Pinocchio Wins

A couple of years ago I was driving my car in California and listening to the BBC World Service on the radio. Specifically, I was listening to an interview with the Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom. He was happy to admit Russia had interfered with both the US Presidential election and had also funded most of the Brexit campaign. Then he said something that has remained with me ever since: “There’s no such thing now as objective truth. Truth is whatever we want it to be.”

What’s striking about that interview is the fact that the Russian ambassador was so supremely confident of the fact that ordinary people are so easily manipulated that you can even tell them they’re being manipulated and it simply won’t matter.

This fact of life is now commonplace in politics around the world. Today the formula for success in politics has nothing to do with policy. Instead, the keys are (a) to tell people what they want to hear, even if that means lying outrageously in defiance of every objective fact, and (b) do so in simple words, ideally monosyllables, in easy-to-remember sound bites. From Trump in the USA through Boris-the-Clown in Britain to Duterte in the Philippines and Bolsonaro in Brazil, everyone’s jumped on the “lie about everything” bandwagon. This is because it works.

Why are we so easily gulled by blustering incompetents whose “policies” are obviously going to…