Forced and Unforced Lies in Political Discourse

Here's an interesting distinction that is not currently being made by those in the media who report and interpret the news. Broadly speaking, politicians generate two kinds of falsehood--forced and unforced. This distinction is borrowed from tennis, where there are forced and unforced errors. A forced error is due to the pressure an opponent exerts, while an unforced error is the player's own mistake. For example, when a player sends two straight serves into the net, committing a double fault, that is an unforced error, because the opponent was just standing there, waiting for the serve.

Now, in a political context, a forced lie would be the sort of lie that is committed to cover up an embarrassing truth. This is the old style form of lying. A politician lies to cover up something that the opposition will otherwise be able to pounce on and take advantage of. This sort of lie can also be called a defensive lie. Nixon lied about Watergate; Reagan and George H.W. Bush lied about the Iran-Contra affair, and so forth. 

In contrast, an unforced lie is a lie that no one is forcing the politician to make. A false attack on an opponent would be an unforced lie. The perpetrator is not trying to cover something up, but instead using a lie as a weapon. Propaganda often takes the form of unforced lies.

The forced/unforced terminology can be applied to Trump's troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Among allegations of a drinking problem, sexual impropriety, and financial misconduct, the most provocative was an email written by Hegseth's mother to her son while he was in the midst of a contentious divorce. In the email, she told him "I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man ..." That email can be viewed as an unforced truth. Hegseth's mother didn't need to forward the email to Hegseth's wife, who presumably shared it with others through whom it ultimately was made public. The mother's recent disavowal of the email (“It is not true. It has never been true.”) can be seen as a forced lie, that is, a predictable defensive attempt, given social and political pressures, to contradict the unforced truth she herself had revealed.

An internet search uncovered precious little, but there's an anonymous post on reddit that also divides lies up into forced and unforced. Here it's an atheist's interpretation of God as a Big Lie that spawns forced lies to deal with the inconsistencies between the Big Lie and reality.

"Even if you have reasonable critical faculties in other areas of life, people who have bought into the big lie construct very complex additional lies as part of the apologetics process. These additional lies are forced lies in the sense that they need to be constructed to paper over the (increasingly many) inconsistencies between the big lie and reality. This is somewhat understandable, if one is empathetic enough to accept the power of buying into an ideological big lie in the first place."

Later in the post, the author introduces the concept of a debt to the truth, the idea being that, just as governments can accumulate debt, people can accumulate a debt that expands with each new lie they tell.

"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid."

How satisfying it would be if people who accumulated a debt to the truth ultimately got their comeuppance. It is an appealing notion that speaks to faith in a moral universe, even among those who question the existence of God. What I see, however, as 2024 comes to a close, is a world or at least a nation where lies, now primarily of the unforced variety, are ascendant, tolerated, often rewarded.

Gabor Mate and a Nation Primed for Demagoguery

People who are anxious, fearful and aggrieved may be unable to recognize the flaws in those seeking power. They mistake desperate ambition for determination, see grandiosity as authority, paranoia as security, seductiveness as charm, dogmatism as decisiveness, selfishness as economic wisdom, manipulation as political savvy, lack of principles as flexibility. - Gabor Mate

After World War II, studies were made and books written to explore whether customs of child rearing could have made some nations more easily succumb to authoritarian rule. Now that our nation has elected yet again a leader who thrives on demagoguery, the question arises here at home.

When I told a friend about speculation that Donald Trump was profoundly affected by undiagnosed learning disabilities in his youth, she suggested checking out Gabor Mate. She mentioned a study of facial expressions at Trump rallies that documented a nonverbal communication between Trump and many of his followers. The premise: victims of childhood trauma reveal that trauma through subtle facial cues picked up on by others who have also experienced trauma.

I looked up Gabor Mate, and though the study didn't come up, a colleague of his, Stephen Porges, said something similar in a conversation between the two:

Instantaneously, our body responds to another who has suffered trauma, not just in seeing them, but in feeling their facial expression and feeling their voices. Our nervous system evolved to detect those features.

What I found in Mate's online writings is the connection he makes between the childhood trauma that Trump likely experienced, and the widespread trauma that causes many people to follow him. In a short essay from 2016, "Trump, Clinton, and Trauma," in which Mate explores the potential impact of childhood trauma on Trump, and also Hilary Clinton to a lesser extent, he explains the compensations that can play out in adulthood in those traumatized in childhood.

“What we perceive as the adult personality often reflects compensations a helpless child unwittingly adopted in order to survive. Such adaptations can become wired into the brain, persisting into adulthood. Underneath all psychiatric categories, Trump manifests childhood trauma…. Narcissistic obsession with the self then compensates for a lack of nurturing care. Grandiosity covers a deeply negative sense of self-worth. Bullying hides an unconscious conviction of weakness. Lying becomes a mode of survival in a harsh environment. Misogyny is a son’s outwardly projected revenge on a mother who was unable to protect him.”

While many of us see Trump as a dangerous demagogue, Mate explains how others can see him very differently:

We need not be perplexed that a Donald Trump can vie for the presidency of the most powerful nation on Earth. We live in a culture where many people are hurt and, like the leaders they idolize, insulated against reality. Trauma is so commonplace that its manifestations have become the norm.

People who are anxious, fearful and aggrieved may be unable to recognize the flaws in those seeking power. They mistake desperate ambition for determination, see grandiosity as authority, paranoia as security, seductiveness as charm, dogmatism as decisiveness, selfishness as economic wisdom, manipulation as political savvy, lack of principles as flexibility. Trauma-induced defenses such as venal dishonesty and aggressive self-promotion often lead to success.

The flaws of our leaders perfectly mirror the emotional underdevelopment of the society that elevates them to power.

Dramatically different interpretations of the Harris-Trump debate can be viewed through the prism of Mate's insights. 

Can a nation be artificially traumatized through propaganda?

Playing a big role in preparing a population for a demagogue, in my view, is the ever expanding reach of rightwing news media. The dystopian America that Trump depicts in his speeches, the fabrication of dark forces and enemies in our midst, of evil immigrants eating people's pets, would be traumatizing for anyone who believes it. Any real trauma people have experienced in their own lives is then augmented by the artificial, vicarious trauma of dark and looming threats conjured by Trump, then amplified by the very news media that should properly be exposing its fallacies. Pervasive propaganda, once it takes hold and becomes dominant, can, to paraphrase Mate, insulate people against reality and stir in them anxiety, fear, and grievance. False propaganda and real trauma, then, can be seen as working in tandem to prime a nation for demagoguery.