Lies, spin, and honesty

When I was five or six years old, my mother caught me in a stupid lie, and I was so ashamed that I resolved that I would never, ever tell another lie.

I took this really seriously, and by the time I was eleven I would boast, with complete sincerity, about the fact that I had not told a lie for five years. Here is the catch: on a five year old's definition of a lie I was telling the truth.

Because during that time I had not once told a direct lie - e.g. deliberately made a statement I knew to be false.

There are two categories of people who are often held to that definition of a lie - five year olds because that is what they can understand, and politicians because that is the sort of lie which can clearly be proved if you get caught.

But when I was about eleven or twelve, I heard a very wise teacher called Mr Bloxham - a very remarkable man, incidentally, a Japanese POW survivor who died a few years ago well into his nineties - questioning a fellow pupil whose story about some minor transgression did not stack up. Mr Bloxham soon established that the boy concerned had said something which, although true, was calculated to deceive and told him "So you told a lie by implication."

Listening to this conversation, I felt part of my world crash around me, because I realised that although I had not told any direct lies for six or seven years, I had become quite expert at selective use of the truth to make people think what I wanted them to think - telling what Mr Bloxham had called "a lie by implication." In the words of a famous saying usually attributed to Blake,

So I had to revisit my attitude to truth, and try to live up to a higher standard of not trying to deceive people. And the first thing which went with that was to stop claiming not to have told and lies for six years, which took a certain amount of effort when the subject next came up, though fortunately for me the conversation when  I had to do that was with people who had heard Mr Bloxham's conversation.

A few days ago in a post on this blog called "Trust and Deference" I responded to Phil Collin's recent Times article about trust in politicians and expressed the view that most politicians very rarely tell direct lies because getting caught doing so can be career terminating.

I stand by that opinion, but there are exceptions, and I think society has a problem with the kind of deception which Charles Bloxham called "lying by implication" and William Blake "a truth that's told with bad intent" e.g. assembling statements which are individually true in a way calculated to deceive. (It's not just politicians who do this, by the way - the most brilliant example of the technique which I ever saw at a public meeting came from a doctor representing the BMA many years ago.)

As a counterbalance to what I wrote a few days ago, there is an article on the  New York Post website about lying, particularly by politicians which talks about the corrosive effect of dishonesty.

One of the things which an honest politician will admit is that there are a very, very small number of instances where a lie is morally justified.

The classic example is if you are living under the Nazi occupation and the SS ask if you know where any Jews are hiding. Another would be where there is about to be a military action and giving the true answer to a question might put the lives of British soldiers, sailors or airmen in danger.

But aside from that sort of extreme circumstance, we need more honesty in politics. And one example of the honesty we need is not to be too quick to accuse someone of lying just because they say something you don't think is true, if there is any possibility that they themselves might believe it.