Sometimes they are honest. In a report published in The World, Miguel Ángel García, spokesman for the PP government in Madrid, said that today, in Spanish politics, “communication takes precedence over management.” Ximo Puig, former socialist president of the Valencian Community, said that, to win elections, the essential thing is “to establish your story in the collective imagination.” For his part, Iván Redondo, former director of the Sánchez president’s cabinet, wrote that in our politics “it is not easy to distinguish what is reality from what is fiction.” Gabriel Rufián said it best: “The truth matters little now.” In short: with politics reduced to a media representation and plagued by communication advisors, our politicians do not dedicate their best energies to trying to improve our lives, but to trying to deceive us. It is hard, but it is like that.
Of course, politics and lies have always gotten along very well. The reason is obvious: lying is the best known tool of domination, and the first thing that power – any power – seeks is to dominate, because that is the way to ensure its survival; just as money always wants more money, power always wants more power: this insatiable desire defines its nature. So it is not true that today there is more lying than ever (although it may sometimes seem that way); what is true is that, thanks to the Internet and social networks, lies have a greater capacity to spread than ever. Political power was the first to take advantage of this fact; the explosion of national populism in the wake of the 2008 crisis is its most visible result: the great milestones of that reactionary wave – from Trump to Brexit, passing through the Catalan crisis of 2017 – were preceded or accompanied by floods of lies. And the result of that result is the overwhelming discrediting of the truth: it still seems incredible to me that a genetically puritanical country like the United States, where Bill Clinton was on the verge of resigning because of a lie (not his sexual dalliances with an intern), can elect for a second time as president a disturbed person who, according to the count of The Washington Post, He told 30,573 lies in his first term. But there is more. Because it turns out that, in view of the success of populism and its pathological liars, traditional politicians have begun to lie with unprecedented shamelessness and cynicism, transforming the art of politics into the art of lying and decreeing that the best politician is the one who lies best or deceives best, or the one who best disguises the lie as truth. Having said that, let us admit that, faced with politics turned into a factory of lies, we citizens are defenseless from the start; not because we are more stupid than politicians, as most politicians believe, but because we are too busy getting ahead on a daily basis to be able to take the daily trouble of unmasking the lies of those who are professionally dedicated to creating them. In reality, faced with the politics of lies we only have one antidote. I am not referring to politicians of truth, because when the politics of lies triumph, all politicians are infected by it and all spend their time constructing their own lies to combat those of their adversary, as if lies could be defeated with lies. I am referring to independent journalism. The problem is that the expression independent journalism, which is strictly a pleonasm (there is no true journalism that is not independent), threatens to become an oxymoron: as it is increasingly difficult to earn a living through journalism, authentic journalism is increasingly difficult and journalism subordinated to power is increasingly common. But it is still possible; that is why – and for the sake of all of us – we better support it.
“The truth no longer matters,” says Rufián. But if the truth no longer matters, freedom no longer matters. And if freedom no longer matters, we are heading towards a dirty, dark and unhealthy place, where we do not want to live at all.
#truth #matters