I am glad that my kids are grown. I would hate to come home and find that my son was using Donald Trump logic to deny a minor but still important act. What if he simply said, “Dad, it’s a complete lie from people who are out to get me.” And so forth. He would not only be lying to me but putting up a smoke screen. The report of what he did cannot be denied. But in Donald Trump’s World, the only wrong thing is to fess up.
This is either a sickness or a practice too evil to ascribe to the person who is supposed to be our leader.
The occasion for this is Trump’s remarkable excusing of Roy Moore’s documented record of abuse.
“He denied it,” the president said. And it went out to the world. The subtext is clear. denial works. It has worked for the person who is now celebrated by his followers as the leader of the free world.
The Moore defense
Any child who listens to Donald Trump is either offended or follows his false logic to its false conclusion. All you need to do to save yourself in any situation is denial. Denial is everything.
I didn’t do it
Denial is Trump’s magic bullet. It has served him since he was a privileged child who never suffered punishment. His father Fred protected him with wealth. Indeed, only money has made Trump’s “deny everything” policy effective.
But there is one more thing. Wealth is a great protector, but human gullibility is the denier’s best friend.
From Bill Clinton’s “I never had sex with that woman” to Trump’s continual denials of things until he is found out, we live in a media sea of distortion and falsehood.
Plausible
Indeed, our world has canonized lying to buttress the strategy of secrecy which has governed life on earth as policy since WW 2. Plausible deniability is what we see as the typical way to justify bad means to reach what are said to be good ends.
Such deniability is, I would contend, the basis for outbreaks of psychotic behavior. I would like to see an honest analysis of the reasons why we lose veterans to suicide at an obscene rate and why we have an opioid epidemic. Google Bateson and double binds for more on this.
Lies
Lies do not serve any purpose but the delay of consequences.
Consequences grow in harmfulness as truth festers.
We are living in an era of lies and we have only one defense. It is the integrity of truth that rests on tolerance, helpfulness, and democracy. When these values are being threatened and distorted, we can be certain that truth is on the scaffold.
Naïve?
This is not naivete, it is realism. It is basing a future on universal values that transcend lies and denial. Liars are not content with the notion that all people have the same rights under the law. Deniers are content to say that anything is true whether it has a provable basis in fact or not. We can do better.
