Daily Times

There are two kinds of lies that corrupt politicians’ discourse. The lie that is intended to deceive is easy to understand, but the lie that is intended to be recognised as a lie is much more dangerous, because it carries a clear message about power. Lies told by politicians are fictional but the dangers they pose are very real. People living in democracies of Third World do become immune to deal with the lie that is intended to deceive. That is the sort of a lie that will finish one’s career if he or she was found to have told it to a western parliament, and it is also the kind of a lie that the media dreams of exploiting. But in the present political culture politicians talk about lies as a fibroid, or as amaranthine: metaphors which suggest that the falsehoods will not shrink and lose their power even when they are confronted with the truth.

There have been an increasing number of politicians, from the prime minister on down, who have been accused of lying, with the usual denial responses, but a check of records prove otherwise. On the hot seat now is Chairman Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Imran Khan, who has accused others of not telling the whole truth and PML-N leaguers are now gleefully saying he has been caught in a lie. Politicians have always lied. Does it matter if they leave the truth behind entirely? Fact is that they are experts in the art of the lie. Imran Khan is the leading exponent of bringing forth lies in politics, a reliance on assertions that seem true but have little basis in fact. If he believes that politics should be based on evidence, this is worrying.  His brazenness is not punished, but taken as evidence of his willingness to stand up to power politics he is not alone. When politics is like a mind wrestling it puts the nation in danger by undermining the role of truth in public discourse and policymaking, as well as the notion of truth being verifiable and mutually intelligible. Imran Khan’s insistence that Nawaz Sharif is guilty in Panama case precludes a serious debate over how to deal with lies and deception in politics. When lies make the political system dysfunctional, its poor results can feed the alienation and lack of trust in institutions.

The first kind of political lie all spread because, to some degree, people enjoy or collude in them. The second and more insidious kind spread against the judgment or instinct of the listeners. This second style of lying is intimately linked with deception and not just because power is sometimes used to compel it. In both cases, what is being demonstrated is the increase likelihood of lie being remembered over truth? Media wars, disqualification and contempt of court issues may not make its perpetrators tell the truth, but it works wonderfully to make power relations clear.

Safeguards against political lies work only in artificial and highly organised contexts such as the law and science. Even then there are miscarriages of justice and corruption

This is a statement of pure power: that the speaker can force the listener to repeat it and thus lie too. The hypothesized mechanism behind such referential precedents is simple. The common ground view claims that listeners register the object as well as the identity of the speaker who coined the label. The linguistic view claims that, once established, precedents are treated by listeners like any other linguistic unit, ie without needing to keep track of the speaker.

Without a formal institutional structure such as a law court or the process of peer review, there is no effective defence against a lie that people really want to believe as the political statements in the newspapers make a bee line for headline stories. Accountability by NAB and Courts is seen as by any reasonable standards a delayed and highly ineffective long unwinding process, where perpetrators will never be punished even by loss of fortune, since they would have nothing to lose. The safeguards against political lies also do not always work. They work only in artificial and highly organised contexts such as the law and science. Even then there are miscarriages of justice and corruption: perjurers are believed and bags of evidence go undetected. But for the most part we can hope to trust the findings of facts that may come out of Joint Investigation Inquiries.

If Imran Khan loses in 2018 elections, post-truth will seem less menacing, though he has been too successful for it to go away. The deeper worry is where autocrats use the techniques of post-truth to silence opponents. Cast adrift on an ocean of lies, the people there will have nothing to cling to. For them the novelty of post-truth may lead back to old-fashioned oppression. Our civilisation is premised on the conviction that such a thing as truth exists, that it is knowable, that it is verifiable, that it exists independently of authority or popularity and that at some point and preferably sooner rather than later it will prevail.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com