An aphasic proposition

Submitted by Patrick Madden

“One may lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.” — Nietzsche

It seems the order of the day to accept that politicians, like lawyers, lie or obscure the truth as a matter of course. We hardly decry this any more. The sound of the lament, which should be a clamour, against power’s perennial dishonesty is actually so idle and exhausted that it long ago joined hands with apathy.

That presidents — and politicians in general — lie, with horrendous consequences, seems to be an unfortunate truism in the political arena, but it seems so difficult to do anything about it that it’s hardly worth trying. Public apathy on this matter is especially notable when compared to the ardour that accompanies other questions, mostly more nebulous and less fundamental issues than the question of whether our leaders speak truths, lies, half-truths or bullshit.

Perhaps — and someone surely must have considered this — untruths tactically delivered to the populace are even necessary for the delivery of good government. And “good government” is the old ideal of service: that which most effectively secures the rights of the people and the fruits of their labour, promotes their happiness and does their will.

Could a people be well served by a government of tactical liars? That misanthropic question is for a later session, because if we let it lie that our leaders lie then we tacitly answer in the affirmative, and in the same breath deny the possibility of functional democracy. So far, we may have let it lie only because we lack a means for determining the veracity of a presidential proposition at the moment of its utterance — and because, after that, it’s usually too late to warrant the effort of investigation.

But what if we had the means?

This is where aphasia comes in. Aphasia is a mental condition caused by specialised damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. It results in the loss of the ability to produce or to comprehend language, so aphasics cannot evaluate or comprehend the meanings of words, but it has no effect on intelligence.

One might think that this would demolish the possibility of communication or understanding, but in fact that is not the case. The majority of aphasics continue to understand well what is said to them. They compensate for the loss of language parsing by paying attention only to the much larger proportion of communication that is non-verbal, and more or less involuntary. In this way they can usually understand the messages people intend for them.

Aphasics’ focus on the more or less involuntary, non-verbal aspect of communication gives them extraordinary sensitivity in determining whether someone is communicating authentically — whether their speech is genuine, sincere and well intended. Although they hear only sounds and no words in speech, they are preternaturally sensitive to any falsity or impropriety in appearance, posture, facial and vocal nuance: tone, rhythm, cadence and inflection — all the aspects of speech that imbue speech with the quality of authenticity, or which indicate its inauthenticity or equivocal nature.

In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks describes a group of aphasics watching the president of the United States give a speech on television. They could not understand the linguistic content of the speech, so he was surprised to find that the aphasics were a picture of uproarious laughter, bewilderment and outrage where the neurologically normal listeners were unmoved. Where the normals were fooled by the president, paying so much attention to words that they had lost their instinct for determining ingenuousness, the aphasics saw a man whose speech was so saturated with absurd inauthenticity they were reduced to gales of laughter. The president, of course, was lying.

In summary: aphasics do not lose their intelligence. They are by no means incapable of understanding communication, nor of communicating non-verbally; on the contrary, they are in many ways more capable of understanding than the rest of us. They have an incredible sense for picking up anything ingenuine, equivocal or false.

A government, as we know, should serve its people. If we consider that authentic, trustworthy speech is a prerequisite for good government, we should not fail to adopt a measure by which inauthentic, equivocal, false or malicious speech would be highlighted immediately, as it would if a group of aphasic individuals could sit in parliaments and listen to important, persuasive speeches.

Perhaps I’m overlooking an obvious obstacle. I’m no expert on aphasia, and there may be a range of ethical issues — some genuine, some fudge, all debatable — to discuss, along with issues that could be raised purely to smoke the screen and quash this potentially useful proposition. Of course, we’ll be interested only in the genuine problems with this proposal; the rest are just the kind of sham we’re trying to uproot.

What if it were possible, and aphasics could help us know whether a politician was less than genuine? Would we even want to? Might an aphasic person suffer damaging emotional stress under the sheer mass of disingenuousness and sham in Parliament? Unfortunately, it’s conceivable.

But aphasic people exist. They are intelligent, they can make decisions and they have an incredible ear for genuine or ungenuine communication. The possibility of a parliamentary aphasic monitoring bench could be investigated. The test of political will, a test of the efficacy of democracy, consists in observing whether we investigate the possibility, or whether we let it lie, and continue to accept the likelihood of being lied to.

Patrick Madden has a degree in marketing, which taught him that marketing is the Antichrist. He is interested in consciousness, ecology and well-being and would like to highlight and destroy the barriers that prevent people from living happily. When he succeeds in tearing his gaze away from his own navel, Patrick writes fiction, freelance articles and misguided musings about the world