Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy
Page 1
DAVID MITCHELL
DISHONESTY IS THE
SECOND-BEST POLICY
AND OTHER RULES
TO LIVE BY
To Barbara
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1 Popular and Unpopular Culture
2 Plenty of Dishonesty but Not Much Actual Lying
3 I Am Become Death.com
4 Destroyer.org of Worlds.co.uk
5 Changing Tastes in Taste
6 Titans of the 21st Century
7 No Artex Please, We’re British
8 Brexit: Snapshots of a Festering, Self-inflicted Wound
9 Civilisation May Go Down As Well As Up
Post-script
Acknowledgments
List of Columns
Index
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
The Best Two Policies
Some honesty to begin with: “Dishonesty is the second-best policy” is a phrase coined by the late American comedian George Carlin. So I didn’t come up with it. Although, in complete honesty again, I really believe I thought of it independently. I don’t think I’d ever heard it before I thought it. The sensation when it came into my head was of invention, not remembrance, and unless you’re an advertising “creative” it’s not easy to confuse the two.
But there’s no denying that George Carlin thought of it before I did. And indeed died before I thought of it. And thought of it before he died. And also before I died. At time of writing, I have not yet died. George Carlin is ahead of me on so many fronts.
As a comedian myself, I should probably have been more aware of George Carlin. The fact that I was in a position to think I’d invented one of his famous quotations is a damning indictment of my ignorance. Or rather of my knowledge. It’s a triumph for my ignorance. A big public victory all over the cover of a book. Take that, my knowledge!
I am now imagining my Knowledge and my Ignorance as two forces within me battling for each other’s eclipse: one striving to make me omniscient, the other seeking the complete evacuation of my brain. A bit like a hoarder versus someone who favours the minimalist school of interior design.
Oh dear, now I’ve implied that the acquisition of knowledge is the cerebral equivalent of living in a weird and stinking house stacked to the ceiling with newspapers and labelled jars of wee. That’s not at all the sort of message I should be sending out to the kids. And the truth is that I’d much prefer to live in an obsessive’s smelly paper labyrinth than a trendy, echoing home containing widely spaced-out, uncomfortable chairs and a solitary orchid.
So having, as it seemed to me, invented the phrase “Dishonesty is the second-best policy”, it felt like an apposite reflection on an era frequently referred to as “post-truth”. I thought it might make a good title for this collection of columns, written for the Observer between 2014 and 2019. And then I thought, “That feels like the sort of phrase someone might’ve come up with already.” And so I Googled it to check, and that’s when George Carlin burst post-humously into my life. Incidentally, William the Conqueror also burst posthumously. At his funeral, so they say. Some claim he actually exploded. I don’t know how Ignorance missed all that. The brain Hoover must be losing its suck.
Obviously, people have always lied – so we shouldn’t get too excited about our own society, as if it’s done something which, while admittedly bad, is devilishly inventive, like feeding Christians to lions or devising whisky. Lying is as old as the hills. Older than ones made of landfill, which I suppose are lying about being hills.
Personally, I lie quite often, mainly about whether I am free to attend social events. It’s all because the phrase “I can come but I don’t want to” seems not to be permitted. There’s no way of dressing that sentiment up so that it’s socially acceptable. I’ll have a go, though:
“It’s so kind of you to invite me and I am sincerely grateful for the thought but, on that day, I know I will be tired and would prefer to stay at home, and I very much doubt that you’d really want me to come if I really don’t want to myself, so if it’s OK, I won’t.”
You see? Won’t do. At best, you’d get some sort of diagnosis. And you’d hurt the inviter’s feelings. And the inviter would think less of you – that’s the real kicker.
So there’s nothing for it but “Thanks so much – I’d love to come, but sadly I’ve got to [insert lie here].” It’s the only way of availing yourself of your liberty not to attend without breaking social convention. If you believe in freedom and you don’t want people to think you’re a dick – and the vast majority of us fall into this category – you’ve got to lie, and lie well.
It’s a bit crazy really. As a consequence, we live in a world in which ostensibly everyone wants to go to everything they’re invited to. They always want to, but sometimes they just can’t. The notion of people not wanting to go to parties that they’re actually free to attend is not openly acknowledged by our society. It’s like prostitution in the Victorian age: it’s happening everywhere, but everyone pretends it isn’t.
In the case of the party-invitation-response convention, that means there is no language for effectively expressing sincere gratitude for an invitation to an event that you genuinely would like to go to but genuinely can’t. All the phrases you might use for expressing that have been stolen by lying excuse-makers like me. Some societies, in this kind of fix, would develop a helpful etiquette: “I’m so sorry but I can’t make it” would mean “I don’t want to come but you’re not allowed to hate me,” while “I’m so sorry but I really can’t make it” would express genuine gratitude and regret.
