HA Journal text pages 12-10_Layout 1 12/11/12 1:44 PM Page 39
The unreality inherent in the experience of political action in general stamps it as inferior reality: inferior because it rests on remoteness from correctly perceived actuality. Political realism is underlain by fantasies and metaphors that political participants don’t recognize as such. Political action is not in the realm of real feelings that sponsor commensurate actions, feelings that emerge from the psyche immersed in reality close to hand. Yes, unreality descends on much of private life, too, but private life can sometimes recover from its pathologies. Political policies and strategies, especially when violence is involved, often set in motion lengthy chains of terribly real consequences— real in a way that the purposes behind them often aren’t—that cannot be repaired or undone.
In an activist or adventurist foreign policy, public officials have many reasons not to tell the truth, and there are many causes for not being able to tell the truth (including the tangled nature of the process of policy formation amid constantly changing circumstances, and the elusive nature of the psyches of the participants). Transparency is both undesirable and difficult for those who hold power. On the other hand, people have many reasons for not wanting the truth, and many causes for not being able to take it in, including the complex and confusing nature of the effects of public policy as well as the nature of the individual psyche. Where does that leave the observer or the conscientious and attentive citizen? If we are not at sea, then at least we are always puzzling over the course of political events. What happened? What is happening? What are the true costs in destruction and waste? What motives and purposes are in play? The given answers to any of these questions rarely provide the full and exact truth. Yet even with a sincere wish to speak the truth and a sincere wish to hear it, transparency would still be imperfect and intermittent; untruth would be prevalent. But the actual prevalence of untruth is owed largely to either the deliberate or the unconscious avoidance of transparency by officials and citizens alike. This avoidance seems to dominate foreign policy especially, and all the more when that policy is activist to the point of imperialism. In the face of these obstacles how can we ever know? How can we achieve more transparency for ourselves, even though others don’t share our concern? Can our powers of inference be strengthened? Suppose we mistrust philosophies of history, even the greatest one, which is Hegel’s. We want to know, if possible, how it really was, how it really is, not what it supposedly had to be apart from human intention. We want to cut through the lies, the distortions, the exaggerations, especially in foreign policy,
Democracy and Untruth
George Kateb
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