Loss of Trust Born of Low Lies and High Causes

As the Year of the Lies begins to fade, the casualties--an entire U.S. public--are busy judging the effects of deceptions. Lying goes on all the time but in 1987 people as different as Jim Bakker, Gary Hart, Joe Niekro and Lt. Col. Oliver L. North made the living of lies or the telling of falsehoods a prime-time topic.

All lying creates victims as well as problems for victims. “Don’t lie!” is perhaps the first moral counsel a child receives--from parents, teachers, preachers and, they say, God. The lie breaks the pact of trust between humans. Jesus paid the power of the lie a great compliment when he called the devil “the Father of Lies.” Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant focused on the lie as the basic test of all morality.

It helps us sort out the problems lying creates if we deal with two classes, both common in 1987. First are the low-grade lies told for low causes. The second are high-risk lies told for Higher Causes, words we have to capitalize. It is comparatively easy to deal with the Bakker-Hart-Niekro type of low lies. I do not want to minimize the destructive effect of them, or their Wall Street counterparts, which also make regular news. Frequent lies, celebrity lies, commonplace lies, lies by our heroes--all make it easier for us to turn cynical or casual about falsehoods and the pact of trust weakens. Yet these remain low-grade lies.

The high-risk, high-grade lies, on the other hand, are the wrenching legacy of the year, particularly from the Iran- contra hearings. They raise the most fundamental issues of security and trust. And a wise person won’t trust anyone who finds it easy to resolve the issues they raise.

Fawn Hall, North’s secretary, condensed the case memorably when she defended the shredding of documents, an act that covered up North’s deception. Hall claimed that in a Higher Cause, “sometimes you have to go above the written law.”

President Reagan himself suffered in the new climate he helped create. In the President’s Aug. 12 speech after the hearings, he only said that “lies, leaks, divisions, and mistakes” had occurred. Had he lied? Who can say?

Polls reveal that 57% of the public was not convinced they had been told the truth. Yet many felt that if Reagan had deceived, it was for the Higher Cause of supporting the “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua, and maybe the President knew best.

While citizens kept fingers crossed or brows furrowed in suspicion as Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter forgot everything that looked deceptive, they were treated to open admissions of lying by North himself. As part of the “good, the bad, and the ugly,” North claimed that “lying does not come easy to me but I think we all had to weigh in the balance the difference between lives and lies. It is not an easy thing to do.”

North-haters and North-lovers alike, if they are serious, will likely agree with his last eight words. If “lives” represent the Higher Cause, then “lies” may save them. North’s deliberately crafted line poses the Higher Cause issue in a dramatic, comprehensible way.

At two extremes, two sets of people find the issues posed by such lying an “easy thing.” One set simply turns all moral questions over to idolized leaders. When leaders deceive, followers have to be confident about their heroes’ judgments. They cannot worry about the destruction caused by exposure, the weakening of the pact of trust in society. The Higher Cause dominates all.

The second set is more morally serious. These are the absolutists who say, “Never lie!” Philosopher Kant poses the classic test. Your friend knocks on your door and asks you to shield him. A murderer is pursuing him and would kill him. So you take him in. The murderer then knocks and wants to know if your friend is in the house. You tell the truth, at the cost of your friend’s life, because truth-telling always has to be right.

Almost all of us allow for some Higher Cause possibility, and that’s where things get sticky, as they did in the Iran- contra affair. The Higher Cause that led to those lies was based on the felt need to deceive, even under oath, a Congress, though that Congress was directly responsible to us, the public. This calculation led to deception of colleagues within the same Administration, some of whom, like the President himself, had been charged by voters with still higher-level responsibilities in pursuit of noble causes.

Stickiness complicates, it does not dissolve moral seriousness. A classic argument against absolutism was the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian theologian who became a victim of Hitler. He knew the need to lie to the Nazis, in order to protect lives and try to bring down the regime. Imprisoned, Bonhoeffer worked on a book, “Ethics,” which included these lines:

“It is only the cynic who claims ‘to speak the truth’ at all times and in all places to all men in the same way,” but who therefore “in fact, displays nothing but a lifeless image of the truth.”

A lively image of the truth finds real and concrete humans living in complex circumstances. Lies may on extreme occasions then be necessary.

The attempt to find a way through Higher Cause debates begins with the simple word “game.” War and spying, for example, are dreadful and deadly games built on deception, games played with their own despicable if necessary rules. The pact of trust among civilians, however, can at least theoretically continue. Had North and Poindexter deceived the enemy and not the President, Congress and the public, we would be less troubled. It is vital to know which game is being played under what circumstances.

Second, a climate of fanaticism breeds the lie for the Higher Cause. “Mr. Dooley,” the newspaper column character created by Finley Peter Dunne, had the definitive word: “A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if he knew the facts of the case.” Considering the lonely and secretive Halls and Norths and Poindexters, one wishes there had been a friend--where are critical friends in all these doings?--who could have reached deep into the Puritan tradition for a stinging line. Oliver Cromwell said it: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Finally, the public can raise the price against deceivers to force them to think through their Higher Causes. Today, many patients rebel against the idea of the “white lie” told them by physicians, allegedly for their own good. Who are these doctors to determine what is one’s own good about one’s own life and death issues.

Sissela Bok in her thoughtful book, “Lying,” ponders what Plato called the “high-minded” or “noble lie.” Rulers in his time and since have admitted to lying “for the public good.” Some even claimed and claim that those who govern have a right to lie. Bok, however, urges: Always think first of the perspective of the deceived.

In 1987, we, the deceived citizens, know and have seen again how broken trust leads to ever more broken trust. The nobility of the lie soon disappears. Lies for the public good are most dangerous because the stakes are so high, the victims so many, the examples they offer so demoralizing.

Do we choose to live in an America where those we elect, or their appointees, feel free to decide when they can lie at our expense? Bok helps by adding two questions. “Would we not, on balance, prefer to run the risk of failing to rise to a crisis honestly explained to us, from which the government might have saved us through manipulation? And what protection from abuse do we foresee should we surrender this choice?”

There can be no final protection against fanatics who pit their devotion to the Higher Cause as they see it, even when that devotion goes against expressed public will. Yet there are some safeguards against permitting the circumstances to develop that make deception and lying acceptable and casual.

The current debate about the height of various causes and the classes of various lies already leaves us better off than a climate that simply excuses and gives permission to the liars. Those who were insulted, offended or outraged by the Iran- contra lies can rescue something from the whole affair precisely through such debate and through an insistence that we pay attention to which high-stake games are being played. Thus Americans can take the first step toward restoring the pact of trust.