Lying in Autocratic Society: A Challenge to Democracy

Several years ago Noam Chomsky said that governments held, as their first priority, protecting themselves from the people.1 Until recently, I thought his view extreme and cynical. But the prominence of governments, loosely called populist, makes Chomsky's depiction prescient and apt with respect to democratic aspiration. For me, the particular feature that singles them out is their autocratic character, by which I mean their aim of marginalizing the processes and institutions of civil society that stand between the leader and democratic legitimacy. In this way, the leader creates an illusion of an immediate bond with ‘the people’ - the leader's people only; together they form a self-sustaining, absolute authority: others are excluded and derided. I will argue, first, that this autocratic authority is magnified by lying, which circulates between the lies of the leader and the attraction of the lie to the people. Together, they form a group with absolutist power. Secondly, the foreclosing of a mediating domain reduces the capacity of individuals to tolerate the inner turmoil of ambivalence and, therefore, to strive for consent in debate as opposed to triumph. Democracies are especially vulnerable because lying undermines their belief in consent.

I will argue that the impact of the lie is different from the disorientations of post-truth.2 Post-truth refers to a loss of bearings when any statement can be put up against any other statement, whether or not it is anchored in evidence. ‘Alternative facts’ are indeed head-spinning, in that they undermine a common base upon which judgment could be framed and consent among positions achieved. But the lie also shatters identity. It attacks one's attachment to truthfulness as a capacity to repair and sustain the ‘good object’ with which one is identified as a good ego. In the depressive position, as defined by Klein (1935), that identification includes the recognition of reality, including the ambivalence of