Does it really matter that our politicians lie?

As the next election nears, it’s time we take an honest look at how we got ourselves into a situation where we know we have people representing us who tell lies and who we don’t trust, writes Margaret Wenham.

How much do I lie?

How much do you lie? How much do politicians lie?

Have you always told lies? Do the lies roll off your tongue easily? Do you feel the uncomfortable pricks of conscience if you do lie? Or not?

Do you think it’s OK if the people who we elect to run our country tell lies?

From memory, the very first lie I told involved me trying to conceal the fact I’d taken home several sheets of crepe paper and a pair of scissors from school.

These were carefully tucked into the leather school satchel I was using as a portmanteau with which to run away. Among the other “essentials” packed for this great escape were several rolls of toilet paper. I was, I think, four.

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My reasons for wanting to pull the plug on existing arrangements were: (a) I hated school because Miss Scott the spare, towering, dour woman running the place used to stand over you until you’d eaten, in between dry retches, the watery mince and boiled cabbage served at lunchtime; and (b) I was upset our cat Matty had died and Mum refused point blank to get another one.

I got no further than the bottom of our street before cravenly packing it in and then I got in trouble when Mum was helping me unpack my bag, as much for “stealing” the crepe paper and scissors as for trying to lie about where I’d got them.

Politicians are human like the rest of us, especially when it comes to telling lies. Picture: Tracey Nearmy/Getty

I was also laughed at for taking such useless survival items (which, in my defence, were obviously figuring strongly in school activities at the time and therefore were considered important in my childish reasoning). The dunny paper provoked more family merriment at my expense, though I still see the value in not being caught short while on the lam.

A few years later, back in Australia and in, I think, Grade 4, I was done again for trying to lie my way out of being responsible for a plot I hatched to get myself and a couple of cronies out of school. I was sure I’d heard Mum say that if you drank milk too soon after orange juice or vice versa, the milk would curdle in your tummy and make you sick. So I mixed orange juice with some of the always warm and probably just-turning-anyway milk doled out at little lunch and a small group of us skolled the concoction.

Well, I was the only one who didn’t vomit, the only one who didn’t get sent home sick and the only one who did get the cuts.

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I may have been only eight or nine but what had to be faced up to was it seemed clear whenever I did anything bad, I’d be found out but, also, if there was lying involved it made things just that much worse.

“How can I trust you?” Mum would ask unhappily, and I would feel a hotter shame for the dishonesty than I felt regret for the transgression. I knew, if you like, that my credibility had taken a hit and my credibility, my trustworthiness, I learned, was to be valued.

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott was once famously caught out trying to lie by Leigh Sales on 7.30. Picture: AAP/Mick Tsikas

You might think that as a result of all this and from quite early on, I became a veritable goodie two shoes. You’d be wrong. With an innate antiauthoritarian streak a mile wide I was still up for lots of naughty (and stupid) things.

And I’d be lying if I said I stopped lying altogether. But because of the sense of shame it provoked, continues to provoke — even a “white” lie, say, to protect someone’s feelings or to avoid a not entirely necessary conflict — I’d like to think I’ve long kept lying to a bare minimum.

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So what about you and what about our politicians? Well, if it makes you (and them) feel any better, there’s plenty of research out there suggesting lying is innate.

“Lying … is something that most of us are very adept at. We lie with ease, in ways big and small, to strangers, co-workers, friends, and loved ones … Being deceitful is woven into our very fabric, so much so that it would be truthful to say that to lie is human,” says science writer Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in a 2017 piece for the National Geographic.

The bits of good news are most of us (sociopaths excepted) value honesty as taught to us by society and consequently limit our deceptions. This means there’s probably not that many George Costanzas among us comforting themselves with the classic “it’s not really a lie if you believe it” line as they lie and cheat the rest of us.

Humans have an innate need to trust others, which makes us terrible at detecting other people’s lies. Picture: AAP/Lukas Coch

But the rub is our other innate need, which is to trust others, makes us “terrible at detecting (others’) lies”.

The latter has been dubbed “the liar’s advantage” by Massachusetts University psychologist, Robert Feldman, and Bhattacharjee says it means we “put up little resistance to the deceptions that please us and comfort us — be it false praise or the promise of high investment returns” and especially “when we are fed falsehoods by people who have wealth, power and status, they appear to be even easier to swallow …”

All of this banging on about lying is, of course, salient in the current climate of the federal election.

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In the knowledge I’m not Robinson Crusoe disgusted by too many of our politicians ostensibly employing Costanza chutzpah and too many others deliberately exploiting “the liar’s advantage”, my suggestion is it’s time all of the rest of us took a good honest look at how we got ourselves into a situation where, according to so many surveys, we know we have people representing us who tell lies and who we don’t trust.

We might not like the answer but the truth too, also sometimes hurts.