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In Washington lying is an art form and a growth industry. The number of Congressmen stays the same, while the number of p.r. firms, lobbyists and pundits increases exponentially. What is the modern art of damage control, after all, but putting on a false front? What is spinning but massaging the truth? Inside the Beltway, the scandal is not the lie but the unvarnished truth. George Bush's campaign barb about Reaganism being voodoo economics raised far more hackles than his claim that Clarence Thomas was the most qualified man in America to be on the Supreme Court.
Watergate was the Waterloo of presidential truth. In 1976, 70% of Americans agreed in a national poll that the country's leaders consistently lied to them. This from a nation brought up on Parson Weems' smarmy fable about young George Washington's perfect truthfulness. Honesty has been a casualty in the eyes of Americans ever since. Today, Bok notes, the public sees a politician's clever dodge as no different from a big fat lie. We're defining deception downward.
In the past few weeks, there have been a thousand sound bites from self-righteous men in button-down shirts advising some variation on "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." This is an impossible standard. No one knows the whole truth. (Omniscience is not a human attribute.) Moreover, humankind cannot bear "nothing but the truth." Meursault in Camus's The Stranger is incapable of lying and is executed for it. Prince Mishkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot is a man of perfect honesty who brings disaster to everyone he meets. And in Liar, Liar, Jim Carrey, who has played a few idiots in his time, is even more insufferable as a truth teller than as an inveterate b.s. artist.
The reason we have etiquette books is that not only does the truth not set you free, it gets you in trouble. "Sweetbreads? I hate sweetbreads!" "That's the dumbest haircut I've ever seen." "What a suck-up you are, you little weenie." One researcher asked his test subjects: If you could have the ability to read the minds of everyone within 50 ft. of you, would you want it? No way, Jose.
Bella DePaulo of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, who has done several studies on lying in everyday life, notes that no one is totally honest all the time. "The tendency to tell lies," as Jean Piaget wrote in 1932, "is a natural tendency, spontaneous and universal." One of DePaulo's studies, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that people told at least one lie a day, and that more socially adept folks stretched the truth more often than the less sophisticated. There's a reason the devil is always depicted as a smooth-tongued fellow. Facility breeds falsity. In the end, Presidents lie for the same reason everyone else does. It's just that the rest of us can't blame national security or cite Executive privilege when we say, "Yes, honey, I picked up the laundry."
In his briefest of speeches on Monday night, Clinton offered a taxonomy of lying. Parse his remarks, and you will find many of the categories of lies that have been promulgated by scholars and philosophers:
"I can only tell you I was motivated by many factors. First, by a desire to protect myself from embarrassment."