I saw
The Ides of March last night and would recommend you seeing it if you feel like having all the bitterness you've ever felt towards politics being affirmed (and no I didn't see it just because it feels like I'm seeing myself on the big screen when Philip Seymour Hoffman is acting). The plot moves around the theme of betrayal and deceit and whether an ends justifies a means. It's about a young campaign co-manager, named Steven, that has a strong belief in the ideals of the candidate he's working for and as a result will do anything to get him elected. I won't spoil it, but Steven ends up in a predicament where he's forced to choose between being loyal to the campaign and the ideals the candidate stands for or risking his own career. The movie got me thinking about how pervasive deception and lying is in our culture.
When I got home from the movie I watched
this TED talk by Pamela Meyer about how to spot a liar. I thought the talk was pretty interesting though I won't buy or read her book because of her main premise about lies only existing when we agree to them. The ease with which she makes this outrageously morally relativistic claim makes me wonder why she wrote an entire book about how to determine if someone isn't telling the truth. What's it matter if someone is or isn't telling the truth if what's true is only an abstract concept that a majority of people come to agreement on? Regardless, I thought the statistics she sited about how frequently people lie and how from a very early age humans have a tendency to be deceptive were quite eye-opening. She references "one author" who calls the current time we live in as a "post-truth world". I'm assuming she means
Ralph Keyes and I
will be buying and reading his book.
My first thought after walking out of
The Ides of March was: should I really believe people/politics/the world are like this? After watching the TED talk my first thought was: why shouldn't I believe the world/people are like this?
This notion that we live in post-truth world where deception is so common-place that people barely feel guilt about lying seems frighteningly realistic and devastatingly hopeless. Aside from my close friends and family, at some level I expect deceit fueled by selfishness from most people. I realize this is not a very good way to go about being charitable or seeing the world optimistically. But it seems approaching life any other way would be naive and irresponsible just in terms of being able to stand up for oneself. It seems trying to always tell the truth (even with tact), will inevitably lead to being screwed-over, to put it politely. This seems true because if a group of people are placing trust in or building themselves up on lies, one person exposing the truth will be at best ostracized and at worst made so the their voice no longer exists. There's a quote in the movie that loyalty is the only reliable currency. But that begs the question, what's loyalty and does it require deceit? Or is loyalty just a commitment to lie for the sake of someone or something?
Do I value (or even care) what the truth is if a lie creates a perception that is more easily controlled and accepted than truth? Do I really believe that a good intention doesn't justify a lie?
Obviously this a pretty gloomy post. I guess maybe I'm understanding more practically what Benedict XVI meant when he said that, ultimately, suffering is the only weapon love has against hate and that through suffering hope is found.
