Talk to me, baby, tell me lies

By The Creator

Socio-political conditions in South Africa are bad, and getting worse. At present no organisations, in or out of Parliament, appear able to improve this situation. (Most such organisations, from the SACP to AfriForum, appear devoted to making conditions still worse.) What is to be done?

Obviously, the government must be changed. Unfortunately, we have already tried this once. In 2005, when conditions appeared good and getting better, we were told (rightly) that things were not good enough and should be getting better faster, and therefore we should replace that government with a new one. The proponents of the change lied when they told us that the proposed new government would be an improvement. Far too many of us swallowed lies which were quite plain at the time, delivered by people who were obviously liars. (Many of us remain in denial about having been fooled.) This is the source of the trouble we’re in now.

This does not mean that the problem is lies. Our governments routinely tell us lies of various kinds. The Mandela government, for example, yakked on about freedom and justice and reconciliation when it was the product of a squalid (albeit unavoidable) deal with the apartheid government and the white business community. None of its high moral stances were sustainable, but it persistently pretended that they were.

The Mbeki government, likewise, did not trust its audience with the truth. When it decided that the country couldn’t afford an expansionist and redistributionist economic policy, and adopted a policy of deficit reduction, it didn’t say “sorry, folks, we’re broke”, but pretended that deficit reduction would generate foreign investment, low interest rates and jobs, jobs, jobs. Naturally, when the policy didn’t meet its illusory growth targets, the government was setting itself up for ridicule and mistrust. Thereafter, when the same government decided that deficit reduction should take precedence over expanded healthcare, it didn’t say “sorry, folks, money trumps human life”, but instead tried to change the subject to the (partly real) problematics of antiretrovirals and the (very real) nastiness of pharmaceutical companies. Of course it was setting itself up for accusations of genocide, holocaust denial and being unfair to wealthy multinationals. These examples could be multiplied.

However, these lies do not in themselves mean that the Mbeki government’s economic and healthcare policies were wrong. Just because a political stance is justified by lies, it doesn’t make the stance wrong (nor is a stance which is justified by truth necessarily right). Lies do, however, matter, because obviously they are hiding something. Are they hiding something dirty, or just embarrassing or opportunistic? The only way to answer that question is to push the veil of lies to one side and try to assemble the facts and what they mean. This is difficult to do, because the truth is not a simple thing to find in political analysis. It entails making assumptions about the future (if this is what is happening now, is this going to go on, get worse, or change for the better?). The interplay of the systems which underlie politics must be examined (is the world headed for another depression, is the rise of the DA going to make the ANC leadership panic or retrench, does the business community really believe some of the lies they tell, etc).

Most publicly-told lies are told for political reasons. A newspaper doesn’t print misleading information just because the managing editor of the Daily Chutzpah is on the payroll of Anglo American or George Soros (although these days it’s perfectly possible s/he is). However, a person who’s in that position naturally holds powerful political opinions derived from that person’s socio-economic background, exaggerated by the need to please the people holding the purse-strings. Therefore, that person wants to promote those powerful opinions, using any material which comes to hand.

That person — journalist, academic, PR operative, politician, it’s all the same in practice — will spin any potentially relevant fact to make those opinions look good. What’s more, that person will downplay — or even suppress — any fact which makes those opinions look bad. That happens often enough for the receiver of the message to get a false impression of the situation. However, because you’re attending to that particular messenger you probably want to hold that particular false impression (or else you’d not pay any attention). As a result, you connive in being lied to; you do not say “hey, wait a minute, I don’t believe this garbage”, because that garbage happens to sound nice.

Even if it is really obvious garbage, you say “well, it may be garbage, but it’s in a good cause”. That’s why people are suddenly bringing up Jackie Selebi’s malicious damage to property conviction from 1974. It’s got nothing actually to do with whether he’s a crook or not, let alone whether his crookery has properly been exposed, but it makes it easier to pretend that there’s nothing funny about the trial verdict (and, of course, it subtly smears the anti-apartheid struggle from way back when, which is gravy for many commentators).

Experienced political liars are good at making their lies attractive, which makes it hugely hard not to buy into the lies. The politically marginalised (especially left-wingers, who have far less prospect of ever gaining power than the far right) are also tempted to confuse such lies with their own fantasies of gaining power. What’s more, if you realise you’re being lied to, it’s humiliating to have to read lies every day. (Perhaps it’s easier for those of us who came of age under apartheid to cope with this — we had no choice.) It’s tempting to simply say “I will not be lied to” and opt out completely, or else take a headlong dive into the sewers of conspiracy theory and conclude that it’s all fixed up behind the scenes by the Freemasons or Halliburton, and there’s nothing we can do about it so we shouldn’t bother to try.

If we want to change the government (and if we want to understand what kind of government we want to change towards, rather than ending up chanting “Heil Helen!” or “Kiss The Blade!” at vast torch-lit -arty rallies) then we can’t afford the luxuries of withdrawal or fantasy. We have to stick our faces into the filth of our existing, lying political culture and see what we can find there. Granted, it stinks and granted it’s unhealthy. However, it’s the only place we can hope to find anything approximating a truth.

The Creator’s manifestation is occasionally to be seen atop a mountain in the Eastern Cape. The shrieks of The Creator are capable of splitting rocks or sterilising cattle at 50 metres. Fortunately The Creator is easily drowned out by a boisterous blast on a vuvuzela, or a speech by any leadership figure in the tripartite alliance.