AMERICA'S CULTURE OF LYING

American attorney and teacher David Hoffman in (gasp!) the Russian newspaper Pravda muses on widespread dishonesty in the US and how it affects our politics:

Former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said, "There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics" Adolph Hitler opined in his book Mein Kampf that when leaders lie, they should tell "great" lies, because while people tend to recognize "little" lies, they have a proclivity to believe that political leaders would not be untruthful about issues or events of great magnitude or severity.

Lying as a political strategy, of course, is not confined to the American political arena. But it has surreptitiously become such an integral part of this arena that the "art of lying" is now widely accepted in other venues as well. In fact, despite the idealistic adages that "honesty is the best policy," or "cheaters never prosper," the tragic reality is that far too frequently the dishonest are the ones who do prosper. In fact, I can honestly (a word perhaps out of place in an article about lying) say that I have rarely in my adult life been in an employment situation where people
did not lie.

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This essay makes a good argument connecting dishonesty about the most routine things at the very lowest levels of American society to the grand lies concocted by the powerful--both lying and believing in lies is now as American as apple pie. Go check it out.

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