But sure, folks who are in deepest in the biggest lies aren’t likely to hear this and think, “Yeah, I really need to stop slinging this shit around”. I doubt your average Tea Party zealot would be willing to own up in any respect to the many flavors of bullshit they’re peddling, or that any pundit of any kind on any side is gonna get the religion of honest curiosity any time soon.

I do wonder, though, if a harsh old curmudgeonly bastard of the right kind came along in politics and said, “You’re the problem, America: it’s time to grow up”, whether they might not get some traction, if it didn’t look like they were just peddling some ordinary policy menu to go along with that message.

Also, which particular “we” are you talking about? I sense pronoun trouble in this post.

I further suspect that the people most likely to take this to heart are among those least likely to need it.

While we don’t live in a post totalitarian dictatorship, there is a profound disconnect between lives actually lived by human beings and the lives of the elite (our role models) depicted in public. Tiger Woods, John Edwards, the marketing of Obama, they are all forms of self delusion along the lines of Havel’s green grocer. We continue to mouth slogans we don’t believe and vote for candidates that will not change anything, because we know that is just what has to be done or said to get along in this world.

We do not live under a dictatorship, as did most of Eastern Europe between 1945-1989. Most of us do not face police repression and arbitrary harassment by the state. But the cynicism and social disconnect is comparable. Tim is right in that we have to find some way to accommodate the rough edges of ourselves, otherwise we are destined to see the same sort of social fragmentation that irreparably harmed Eastern Europe under the communists, and that continues to this day.

Interesting putting those two examples together, but I can see how they can both be understood as commenting on the same phenomenon. In the first, you’re basically taking a populist/radical democrat line, critiquing the political operative’s (or Schumpeterian) line that there can be no real engagement with the voters, and that they must be addressed through carefully calibrated advertising campaigns alone. In the second, you’re defending the legitimacy of talking about the practical (Weberian) realities of governance, something which many of those aforementioned populists and radical democrats (the Nader voters, like me!) are admittedly often frustrated by and view suspiciously. Either way, you can see a refusal to engage actual, ordinary, empirical, lived experience and knowledge. Definitely something worth thinking about.

“My dear fellow citizens: For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

“Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers’ state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available.

“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

“We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all — though naturally to differing extents — responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.”

Sorry to quote at such great length but it always just really blows me away. Havel could say this because he wasn’t (at the time, anyway) a politician, and because he represented a real and genuine break in his country’s politics, but there’s something amazing about how he implicated the whole country in its malaise and laid out the fact that the whole country had to act to fix it, rather than just laying everything at the feet of the deposed dictators.

Something more toxic than a blithe shrugging at a politician lying is the belief that of course lying is necessary because Those Other People can’t handle the hard truths. Especially because a lot of folks who think that they are in on the group of people who can see things no one else can see are nowhere near as perceptive as they imagine themselves.