People Saying One Thing, then Doing the Opposite — an Accepted Cultural Pattern of Lying that’s Going to Sink Us

© 2011 Peter Free

 

10 August 2011

 

 

Remember how refreshing it is to meet an obviously honest person?

 

Life is challenging enough without having to find our way through a forest filled with lying wolves behind every tree.

 

 

Today, we mostly accept that all politicians, plutocrats, and self-interested people lie in order to get what they want — But is our tolerance for deceit wise?

 

Our society’s acceptance of lying as legitimate business and political strategy wounds our survival chances.

 

Dana Milbank gave us an example:

 

Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia, a Tea Party favorite and president of the House Republicans’ freshman class, got off to a slow start as a legislator but finally introduced his first bill last week.

 

In its entirety: “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Legal Services Corporation Act is repealed.”

 

This one sentence says a great deal about Scott, because it is a transparent attempt by the young lawmaker to defend a company in his district that discriminates against U.S. citizens in favor of Mexican migrant workers.

 

Scott introduced the bill abolishing Legal Services exactly three days after it became public that Legal Services had won a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determination that Georgia’s Hamilton Growers “engages in a pattern or practice of regularly denying work hours and assigning less favorable assignments to U.S. workers, in favor of H2-A guestworkers.”

 

Hamilton also “engages in a pattern or practice of discharging U.S. workers and replacing them with H-2A guestworkers,” the EEOC determined.

 

In a broader sense, Scott’s bill gets at what has long troubled me about the Tea Party movement: It is fueled by populist anger, but it has been hijacked by plutocrats.

 

Well-intentioned Tea Party foot soldiers demand that power be returned to the people, but then their clout is used to support tax cuts for millionaires. They rally for tougher immigration laws, but then their guy in Washington helps corporations to fire U.S. workers and hire foreign nationals.

 

© 2011 Dana Milbank, How Rep. Austin Scott betrayed his Tea Party roots, Washington Post (09 August 2011) (paragraphs split)

 

 

This minor (but culturally prevalent) example symbolizes why truth is important in a democracy

 

Without honesty, how do any of us know (i) what is going on and (ii) how to successfully get to where we want to go?