American Politics Journal -- The Culture of Lies in America

Guest Commentary
The Culture of Lies in America
Race Lies, Enron, the Crooked Media and the Collapse of Integrity in 21st Century America
by Charles Utwater II

April 5, 2002 -- WASHINGTON (APJP)

On Truth

A generation ago, many good scientists from around the world convinced themselves that water had a fourth state beyond ice, steam and liquid, a state called "polywater". In retrospect, the evidence was pathetically deficient.

We grew up believing that the Einsteinian universe was the perfected vision of God's cosmos. We thought that the speed of light was an unchanging constant. Now it seems we were wrong. How many kids were put down or ridiculed for questioning that now-discredited orthodoxy? And speaking of the misuse of orthodoxy, what about the Inquisition? What about witch-burning, Quaker-hanging, Baptist-stoning and the other innumerable acts of violence committed in the name of religion?

Yet without transcendent values -- concepts such as truth and justice (or, for many, a living being called God) -- individuals and societies descend into materialism and nihilism. The existence of human society relies on a leap of faith, on a belief that there is more to life than self-gratification.

So, here's a paradox: we need to believe in certainty, but not too certainly. When we are too certain in our beliefs, we deceive ourselves. When we are too cynical, we degrade ourselves.

There is no bright line between error and lying. One knows it only by tracing the inner currents of the heart. Lies are integral to the human condition. None of us owns the truth, and not one of us tells it every time we open our mouths. All of us are capable of seducing ourselves across the line from error into lies, simply by overlooking, minimizing or rationalizing facts contrary to our beliefs. With great subtlety, the emotional mind closes the eyes of the rational mind.

So what, if anything, differentiates the "normal" person from the liar? Consider the depth of personal depravity it takes for a Rush Limbaugh or a William Safire to accuse their opponents of lying. Has sociopathic dishonesty become normal and accepted in America, and if so, why?

The Record

The faults of our own day are before us, so we tend to imagine that the past must have been better. Only the mythical past. The social structure of lies required to sustain racial apartheid in America, for example, was awesome. Southern churches quoted the Bible to justify slavery, even though the passages in question were clearly intended as consolations to slaves. I am reliably told that in Lynchburg, Virginia of the 1930s, society ladies plotted among themselves how to revenge the adultery of their husbands, who visited African American prostitutes. The women coerced black men into sleeping with them by threatening to lodge false charges of rape. In that era, simply making the charge was a death sentence, as was getting caught. Not many people died precisely because Jim Crow was a means of using people as chattel. One suspects that few if any people actually believed that blacks were inferior. It was a transparently false myth needed to maintaining a system of privilege.

We're all familiar with where that depraved culture of racial lies led decades later as segregationists resisted the civil rights movement. In the face of mounting scientific evidence that race has no connection to intelligence or any other essential human characteristic, laws and bones were broken to maintain white privilege. A generation later, DNA evidence had extended the proof that race is virtually irrelevant in defining human capacities. Yet it was possible in the 1990s for Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's ludicrous book, "The Bell Curve", to receive serious consideration by mainstream media outlets [1]. Reviewers even claimed, with a straight face, that the book was not primarily about race.

In historical context, the racial "science" of Charles Murray's Bell Curve was simply a point along a continuous trajectory of racial dishonesty, obvious as a fraud to anyone who knew the history. Racial "science", the mass jailing of African American men on minor charges in the War on (some) Drugs and the purging of black voters from the rolls in Florida are part of the long national tradition of maintaining white privilege.

The dishonesty of the present day is, though, worse in one way than that of the past. The people practicing dishonesty now for the most part both know better and have lesser incentives to lie. The New York Times gains little from racism and its writers have no excuse not to know the substantial literature debunking racialist theories of intelligence. Yet that newspaper lauded Murray for his supposed courage, thereby launching "The Bell Curve" into the mainstream. This combination of a willful contempt for both the truth and for the millions of human beings whose lives are crushed by the culture of lies may be something new. This narcissistic sense that truth and human dignity do not matter is central to the corporate scandals of out era.