But that’s not how we roll these days. The “really” would be instantly co-opted by the insincere brigade to make their lies more believable and reduce their reputational jeopardy, just as every politically correct term for mental illness ever devised, from cretin onwards, has been co-opted as a term of abuse.
The Truth Won’t Out
Lying is probably the inevitable consequence of being able to communicate. Language is an amazing tool, one that’s not available to most organisms, but I reckon as soon as you have the power to pass on the truth, it’s going to occur to you not to. Some of those bee dances and whale calls are almost certainly bullshit.
So I suppose it makes sense that the advent of the most powerful communication technology ever devised – the internet and the smartphone – should have caused an exponential rise in dishonesty. We should have expected it; we just got distracted by all the hyperbolic chat about the “democratisation of truth” from people who, if they were being totally honest themselves, would admit that they’re in it primarily for the gadgets.
I’m fond of saying that the internet and its smartphone delivery system are a more disastrous human invention than nuclear weapons. And it’s certainly arguable at this point in history. Though I admit that’s largely because there’s never been a full-scale nuclear war.
So broadly speaking, if I’m right, it’s good news! One of the many things a full-scale nuclear war would blast away is the arguability of my claim. All of which makes me a sort of doom-mongering optimist. I’m saying that maybe there won’t ever be a big nuclear war, which leaves the field clear for smartphones to wreak their slightly less dramatic form of havoc in a way that will eclipse the harm done, so far, by nuclear bombs. Hooray!
One of the advantages of nuclear weapons, as disastrous things to invent go, is that they were immediately obviously a disastrous thing to invent. Nobody’s going to be fooled for a second into thinking they’re going to democratis
e anything, except possibly death, which is pretty democratised already.
Conversely, the smartphone/internet combination is in the cigarettes and plastic straws school of disastrous invention. Not because it’s also tubular – neither the internet nor any mobile phones are, to my knowledge, tubular – but because it initially seemed harmless and fun. The cancer and scourge-of-marine-life issues only raised their heads later, in stinging rebuke of the initial invention’s triviality and superfluousness.
To be fair to smartphones (and I always like to be fair to inanimate objects), they never seemed trivial in the same way as plastic straws. They seemed like they’d be useful. And they are useful. It’s very useful to be able to communicate instantly and globally, to be able to find things out, buy things and be entertained by things without having to move, or while moving around doing something else which currently can’t be achieved online, such as gardening or attending funerals.
It’s extremely useful to be able to do all that. The only fly in the utility ointment is that everyone can do it. Frankly, that spoils it. If you were the only person with smartphone powers – able to shop, watch TV, write and receive correspondence, make phone calls, access more data than the Library of Congress wherever you were – that would be brilliant. So labour saving! You’d never have to go to work. But when everyone can do it, it effectively means you never leave work – if you’re lucky enough to be in work, that is, which, if your area of expertise involves shops, restaurants, pubs or any of the old media, you’re much less likely to be post-internet. And that’s a particularly rough deal because you’ve also got several extra monthly bills to pay in order to remain a normal citizen: mobile, broadband, cable TV, maybe a bit of Netflix or Amazon Prime, and rental of space in a “cloud” as well. Well, it all adds to the GDP, I suppose, and conceals the fact that society is coming to bits.
The trouble is that all that – paying every month for a new invisible thing that means you can never literally and metaphorically switch off, and which has undermined economic norms that have existed for millennia – is the fucking least of it. It’s the mere tip of the technological iceberg along which the good ship Life-As-We-Know-It is scraping its hull.
We haven’t even got to the grooming, the dramatic reversal of the decades-long decline in child abuse, the increasing impossibility of distinguishing truth from lies, the financial degradation of the old-media investigative institutions that used to provide that truth, the bullying, the abuse, the threats of murder and rape, and the incalculable long-term effects of social media, bristling as it is with virtue-signalling, selfies and revenge porn, on all of our brains, particularly those of young people, who have grown up with this technology in its current raw, unregulated form. Plus, people don’t keep appointments any more because they can just text and say they’re running late. It’s all fucking terrible! Who knows what the ultimate outcome of all this will be but, anecdotally at least, it doesn’t look like happiness.
Most insidious of all is the effect on truth. Suddenly it feels so flimsy. My whole view of existence is predicated on the notion that, in the end, the truth will out. Possibly long after the protagonists of any controversy have died, but eventually, and for the eternal knowledge of posterity.
That’s how you get taught history at school. Tudor propagandists added a hunched back to Richard III’s portrait, but we now know he only had scoliosis. The crucial phrase is “we now know”. But what if the blizzard of words and imagery that the internet generates about everything, often manipulated by malign interest groups, makes the truth impossible ever to discern? It’s in that haystack somewhere, but it’s just one of the pieces of hay. Suddenly the whole of human existence is like an episode of Poirot in which the murder remains unsolved.
