lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality

I HAD NEVER READ or listened to Hannah Arendt's virtuoso essay Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers until I recently found that Youtube of her delivering it in her wonderful voice, from there finding a printed version of it as it appeared in The New York Review of Books half a century ago.  This passage shocked me because she says something I'd concluded on my own but had never read anyone else had noticed before, that the truth is at a number of disadvantages which lies are unencumbered by.  

The truth has to conform to reality no matter how unattractive or unappealing whereas lies can assume any form which will sell to a weak and gullible target for them, using the con-man's greatest weapon, the weakness of the mark, their own widely shared moral and other failings. The optimism of the absurd "enlightenment" notion that the truth will come out reliably on top in a contest with lies, something I've become entirely skeptical of is something I wish I had had the chance to discuss with Arendt because I both see it reflected in her claims and the basis for coming to my pessimistic conclusion about it is also contained in her text.  The silence of the First Amendment on the right to tell the truth and that there is no such a thing as a right to lie, because of this difference in the powers of persuasion between them, is and will always be an extreme danger embedded into the very parts of the Constitution and American civic piety which we are required to hold as having the most venerable of moral authority.  

Here is the passage taken out of the entire essay, every sentence of which is worthy of study and commenting on.  She was a spectacularly brilliant thinker. That her observations and what should have been warnings have had no impact on American, British or so many other would-be liberal democracies is, itself, an example of the fragility of the truth and the durability of lies as a political force. I will insert a few comments.  

Hence,when we talk about lying and especially about lying among active men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness; moral outrage, for that reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.  The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts, that is with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.  The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily lives;  it is always a danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion.  Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.  For this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt - as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance, the statement that two and two makes four.

It is this fragility that makes deception so easy up to a point, and so tempting.  It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were;  lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.  He has prepared  his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected for which we were not prepared.

In short, lying uses all of the same tools as the specialized type of lying that is a con job as put over by a con man on a targeted and, so often, self-deceiving mark.  Trump's stock in trade. 

In America's winner-takes-all political system, that point is effectively surpassed over and over again, the fixed time-periods of terms of office, everything from two years for the House, four for presidents, six for senators, the from here to eternity which the founders idiotically gave to Supreme Court "justices" means that the lie only has to work to the point of getting them elected.  The myth of, for example, presidential impeachment, the impeachment of Supreme Court "justices" and the near impossibility of expelling even obviously criminal Republican Senators (Packwood being sent packing in shame seems a thing from a quaint and lost past).  The very terms set in stone on the U.S. Constitution set in stone an easily surpassed point beyond which, for the duration of the term of office gained through lies or the lifetime for a Clarence Thomas or Alito or, I'll bet you anything, a lying, perjuring Kavanaugh, makes the fact that they are known liars moot in terms of politics and the law.  That Leonard Leo and Lindsay Graham (his stage managing of Mrs. Alito's flood of tears)and the as vile as senile Chuck Grassley can get a total creep on the Court for life where they can destroy democracy through the methods of advertising* is about as serious a truth as I'll present in this post.

I would contend with her observation "that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness," because human sinfulness is a consequence of choices, not accidents apart from human agency, human choice.  What she may have more accurately have meant would be that lies believed and repeated out of ignorance and laziness have an enormous political and social effect.  Both the intended lies and those that are a product of ignorance and laziness are important.  The Trumpian era rule that he would have had to have known he was lying in order to call it lying was set up to shield the most flagrant liar to have ever held the American persidency plays around with the distinction between the two.  The civil law can't be conducted on the basis of telepathy, though the idiotic Supreme Court has made it the law of the land that to punish many of the lies told, you do have to convince a jury and then judges up to and including the most political of them on the Supreme Court that your mind-reading is accurate.  

Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute;  no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer,  it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.  The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle.  This is one of the lessons that could be learned from the totalitarian experiments and the totalitarian rulers' frightening confidence in the power of lying - [And the secular liberal confidence that lies are permissible because they are innocuous] - in their ability, for instance, to rewrite history again and again to adapt the past to the "political line" of the present moment, or to eliminate data that did not fit their ideology, such as unemployment in a socialist economy, simply by denying their existence;  the unemployed person becoming a non-person.