Enron and the Crooked Media

The biggest irony of the culture of lies is, to paraphrase P.T. Barnum, that corrupt people cheat themselves worst of all. Economists theorize that the more one has of a commodity, the less important it is to have more. This is clearly contradicted by the desperate greed of the last decades. The looting of treasuries both public and private by people whose wealth and power exceed the wildest dreams of even a millionaire shows that the smaller the prize, the smaller the soul of the man or woman who will fight for it. Our biggest national lie, the installation of an amoral, liquor-soaked class clown as president produced only marginal gains for the wealthy and the right-wing. After six years of holding the previous president hostage through false accusations, they already owned almost everything and controlled the media from top to bottom. Very little more was to be gained by preventing the wealthy, pro-business Tennessee conservative from claiming the prize he had won. Yet the assent of the American people was lost in stealing the election. That is no small thing to have lost.

Enron would probably still be solvent, making good money extorting California ratepayers, had it been honest with its shareholders a few years earlier. Although it will take years to suss out the causes of the Enron collapse, a good guess is that the collapse can be traced to a day in 1987 when CEO Kenneth Lay refused to confront a trading fraud by Louis Borget and Thomas Mastroeni of its New York office [2]. That fraud cost the company $150 million and cranked up the financial pressure on the company. But, more importantly, Lay's reaction told Enron employees that management would do anything to avoid admitting losses. Ten years later, Enron offloaded $2.6 billion in debt onto its subsidiary Chewco, booking $405 million in non-existent profits; Lay continues to deny he knew about the existence of Chewco. To be silent about wrongdoing means that wrongdoing will multiply (a lesson on which the Democratic Party should reflect).

Nor did Lay, Fastow and Skilling operate on their own. The hearings on Enron have brought into the light a vast network of crooked players who made the scam possible. Chief among these was Enron's accomplice, the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, which surely knew that Chewco and the rest of the special purpose entities were shams used to reclassify debt as an asset. But Enron and Andersen could not have operated without crooked politicians to defang the Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement arm, crooked stock analysts to boom the stock, and above all, crooked media, which continue to deny that this scandal is ultimately political. The Enron scandal is bipartisan only in the narrowest sense, that politicians of both parties accepted money from Enron. Though some accomplices may have been, in William Greider's phrase, "Enron Democrats" [3], the assault on regulation, the attempt to deny the SEC funds for enforcement and the installation of numerous Enron executives and advisers into high Administration posts were not truly bipartisan acts.

The media's attempt to disregard the partisan nature of the scandal is not the act of a free press, but of a subservient one. Scandals of the scope and nature of Enron are unlikely where there is a genuinely free press. Rather, smaller scandals will be detected and punished, and potential malefactors deterred. We are often told that conspiracies can't take place "because people talk". Yet hundreds of people, employees of Enron and Andersen, knew about scams like Chewco and we heard not a word in our press. One need not be one of those "Internet conspiracy theorists" who the media like to disparage in order to recognize that it isn't impossible that George Bush may have been personally involved in the collapse of Enron. "Kenny Boy" is, after all, one of his oldest business partners.

Understanding the Sickness

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's thought-provoking book, "People of the Lie", proposes that the choice to live by dishonesty is rooted in "malignant narcissism". Malignant narcissism is a love of self-image grown so powerful that the image replaces the man/woman as the core of existence. Defending the self-image becomes as urgent as life or death. Peck presents a number of cases from his psychiatric practice in which an unwillingness to admit an error led to larger and larger consequences. In one case, the parents of a young man brought him to the brink of suicide before Peck intervened.

Thinking over the events of the last decade, malignant narcissism seems to describe them well. The Hunting of the President (i.e., the assault on Clinton) was a clear example of how the narcissist must cover debunked lies with bigger lies. The press and the Republican Party built some dubious business deals and womanizing into an epic tale of the collapse of morality in America. The collapse of morality, ironically, was precisely what was happening within the media and the right.

That many of Clinton's accusers were building a gallows to hang the president from the very material of their own lives is worse than simple hypocrisy. It certainly was malign; the self-righteous condemnation of Clinton by bimbos like Sally Quinn and tramps like Newt Gingrich definitely spoke of narcissism. Yet the defective characters of those who smeared Clinton were secondary to their larger mission of seizing power. Malignant narcissism -- or perhaps we should call it Pride -- was the symptom. The larger forces driving the cabal were power lust and contempt for what was good about this nation. One must widen Peck's construct to admit the other Six Deadly Sins.

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