Apology to politicians

I’ve hated you for lying but now I Get It.

I hate when people lie to me. I understand that, at some level, it’s “just how things are”. I get it. It allows people to save face, it keeps them from getting their back against the wall, it keeps the whole social enterprise flowing, well-oiled. And yet, I hate it.

I suspect that hatred has to do with being a natural-born quokka.

:) Me :)

Person says something that sounds too good to be true? Sounds legit to me! Which reminds me I need to get back with the money that Nigerian prince emailed me about. Such an unfair story.

But anyways, what I mean is this: lying hits (me) different.

When everyone knows that lying is happening just so someone can save face, the lying feels almost generous. Except I don’t know. And when you only realise lying was happening years later and everyone was “in on it” but you… It’s like when you realise that she was totally flirting with you and you totally missed it. In sum: feels bad, man.

Anyways, given all of the above you can imagine how I felt about politicians.

Well, I was wrong.

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I’ve been recently noting the evolution of my thinking feels uni-directional. I’ve been going from assuming everything is deliberately adversarial to realising most things are just sadly structurally necessary instead. A deflating denouement from active conflict to passive tragedy. Let me illustrate.

A friend recently expressed his frustration at my quokka blindspot above. And, fair enough, I told him. It’s buried deep and I suspect that all of my very explicit modelling and thinking of deliberate adversariality is just to make up for it.

And what else could I do? If I can’t spot lying with my actual eyes, I have to infer it with the eyes of the mind. Which means I’ve intellectually erred on the side of assuming everything is adversarial in a Type 1/Type 2 fashion.

As you might know by now one of my favorite thinking tools is Type 1/Type 2 errors. You don’t get to choose if you fail, but you get to choose how you fail : do you want to catch all true instances of something but also have some false alarms? Or do you want to never have a false alarm but also miss lots of true instances? You can’t have both.

To be clear, it’s not like I sat down and chose this. But I suspect that since my “base layer” fails to detect actual instances of lying/adversariality (and notice how I was treating those as one and the same), my mind compensated by building an elaborate conceptual system designed to explicitly catch them.

If my “base layer” errs towards the extreme of never catching them, my mind is failing in the other direction by seeing them everywhere: misfiring and tagging as adversarial things that really aren’t.

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The first time I noticed a misfire was when thinking about concepts and words and truth.

You can imagine a really strict view—mine—in which everything you say either is true or is a lie. But this doesn’t really work because some things are neither true nor are they lies! Imagine someone says “It’ll be sunny tomorrow”. Is it true? Is it a lie? Well, it’s neither! At the moment it is said it is indeterminate. That was the first blow to my view. But it didn’t stop there.

As I thought about society I realised something else: lots of things are said that are neither-true-nor-false. And, not only that, but lots of them are said, not despite not being true, but so that they may become true. That is, people try to speak things into being all the time.

Abracadabra—iykyk

You’re making plans with your friends. One of them goes “we meet for dinner at 8pm”. What now?

Well, one thing you can do is be an idiot quokka (aka me) and go “How can you possibly be in an epistemic position to truthfully affirm that”—yada yada yada, and spiral yourself into a neurotic whirlwind.

Or, alternatively, you can go “Cool, be there at 8!”.

And the point is that the latter works. You’ll be there at 8, so will everyone else, you’ll have a great time, hopefully, and your friend’s sentence was true: you did all end up meeting for dinner at 8.

It even works if you knowingly are the only idiot spiralling quokka of your group “Well, I know that he doesn’t have the epistemic privilege necessary to perform a truth-claim but they don’t know and so they’ll be there at 8 and, therefore…”

That is: you don’t even need to believe what your friend said is true for it to work. You just need to believe everyone else believes it. No one wants to be the singular asshole that’s late.

Which brings us back to politicians.

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My qualm with politicians was that they appeared to be, from my previous pov, the paragons of deliberate adversarial lying and, thus, a prime target for my burning hot hatred. So I thought.

This Monday's blackout changed my view. Politicians are in an impossible position. Structurally so, due to the nature of their position which is such that they cannot possibly tell the truth.

Imagine my dinner-coordinating friend had told the strict truth: “I booked dinner for 8. It is impossible to truthfully say at what time each of us will arrive.”

I’m pretty damn confident that him saying that would ensure each person’s arrival times to be all over the place if they were to arrive at all. No one wants to be the singular asshole that’s late but no one wants to be too early either or—Heavens forbid—alone.

As with dinner plans, so with all future coordination.

During the blackout the PM kept saying, on the radio, every few hours “We have things under control. Electricity should be back in a few hours”. Now, I don’t know if that was true at the time he said it. Imagine it wasn’t and he told the truth: “Well, to be honest, things are definitely not under control. We have no idea when, or if, electricity will be back. God help us all, lol” Panic, chaos, mayhem. Even with his actual messaging you could see inklings of those forming.

So that’s what I realised: I was failing at hermeneutics. Bigly. Statements by politicians are not to be parsed as truth-apt propositions aiming to describe what is the case. They are to be parsed as speech-acts intended to create a particular reality. They’re never predicting, always hyperstitioning. They’re not saying things because they’re true. They’re saying things to make them true.

Now of course that to their inner circle they have to tell the truth. The PM couldn’t tell his ministers “It’s all good. Nbd” if it weren’t. No. They need to know what is actually going on. They get hit by the attempted truth-apt propositions. “We don’t know that it wasn’t a cyber attack”. But that story stays in the inner circle. You don’t share it with the outside world. It stays esoteric.

True story: a minister spoke to the media before the PM saying it might’ve been a cyberattack. Panic. The PM had to rush to erase his messaging. After that he locked all ministers with him in a room for 12 hours. It’s the way he found to maintain message discipline: to keep the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric stories tight.

To recap: politicians must have an esoteric story for the trusted inner circle about what is really going on so that they can act on reality. They must also have an exoteric story for everyone else to coordinate them to bring about the reality they desire. For the latter to work people must believe it is the former, or at least believe others believe it is the former.

This means that the exoteric story, even though it might technically be a lie is, or at least in this case was, necessary, well-intentioned, and ultimately pro-social: it actively prevent mass unrest.

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Now, for the twist.

Notice I talked about politicians' positions. This means that by “politician” I mean everyone who has that job title, but also everyone who has that role. You should also notice that the exoteric/esoteric story is fractal. It’s unclear how many inner circles there might be.

But those aren’t the twist. Just some fun complexifications to ponder.

The twist is this: all of the above exoteric stories, or hyperstitioning, only works insofar as people don’t know about what I’ve written on here.

What some people—most unfairly— call politicians’ """"lies"""" only work insofar as people sync their actions to them because either they believe them, or believe others do.

Even if you, personally, are “clued in” and know that politicians lie it doesn’t matter as long as you believe all those others sheep don’t and will just go along with it. For all intents and purposes, despite your extraordinary realisation, you are functionally indistinguishable from those sheep.

Moments before disaster.

Imagine I become hyper-popular and this essay becomes mega-viral. Everything I say here becomes common knowledge. People realise that politicians lie, that they must lie, and why they must lie. Everyone realises this, and everyone realises that everyone realises this. Well, then the magic stops working.

Politicians' sentences won’t be believed anymore, and thus they won’t serve to create reality, to create coordination anymore. The whole edifice of society collapses. Mass unrest.

That is why I am, in writing and publishing this essay, morally fucking up. Everything written here should itself have remained an esoteric truth shared only with an inner circle.

Although I believe everything I’m writing is true—to the best of my ability—and well intentioned, it is, ultimately, and especially if it spreads, deeply, deeply anti-social.

So who’s the hate-deserving asshole now?