes. Or is it more like a phantom whose variants pass in the night, avoiding collisions that would expose one as genuine and the other as fraud?
It reminds one of a maxim attributed to the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. Roughly rendered, truth is the first casualty of war. Because we are at war. With ourselves. And truth has been much more a victim than a weapon.
This is deeply worrying. Aeschylus wrote tragedies, and it’s hard to see how this modern volume ends well.
I was thinking about this early in the week, well before drowning in the geyser of falsehoods spouted by Donald Trump Wednesday night. You can, and must, fact-check from dusk til dawn. This kind of epic mendacity — and Trump is only the latest practitioner — cannot be allowed to pass without scrutiny.
Such acts of setting the record straight, however necessary, are not sufficient. Because the aim of the lie isn’t just to try to pass it off as truth for reasons of convenience — to make a case, win a debate, score a political point. No, the goal of all overwhelming walls-of-lies is to create a milieu where everything is suspect, everyone is a liar, no one is trustworthy, and nothing can be believed.
The stage was set the day before Trump hit the one in New Hampshire, when Elon Musk tweeted: “Trust nothing, not even nothing.”
A few hours later, in a video to promote a new show on Musk’s Twitter platform, Tucker Carlson said, “At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie . . . Facts have been withheld on purpose along with proportion and perspective. You are being manipulated.”
Whether you call that gaslighting or a confession — or truth or lie — it’s chilling.
They are the henchmen of mendacity. And they plow the fertile earth to ready it for the seeds of a cult of personality.
Now it seems likely they will be joined by a powerful collaborator — artificial intelligence. As much as this technology seems certain to bring us amazing achievements, it also bears the capability for enormous harm. Think clips of people apparently saying things they never said, doing things they never did, in places they never were. At a time when even well-meaning people of diligence sometimes have difficulty discerning fact from fiction, AI is posed to make it that much harder.
One of our most over-used adjectives is “Orwellian.” But this actually is. In 1946, the same year Trump was born, George Orwell wrote that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
He saw even then how words would be used by some to acquire and stay in power, to deceive rather than to inform.
By now, it’s clear that our nation’s second president, John Adams, was incompletely correct when he noted that facts are stubborn things. Lies, it turns out, are stubborn, too.
I do hope truth will out. But I wonder.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
