Mythmaking, dishonesty, and politicians (1)

Politicians do not hold the monopoly of mythmaking and dishonesty. Many of us have encountered throughout our lives some people—your colleagues at work, your peers, and some classmates from your high school and college days—who have spun colorful tall tales about themselves to influence other people or to become more popular. No less than Vice President Sara Duterte remarked in one of her past interviews that honesty is not important since politicians are liars anyway—and she was not joking when she said this. It is ironic that she said something incriminating like this. As a lawyer, she should know better.

But politicians can be our leaders. Ordinary people who spin beautiful yarns to make them earn more friends will soon be discovered for who they are and as such will have a negligible effect on a community or society. A few of these people have scammed people out of their hard-earned money via smooth-talking strategies to mulct such precious resources from their victims. This is true of those who have been conned to invest in pyramid or Ponzi-like scams. Several academicians have lost their retirement money when they invested in one of the most notorious schemes, called Kapa (Kabus Padatuon, Visayan for ”the poor should be made rich”), one of the biggest financial investment scams in contemporary Philippine history.

But because politicians become our leaders after they get elected, they have the responsibility to behave as role models for everyone in society, especially the youth, whose minds are still malleable enough to control through subtle and insidious means. Many politicians, local and international, have become adept at presenting alternative reality or alternative narratives, which can be made credible now via social media platforms that peddle lies and distortions of reality as if they are the “truth.” Many of those who succumbed to this “mythmaking” via social media are the youth.

In the past, dictators in various parts of the world have resorted to mythmaking and dishonest strategies to convince people that they are the ones “chosen” to lead their people. And often, these strategies have led to different forms of injustice and oppression of the population they ruled. Despotic leaders in different parts of the world know no satiation of their greed for power and wealth, and they are not content to control only their own people. They also needed to spread their dictatorial leadership to weaker countries they invaded and controlled.

Peter Baker, a Washington-based journalist and contributor to The New York Times, has covered the dynamics at the United States of America’s center of power, writing about the different ways US presidents have run this powerful country for the last six presidential terms. His latest book was on President Donald Trump’s first term as US president after Obama ended his second presidential term.

In The New York Times last Sunday, Feb. 23, Baker analyzed President Trump’s pronouncements and moves in his second month as a returning US president. Baker did not mince words about Trump’s “alternate reality” and many distorted remarks on specific incidents that could have been explained using science in his remarks—coming no less from the highest official of the most powerful country in the Western capitalist-driven world.

For instance, the latest tragedy involving two colliding airplanes has immediately gotten the ire of this newly reinstated president. Instead of comforting the people who had lost their loved ones in the incident, he went on to rant about the “diverse crew” of the plane that led to its tragic midair collision with another plane. He claimed that air safety was compromised because the airline had hired “diverse” individuals, i.e., Asians to ensure air safety. If this is not an example of a distorted view of reality, then I wonder what kind of science (or if there is) Trump bases his remarks. It is a new way of victim-blaming and veers away from real and scientific analysis of what has led to the cause of the air tragedy.

Perhaps the most idiotic among Trump’s current propensity for building up a set of lies as the “truth” is his order to dismantle the United States International Agency for International Development (USAID). Such pronouncements have created ripples of confusion and disappointment not only among the American staff of this long-standing development agency, but also among local staff in different countries where USAID had established offices. His (irrational) purpose? USAID has spent $50 billion to distribute condoms to the members of Hamas in Gaza so the agency needs to be permanently closed. And this claim has been proven to be untrue.