NO ONE likes to be lied to. Yet, people the world over lie to one another for various reasons. A survey that appeared in the book The Day America Told the Truth, by James Patterson and Peter Kim, revealed that 91 percent of Americans lie regularly.
The author’s state: “The majority of us find it hard to get through a week without lying. One in five can’t make it through a single day—and we’re talking about conscious, premeditated lies.”
Lying is a common practice in nearly all aspects of modern-day life. Political leaders lie to their people and to one another.
Time and again, they have appeared on television denying any connection with the scandalous schemes in which they actually were deeply involved.
Sissela Bok, in her book Lying—Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, observes: “In law and in journalism, in government and in the social sciences, deception is taken for granted when it is felt to be excusable by those who tell the lies and who tend also to make the rules.”
In the United Kingdom, Peter Oborne of the Daily Telegraph has told the Leveson inquiry that “Political Lying” should be made a criminal offence for both politicians and journalists reporting on Westminster.
It is with good reason, therefore, that the common people do not trust their political leaders.
In international relations such leaders find it difficult to trust one another.
The Greek philosopher Plato observed: “The rulers of the State . . . may be allowed to lie for the good of the State.”
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