I hope that I am not right in thinking that the brilliant analysis of Hannah Arendt re the use of computers, etc. not being enough to defeat reality was premature, based on things like the state of computers and electronic media a half a century ago.  I think what she comes very close to here is the truth that, in the end, the difference between truth and lies is consequential in ways that will assert themselves, perhaps even breaking into the unreality that many, especially those most vulnerable to even low key advertising methods, live their lives in.  I got into an argument a few days ago with someone who was telling me about the Republican-fascist lunacy mill online accusing Biden and NOAA of manipulating the hurricane to hit Republican areas of Florida.  I said that I thought a lot of that was due to the amount of time Americans spend watching fantasy and sci-fi on TV and in the movies.  I think it is of consequence in accustoming people into susceptibility for such nonsense that they spend such an unprecedentedly large amount of their lives in fantasy and unreality, much of it carrying such absurd exaggerations of the ability of science and technology to do such things.  I said that I thought that even the lie machine of FOX and the rest of Republican-fascist media had less of an effect than the entertainment that a dangerous percentage of Americans and others substitute for time spent in reality. How does reality break through to those who have so little experience of it?

The most dangerous political and legal effects of lies have often accomplished their harm before reality delivers the undeniable consequences that come from the true nature of the lies the suckers bought and gave the power of their votes.  The power of such political and legal lies makes this method of correction too dangerous to rely on it to do everything up to saving the species from extinction.

I will go back to the first sentences of this quote:

Hence,when we talk about lying and especially about lying among active men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness; moral outrage, for that reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.

To which I say, yes, this is absolutely in keeping with the experience of the United States in the period in which we went from lies merely flourishing to lies swamping the truth even more in the period after the Supreme Court gave the media the ability to lie about politicians and other public figures with virtual impunity in 1964.  As I will almost never neglect to point out, the media being owned by corporations and Republican-fascist interests, those lies have been told, primarily and most impactfully, against liberals and Democrats. Lies told with the protection of the Warren Court's and the ACLU's reading of the First Amendment, have basically changed the media from what it was before.  FOX "news" as it is, as it has been, could not be if the old standards allowing public figures to sue media corporations and individuals who lied about them, the argument I had with my friend would have had far different terms and the online lying about Biden controlling hurricanes would probably not have remained up long enough to gain any traction with the suckers.

I would guess that if it were possible to really quantify the "moral outrage" of the media about lying that what that analysis might show is that far from "moral outrage" being enough to quell the lies, that it would generally be followed by an habituation to and subsequent normalization of and customization to even the most repulsive and obvious lies, which, from what I gather, CNN under its new ownership may be an example of.  There is a reason that "moral outrage" such as has political and real effects are more likely to be after the lies of James O'Keefe and his ilk are aired in the very same media which expresses "moral outrage" of the currently conventional kind.  After which innocent people lied about are about the only ones to pay the price, whether it is losing their career or a public-service to the least among us group such as ACORN is driven into extinction. In the mean time the liars, with funding from multi-millionaire and billionaire Republican-fascists, go on lying and the cable and other media keep playing their part in this.  

* To the many genres in the art of lying developed in the past, we must now add two more recent varieties.  There is, first, the apparently innocuous one of the public relations managers who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.  Public relations is a variety of advertising, hence has its origin in the consumer society, with its inordinate appetite for goods to be distributed through a market economy.  The trouble with the mentality of the public relations man is that he deals only in opinions and "good will," the readiness to buy;  that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.  This means that for his inventions it may indeed look as though the sky is the limit, for he lacks the politician's power to act, to "create" facts, and thus that simple everyday reality which sets limits to power and brings the forces of imagination down to earth.

The only limitation to what the public relations man does comes when he discovers that the same people who perhaps can be "manipulated" to buy a certain kind of soap cannot be manipulated - though, of course they can be forced by terror - to "buy" opinions and political views.  Hence the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.  But such doctrines do not change the way people form opinions or prevent them from acting according to their own lights;  the only method short of terror to have real influence on their conduct is still the old carrot-and-stick approach.

It is not surprising tht the recent generation of intellectuals, who grew up in the insane atmosphere of rampant advertising and were taught that half of politics is "image making" and the other half the art of making people believe in the imagery, should almost automatically fall back on the older adages of carrot and stick whenever the situation becomes too serious for theory.  For the, the greatest disappointment in the Vietnam adventure should have been the discovery that there are people for whom carrot-and-stick methods don't work either.

I will probably have a post on this quote, soon.  I will point out that what Arendt said about intellectuals' thinking being damaged by the influence of rampant advertising is magnified by an extremely high power in the "journalism" which is financed by advertising and which so often bends and distorts its "reporting" with a mind if not an actual order from the advertisers, some of those being the very owners of the media.  Moral outrage to order is what you can expect from them without any actual moral content.   It's all advertising.  Yet Congress is to make no law ever taking that into account no matter what consequences reality eventually serves up to us.