During the debate between the two candidates for the presidency of the United States, Donald Trump declared—among other exaggerations or nonsense—that the Democrats were in favor of abortions up to the ninth month of pregnancy and even infanticide. The day before, I was leafing through a leaflet stuck on the walls of my CEGEP in which it was stated that the Israeli army had killed more than 175,000 Gazans. A few days later, it was Justin Trudeau’s turn to claim, during a radio interview in the West Island of Montreal, that sick English speakers did not know whether they could be treated in their language in Quebec hospitals.
What do these three statements have in common? Obviously, they are false.
We are not talking about errors or misinformation here. Mistakes are only too human. Who has never made one? Anyone can make a mistake and state, based on erroneous, dubious or simply incomplete information, something that will turn out to be objectively false. Even if we sometimes persist in this type of error, the healthy attitude when faced with a falsehood spread in good faith is obviously to recognize it for what it is and, afterwards, to apologize for it.
Nor are we talking about ideas, opinions, judgments, debatable and controversial, in which the establishment of facts plays a more or less negligible role or at least is not the only one at stake. Whether Trump is opposed to illegal immigration, whether Trudeau considers that Bill 101 oppresses Anglo-Quebecers, or whether students consider the offensive led by Israel in the Gaza Strip to be totally illegitimate, no one will find fault with that. One can obviously disagree with these positions, but the fact remains that they are legitimate and even perfectly defensible. Everyone has the right to their opinions.
Finally, we are not talking about lies by omission. In many areas, hiding a compromising truth is fair game; concealing is sometimes necessary. Not telling everything can also be a matter of discretion and the most normal preservation of one’s privacy. No one is an open book, and that’s just fine.
But the three lies mentioned above are not of that order.
They do not arise from ignorance, from the controversial nature of an opinion, or from a desire to hide a secret. Trump knew full well that what he said about the Democrats’ positions on abortion was false. Just as Trudeau was aware that the new directives from the Quebec government do not in any way call into question the right of the Anglo-Quebec minority to receive health care in their own language. As for pro-Palestinian activists, they can hardly ignore that the death toll they are putting forward—taken from a criticized letter (and not from a study) published this summer in The Lancet estimating it at roughly 186,000 — does not match that of Hamas (41,000 dead to date), an organization that is unlikely to minimize the number of Gazans killed by Israeli attacks.
These are lies that are characterized, proven and apparently assumed. The one who lies in this way knows that what he says is not true, but he says it anyway, because the goal he pursues through his speech is only to produce an effect on the one or those who listen to him or read him. In his mouth, the truth does not exist, the words are used for the sole purpose of insinuating an idea into the minds of his listeners or readers and thus advancing a cause.
As we can see, this post-factual and this post-truth are far from being the sole preserve of Donald Trump and his followers today. On the right as on the left, lying has become normalized, which makes us forget that the contempt for facts that characterizes liars is only matched by the contempt in which they hold those to whom they address themselves and to whom they dare to lie brazenly.
Lying, in fact, not only instrumentalizes words, figures and invented or distorted facts, it also deceives those to whom it is intended. It breaks the trust that should be established between the public it wants to convince and the one who, far from deserving this trust, lies to it shamelessly. The political leader or activist who utters such lies uses his recipients without their knowledge to serve a goal that, of course, will also remain hidden from them; because how could he reveal his true intentions to them if he lies to them with aplomb about facts, and even when his lies can be easily discovered?
The answer to this question is quite obvious: he believes them to be manipulable, blind and stupid, or simply indifferent to the truth.
Behind the untruths, the hoaxes, the shameless lies that are spread daily on social networks or elsewhere, there is a disturbing truth: we now live in a society that no longer has the slightest concern for the truth. We are only shocked by the lies uttered by the other side, while any denial of the truth should unanimously arouse our indignation.