Mendacity
Mark Greathouse
(3/2023) Dictionary.com defines mendacity as the quality of being mendacious; untruthfulness; the tendency to lie. It’s about deceit, prevarication, falsehoods, deception, blasphemy, exaggeration, and lying. Mendacity is ubiquitous to mankind. Mark Twain noted, "The insincerity of man: all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears, he is a comet, his fame is eternal – needs no genius, no talent – mere honesty."
Mendacity is challenging but is truth any easier? Truth is defined as the body of real things, events, or facts; a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality. Yet truth can be cruel. We resort to truth bending and social filtering to avoid hurting folks’ feelings. Most folks consider this being civilized, but it’s a slippery slope from truths to lies, honesty to mendacity. After all, is it my truth, your truth, their truth, or the truth?
Politicians are mostly pathological liars, spewing whatever lies, myths, or exaggerations it takes to achieve their ends be they good or evil. One of my favorite quotes is from the late President John F. Kennedy, "The greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and realistic." Gaslighting and outright lies abound, and we’ll get to some of those.
Out on America’s western frontier, we can cite all manner of mendacity. White settlers broke treaties with Indian tribes and vice versa. Bureaucrats and tribal chiefs made promises they knew they couldn’t keep. Fraudsters simultaneously sold the same piece of land to multiple buyers, cattle thieves rebranded cattle, snake oil hucksters sold miracle cures, and politicians promised plenty they couldn’t deliver. Shucks, Jim Bowie of knife fame and hero of the Alamo was caught up in a land fraud scheme. Mendacity knows no era.
As noted by JFK, persistent repetition is critically important to lies or myths being perceived as truths. We see the term climate change substituted for global warming, choice becomes a supposedly more acceptable surrogate for abortion, racism is slung about as the cause of every social ill, and urban lootings and burnings become peaceful protests rather than riots. The effort to find focus-group-tested words to hide unpopular dogmas is continuous. Of course, word wrangling does little more than offer camouflage.
Mendacity? The emotionally raw lines of Big Daddy played by Burl Ives in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" by Tennessee Williams define lying well, "Mendacity. What do you know about mendacity? I could write a book on it...Mendacity. Look at all the lies that I got to put up with. Pretenses. Hypocrisy. Pretendin' like I care for Big Mama, I haven't been able to stand that woman in forty years. Church! It bores me. But I go. And all those swindlin' lodges and social clubs and money-grabbin' auxiliaries. It's-it's got me on the number one sucker list. Boy, I've lived with mendacity. Now why can't you live with it? You've got to live with it. There's nothin' to live with but mendacity. Is there?" Wow!
Mendacity knows no political party boundaries. President Joseph Biden has a long and well-documented history of speech plagiarism plus the lies and repeated exaggerations in his speeches as he wanders from his teleprompter. Examples of political lying include Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) falsely claiming Vietnam service; Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) earning the sobriquet "Pocahontas" by falsely claiming Native American ancestry on her college job application; Representative George Santos (R-NY) making wildly false claims on his personal resume; and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas lying about U.S. southern border security. There seems an endless supply of mendacious outpourings to draw from. It gets down to whom to trust? Government? Big tech and media fact checkers? Academic rubes? Educators pouring socialist drivel into children’s heads? It’s all such a frustrating morass of lies, myths, and half-truths.
Can politicians be trusted to keep the oath they swear to upon being sworn in as a United States Senator or Representative? "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."
As they say out west, trust your neighbor but brand your cattle. Elected folks are about as trustworthy as a rattlesnake ready to strike.
Media mendacity? How about rock throwing, police car burning, and shooting police in recent Atlanta riots being reported as nonviolent? And we dare not forget the Trump collusion hoax. Again, an endless trail of lies.
Fact checkers? Blatant misinformation and disinformation spawned by all manner of sources from government to social media to big tech and academia reviewed by truth panels harkening back to George Orwell’s Newspeak in his dystopian novel 1984 wherein history is constantly recreated to suit the ends of Big Brother. And, if folks don’t toe the line to the fact checkers’ pronouncements, they’re likely to be cancelled, shadow-banned, doxed, or put in social media jail if not worse.
USSR dictator Josef Stalin famously disposed of his enemies and airbrushed them from photos. He also pulled the wool over the West’s eyes as Communism’s realities by creating Potemkin villages wherein peasant actors clustered around a stage set collective farm, happily praising Stalin and promising to produce more grain as a patriotic duty. In the actual Russian villages of the 1930s, starving over-worked peasants described collectivization as a "second serfdom." Notably, some of President Franklin Roosevelt’s closest advisors fell under the Potemkin village ruse. President Biden was recently treated to a Potemkinesque exercise upon visiting the U.S. border in El Paso whereby the accumulated detritus of months of gathered immigrant waves were sanitized so as to deceive him. They offered Biden the "blue pill" per the apocalyptic dystopian Matrix with no alternative "red pill" revealing the ongoing border horrors of rapes, drownings,
suicides, murders, drugs, and human trafficking.
How do we end mendacity in our culture? Imagine laughing emojis. Seriously, there is a path out of the quagmire of lies and deceit. It begins with instilling solid moral values. The Ten Commandments offers a good start, and there’s great wisdom in the seven cardinal virtues: prudence, temperance, justice, faith, hope, charity, and fortitude. Juxtapose these virtues against the seven deadly sins often hidden beneath lies: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. The Bible certainly offers examples of mendacity’s pain from Peter denying Jesus three times to David’s deceptions with Uriah’s wife Bathsheba. If you’re disinclined to follow Christian teachings, try Aristotle’s and Plato’s prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Loss of values will surely lead to ever-greater crime and violence coming to a street corner near you. Words? Empty words? Actions matter. Even virtues and values aren’t worth much unless inculcated in
our children by parents and reinforced through corporations, schools, media, and even politicians. If we don’t; well, you’re stuck with Big Daddy’s assurance, "You've got to live with it. There's nothin' to live with but mendacity. Is there?" Let’s never forget the words in our Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident…" Just sayin’.
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