Backdrop: The recent events in Washington surrounding Biden and the emerging factions of people trying to either oust him , or ride and hide with him.
Below is a relevant excerpt from a 1972 speech by Hannah Arendt on the Pentagon Papers, which may give an insight into what is going on behind the scenes in this white house
TL;DR
The Political Image Man who spends half his time creating an image, and the other half convincing the public it is valid. He is free to say what he wants, for he is not personally bound by deliver-ability of the promises made
The Problem Solver who uses pseudo statistics and observed correlations to sound reasonable in pushing his "solution" to the problem while giving the listener 3 choices of outcome. Two of those are extreme, while the other is his own submission.. Prides himself on looking rational
Hannah Arendt 1972 on the Pentagon Papers
For this ultimate aim, all policies became short-term interchangeable means. And finally, when all signs pointed to defeat , the goal was no longer voiding humiliating defeat, but of finding ways and means to avoid admitting it and save faith. Now, image-making as global policy, not world conquest, but victory in the battle, as they say, to win the people's mind, is indeed something entirely new in the huge arsenal of human follies recorded in history. This was not undertaken by a third-rate nation always apt to boast in order to compensate for the real thing, but by the World's dominant power.
Sound familiar?
Two New Types of Liars in Government
Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable truths in political dealings. The ability to lie, the deliberate denial of factual truth and the capacity to change facts, the ability to act, are interconnected.
They owe their existence to the same source, imagination. For it is by no means a matter of course that we can say the sun shines when it actually is raining. The consequence of certain brain injuries is a loss of this capacity. It rather indicates that while we are well equipped for the world, sensually as well as mentally, we are not fitted or embedded into it as one of its inalienable parts.
We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say yes or no, not just to statements or propositions in order to express agreement or disagreement, but to things as they are given, beyond agreement or disagreement, to our organs of perception and cognition, no action would be possible. And action is, of course, the very stuff politics is made of.
Hence, when we talk about lying, and especially about lying among acting men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage for this reason alone is not likely to make it disappear. The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts-- That is, with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are.
Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life. It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point. and so very tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains that they are.
Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has a great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye of making it credible, whereas reality has a disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected for which we were not prepared.
Now to the many genres of lying developed in the past, we must now add two more recent varieties.
There is first the apparently innocuous one of the public relations managers in government who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue. Public relation is but a variety of advertising, hence has its origin in the consumer society with its inordinate appetite for goods to be distributed through a market economy.
The trouble with the mentality of the PR man is that he deals only in opinions and goodwill, the readiness to buy that is in intangibles, whose concrete reality is at a minute. This means that for his inventions, it may indeed look as though the sky is the limit, for he lacks the politician's power to act, to create facts, and thus that simple everyday reality which sets limits to power and brings the forces of imagination down to earth.
The only limitation to what the public relations man does comes when he discovers that the same people who perhaps can be manipulated to buy a certain kind of soap cannot be manipulated, though of course it could be forced by terror, to buy opinions and political views.
Hence, the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion. But such doctrines do not change the way people form opinions or prevent them from acting according to their own lives.
The only method short of terror to have real influence on their conduct is still the old carrot and stick approach. It is not surprising that the recent generation of intellectuals who grew up in the insane atmosphere of rampant advertising and were taught that half of politics is image-making and the other half the art of making people believe in the imagery should almost automatically fall back on the older adage of carrot and stick whenever the situation becomes too serious for theory.
To them, the greatest disappointment in the Vietnam adventure should have been the discovery that there are people with whom carrot and stick methods don't work either.
The second variety, though less frequent in everyday life, plays a more important role in the Pentagon Papers. It also appears to much better men, to those, for example, who are likely to be found in the higher ranks of the civilian services. They are, in Neil Sheehan's felicitous phrase, professional problem solvers.
And they were drawn into government from the universities and the various think tanks, some of them equipped with game theories and systems analysis and prepared, as they thought, to solve all the problems of foreign policy. A significant number of the authors of the McNamara study belong to this group, which consisted of 18 military officers and 18 civilians from think tanks, universities, and government services.
They certainly were not a flock of doves, a mere handful were critical of the United States' commitment in Vietnam. And still it is to them that we owe this truthful, though of course not complete, story of what happened inside the machinery of government.
The basic integrity of those who wrote the report is beyond doubt. they could indeed be trusted by Mr. McNamara to produce an encyclopedic and objective report and to let, as McNamara said, the chips fall where they may. But these moral qualities, which deserve admiration clearly did not prevent some of them from participating for many years in the game of deceptions and forfeits.
Confident of place of education and accomplishment, they lied perhaps out of a mistaken patriotism. But the point is that they lied not so much for their country, certainly not for their country's survival, which was never at stake, as for its image.
In spite of their undoubted intelligence, They also believed that politics is but a variety of public relations and were taken in by all the bizarre psychological premises underlying this belief. Still, they obviously were different from ordinary image-makers.
Their distinction lies in that they were problem-solvers as well. Hence, they were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being rational. And they were indeed to a rather frightening degree above sentimentality and in love with theory, expressed in pseudo-mathematical language which would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them.
That is, they were eager to discover laws by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary and thus as reliable as a physicist once believed natural phenomena to be. Reason, aversion to contingency is very strong. It was Hegel, the father of the modern grandiose concepts of history, who held that philosophical contemplation has no other intention than to eliminate the accidental.
Indeed, much of the modern arsenal of political theory, the game theories and systems analysis scenarios written for imagined audiences, and the careful enumeration of usually three options, A, B, C, whereby A and C represent the opposite extremes, and B, the seemingly logical middle of the road solution of the problem, has its source in this deep-rooted aversion.
The fallacy of such thinking begins, of course, with forcing the choices into mutually exclusive dilemmas. Reality never presents us with anything so neat as premises for logical conclusions. The kind of thinking that presents both A and C as undesirable and therefore settles on B hardly serves any other purpose than to divert the mind and blunt the judgment for the multitude of real possibilities.
What these problem solvers have in common with down-to-earth liars is the attempt to get rid of facts and the confidence that this could be possible because of the inherent contingency of all facts. The truth of the matter is that this can never be done by either theory or opinion manipulation as though a fact is safely removed from the world if only enough people believe in its non-existence. It can be done only through radical destruction, as in the case of the murderer who says that Mrs. Smith has died and then goes and kills her. In the political domain, Such destruction would have to be wholesale.
Needless to say, there never existed on any level of government such a will to wholesale destruction, in spite of the fearful number of war crimes committed in the course of the war. But even where this will is present, as it was in the case of both Hitler and Stalin, The power to achieve it would have to amount to omnipotence.
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