Emily Richards

Short Response Paper #2

3/7/2018
Hannah Arendt’s work Lying in Politics is astounding and haunting in the way

in which her words accurately apply to the current political and cultural climate in

the United States. As she discusses how the release of the Pentagon Papers resulted

in public confirmation of the “the willful, deliberate disregard of all facts, historical,

geographical, for more than twenty-five years” (Arendt 32), I can’t help but relate

this contempt for what is true to President Trump’s renowned tendency to proclaim

negative press as “fake news”. The men responsible for the lies generated about the

Vietnam War were determined to display an image of America that was somehow

better, stronger, or more moralistic than before. Whether or not this image is

accurate, however, still does not seem to matter to the people in power.

Trump’s campaign promise to “Make America Great Again” in many ways

parallels the narrative that those involved in the Pentagon Papers tried so hard to

perpetuate within the public: the strength, influence, and intrinsic goodwill of the

United States in the Vietnam War. “The ultimate aim is neither power nor profit. Nor

was it even influence in the world in order to serve particular, tangible interests for

the sake of which prestige, an image of the “greatest power in the world,” was

needed and purposefully used. The goal was now the image itself” (Arendt 17). This

idea of America’s image is particularly intriguing to Arendt—how and why was it

that these government officials were willing to go so far to preserve an image that

may not have been endangered in the first place?

The idea of self-deception is what Arendt seems to think is the leading factor

behind the continual struggle to project feelings of patriotism and compliance upon
an angry public. Arendt’s description of self-deception bears similarities to Orwell’s

description of “doublethink” in 1984 and the “interconnectedness of deception and

self-deception…from this one may conclude that the more successful a liar he is, the

more people he has convinced, the more likely it is that he will end by believing his

own lies” (Arendt 34). In her explanation, she claims that those who practice the art

of distorting facts do so to implicitly bind themselves to a manufactured truth. “Self-

deception still presupposes a distinction between truth and falsehood, between fact

and fantasy, and therefore a conflict between the real world and the self-deceived

deceiver that disappears in an entirely de-factualized world” (Arendt 36). In other

words, those in charge of the information that is disseminated will make the

information true in their own minds, so as to “prove” it as fact to the nth degree.

How Orwellian is that?!

Arendt does acknowledge, however, that the self-deceiver can only reach a

limited amount of success. In the modern age of the free press, it is virtually

impossible for a democratic public to receive only non-factual information. Those

who wrote the Pentagon Papers—and some may also argue Donald Trump—

became out of touch with reality and fail to recognize that the public will not accept

what is obviously false. “The self deceived deceiver loses all contact with not only

his audience, but also the real world,” she writes. As a result, a democratic

government that doesn’t understand its people will inadvertently become victim to

the press, or the enormously important body “that can rightly be called the fourth

branch of government” (Arendt 45). There is hope in the press and in the people, as

long as the public is willing to question authority and seek out the truth.