Chris
06-16-2016, 07:43 PM
Funny little story. The author relates how when he coached soccer he drove the team to a game two hours away. At intervals different boys would walk up to ask how long before they got to the game venue. He decided to say 20 minutes each time. Eventually some boys caught on and pointed out that's what he'd already said 20 minutes ago. He just said again but it's 20 minutes from now. And the boys accepted it. They always did.
How I Learned to Lie Like a Politician on a Two-Hour Bus Trip (https://fee.org/articles/how-i-learned-to-lie-like-a-politician-on-a-two-hour-bus-trip/)
It would not be remarkable to observe that politicians lie. Many people lie. What is remarkable is that politicians keep telling the same lies over and over again. Few people do this. (Donald Trump, who tells a new lie almost every time he opens his mouth, is not a counterexample to this observation because he is not really a politician.)
I am unable to recall a time when politicians were not promising to balance the budget by eliminating “fraud, waste, and abuse,” or to help the poor by increasing the budget of a federal program, or to create energy self-sufficiency, or to stem the tide of illegal immigration by controlling the border, or to reduce gun violence by adopting stronger gun control measures, or… you get the idea.
Now, politicians are generally not stupid people. If there is one thing they know well, it is how to get people to vote for them. So if they are constantly repeating assertions that consistently turn out to be false, it must be because doing so has this effect.
But why? Why does the public never seem to catch on? To answer this question, I want to describe something I call the “20 minutes game.”
...
How I Learned to Lie Like a Politician on a Two-Hour Bus Trip (https://fee.org/articles/how-i-learned-to-lie-like-a-politician-on-a-two-hour-bus-trip/)
It would not be remarkable to observe that politicians lie. Many people lie. What is remarkable is that politicians keep telling the same lies over and over again. Few people do this. (Donald Trump, who tells a new lie almost every time he opens his mouth, is not a counterexample to this observation because he is not really a politician.)
I am unable to recall a time when politicians were not promising to balance the budget by eliminating “fraud, waste, and abuse,” or to help the poor by increasing the budget of a federal program, or to create energy self-sufficiency, or to stem the tide of illegal immigration by controlling the border, or to reduce gun violence by adopting stronger gun control measures, or… you get the idea.
Now, politicians are generally not stupid people. If there is one thing they know well, it is how to get people to vote for them. So if they are constantly repeating assertions that consistently turn out to be false, it must be because doing so has this effect.
But why? Why does the public never seem to catch on? To answer this question, I want to describe something I call the “20 minutes game.”
...