And it’s not just the bare-faced lying that scares me but all the subjectivity. In the online world, which has become such a high percentage of many people’s experience of existence, almost everything we see has been curated for us: the adverts that appear, the political claims that are made, the people we interact with, the products that are suggested to us when we search for something and the news that we’re told about. It’s all been tailored according to what we’re likely to respond to. No two people see the same thing.
Even the BBC News website is at it. It’s taken to asking me if I want to “change nation”. Considering the Brexit situation, I bloody do. Sadly, the only options are England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which is a bit of a samey range if you ask me. But it’s not really offering to change my nationality; it’s telling me that it will report stories from where I live, or where I’m most interested in, more prominently. I hate that. I just want to look at the BBC News website. I want to see the same one as everyone else, just like I would if I’d bought a newspaper in a shop.
I can seek out the subjects I particularly want to find out about by myself. I want to be able to find them, but I don’t want them pushed towards me. The level of interest an algorithm thinks I’m likely to show in any given news report is not a meaningful gauge of how important it actually is. If I only want to read stories about, say, cricket, I’ll go to a cricket website or buy a cricket magazine. I don’t want all my news feeds to suddenly start banging on exclusively about cricket because some machine has worked out I’m into it, thereby giving me the illusion that the most important global events are all cricket-related.
No wonder we talk about our online echo chambers, where everyone seems to agree with each other and any transgression from a range of approved views is jumped upon and the transgressor shamed. Social media corrals people into interacting solely with those who share their viewpoint more effectively than the court of Versailles in the last days of the Bourbons.
This already dangerous situation is exacerbated by the fact that the only news, adverts or products that each echo chamber will get to see are specifically designed to attract the attention of its members – and so inevitably to confirm them in their opinions and prejudices. How else can the censorious and admonitory extreme political correctness of some university campuses coexist in the same world as the unabashed rise of crypto-fascism?
The fact is that, virtually speaking, they don’t exist in the same world. There is no unified reality, and that really might be a disaster. Objective truth may always have been unattainable, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth striving for.
If we all just settle into small, mutually ignorant online support groups exchanging comforting half-truths, then civilisation is in for a rough ride. No one will know what is really going on, and working out what is really going on has, for most of history, been humankind’s main purpose. Losing that is a high price to pay for being able to order pizza without speaking to anyone.
Chivalry Is Dead
Look, I’m not Amish. I understand that humans are driven to invent things, that technology, in general, becomes more advanced over time, and, again in general, I’m in favour of that. Maybe we were happier as hunter-gatherers, but it’s too late to go back to doing that now, as there are roughly seven billion more people on the planet than that lifestyle could support. So even if starting to farm and live in towns was a big mistake, there’s no going back. We might as well double down on the cock-up (as they say in porn) and develop crop rotation and the yoke and the seed drill and the steam engine and, as it turns out, nuclear weapons, asbestos, porn and Twitter.
So I’m not cross with the people who invented this stuff. It’s what humans do – you might as well get cross with beavers for building dams. Our brains got us into this and, if anything will get us out of it, it’s our brains. All the more reason to hope that they haven’t been fundamentally warped and brutalised by overexposure to Instagram.
It’s not fair to blame inventors and, in fact, I don’t think it’s very constructive, in general, to blame people. I mean, it’s enjoyable and it’s often deserved. Nobody is going to take away my righteous contempt for David Cameron, for example. My unshakeable view is that he hugely damage
d the country with his mixture of self-interest and being-wrong-about-everything, but the more important question is: how was such a second-rate scoundrel in a position to do what he did? There must have been failings in the system.
I also think this about another figure often singled out for personal blame: businessman Sir (at time of writing) Philip Green. I’d genuinely hate him to lose his knighthood, because the fact that he’s got one is such an illuminating case study of the self-defeating way our society dishes out rewards.
In theory, knighthoods are supposed to go to people who do good things – who are successful and good. But who, for an instant, ever thought Sir Philip Green was good – that he was a really good man? Here I’m just talking about the activities of the businesses he runs, not the allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct. Even assuming that they’re all groundless, which would surprise me but is theoretically possible, who ever thought that he was a decent chap or a nice guy? I mean, he might have been successful, but he clearly never gave a damn about the country or society. He just wanted to make money.
That’s OK with me – we live in a capitalist system, so that’s what we should expect lots of people to want – but what was the knighthood for? He gets to keep the money, doesn’t he? Do we worry that, without the added promise of a chivalric award, he wouldn’t have bothered to dedicate his life to his own enrichment, and so our economy would have suffered? I’m pretty sure he’d have done it anyway. And, as a side note, we might have been better off if he hadn’t.
But blaming him misses the point. Circumstances existed in which he was able to practise business as he did – ie with minimum collateral benefit to the community – and was honoured by our sovereign for doing it. Blaming him is like blaming the burglar if you leave your house unlocked. It’s morally coherent but not particularly helpful. If that burglar hadn’t stolen your stuff, another burglar probably would’ve done it. The root of the problem is not the personality of the burglar, but the circumstances in which the burglar can prosper.