Maintain the lie...

If there was a prize for least relevant global organisation it would surely be awarded on a regular basis to the ridiculous IMF without whose presence the world would function perfectly fine. What is the purpose of this out of date, out of touch, out of ideas cabal of discredited gobshites? Especially when you read some of the shit they come out with: in cahoots with Project Fear they forecast the financial equivalent of cock cancer should the UK dare to even consider leaving the EU; their corrupt head honcho fraudulently escaped a jail sentence; and now they are trying their damnedest to wreck Spain.

Spain doesn’t need a lot of help in that regard, but having agreed to assist in facilitating the invasion of the machete-wielding, robbing, stabbing, raping army of illegal African immigrants, the IMF has taken it upon itself to collude in its cultural and economic suicide by trotting out a long discredited line of innumerate bullshit. Immigration is an unalloyed economic good, it insists and Spain needs another five million vibrant multiculturals just to pay its pensions.

A fundamental rule of propaganda is to stick with the lie. Repeat it, reinforce it, recruit talking heads to promote it, campaign to spread it, but never, ever admit it is a lie. Eventually, so the theory goes, people will accept without thinking that being white is racist, privilege must be atoned for, the Jews did it and ‘we need immigrants to pay the pensions of old, economically spent, racist white people’. After all, they stole your future, right kids?

It’s not difficult to pick apart this lie. For a start, it’s a fact that pensioners are putting off retirement and working longer simply because they can. Older workers often earn more and produce more than their young replacements because of a working lifetime of acquiring valuable knowledge and experience. As a result they pay more tax and without young families to raise, no longer consume resources such as schools and child-based medical facilities. Elders are generally well-behaved and rarely take up valuable police time and contrary to the picture of ageing, decrepit bed-blockers, many more older people are living active lifestyles that would shame some people half their age.

But far from retiring older workers, countries need them to work later into life. It is no longer viable for people to routinely retire in their sixties if they are then going to take a pension for a further thirty years. Working longer can keep people out of social care, medical care and state dependence, possibly for decades; post-retirement decline is a major contributor to poor elder lifestyles. But there is one huge elephant in the room; far from immigrants being needed to pay the pensions, it is the would-be pensioners who are needed to pay for the immigrants.

Maintain the lie. Spain has 3.5 million unemployed; import more unemployable. Maintain the lie. Low-paid workers are a drain on the economy; bring in more of them. Maintain the lie. Multiculturalism doesn’t work and immigrants don’t integrate; keep stuffing the ghettoes. Maintain the lie. Mass immigration increases crime, especially fraud and violent crime; keep ‘em coming. Maintain the lie. The IMF is part of the problem; the IMF is part of the solution. What do YOU believe?

Election themes and Internet Memes

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins posited the notion of memes – ideas that replicate. A meme is a device which passes on cultural ideas, themes, thoughts, even emotions, via some simple recognisable icons or symbols in much the same way as genes replicate biological characteristics. Memes can even mutate and in a sense evolve and as a result the feelings they provoke can be transmitted from one individual to others, appropriated and misappropriated, often in unintended ways. The Internet is a perfect breeding ground for memes, and the name has attached to those handy sound-bite pics where a quotation is coupled with a picture to convey a misleading message.

Isabel Hardman in The Spectator has written about one such series of images and how they can be manipulated to tell a story which – true or not – stirs up the outrage on those conveyor belts of hurt that are Twitter and Facebook. So powerful are the effects on those who willingly suspend normal critical faculties online that the picture-meme is already becoming a major tool in the battle for the general election in 2015. It’s an absolute gift for the activists who have nothing better to do than paint their opponents in the worst possible light.

Forget policy, forget facts; in politics perception is everything and perception can be manipulated much more easily with a simple lie than with a whole Hansard of verifiable truths. Thus with Cameron, Osborne, Balls and Miliband all but agreeing to choose the NHS as the battlefield for the next election, expect a spate of unchallenged, statistically-backed, facts-lite images that variously claim: That the Tories are selling the NHS to their rich friends, that Labour already did, that thousands of people will die due to Tory cruelty, that Andy Burnham’s death squads will roam again, that spending is being raised, that spending is being cut, that blah blah blah blah blah…

Abe tells it best

I don’t know about you, but I have yet to see a single verifiable account of a Tory actually prising a toddler’s mouth open to steal food. Or of a Labourite actually donning a Mao suit and calling for the execution of intellectuals. But then, like you, I rarely let the truth get in the way of a good story and I’m looking forward to seeing how far each side's supporters can go to create fantasy myths about impending death of the NHS . But be warned; I’ve checked and it appears the NHS is bigger by far than any government and has to date survived every imagined attempt to kill it off, while it has abetted the downfall of any who would use it as a political weapon.

So, bring it on, fellas, there is a willing army of dreamers ready and receptive to believe almost every last thing you want to tell them about how very few days the fragile behemoth will survive under one or other administration. Meanwhile the top ten boy’s name in Britain is no longer Oliver (Oliver, really?) as of the last count it is, as predicted, mohammed. Get meming!

The truth of the matter?

So the police lied about the actions of former government Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell in the grubby Plebgate affair? Was anybody surprised? No matter; their primary objective was achieved. Politicians lie as if it were part of their job description and when they are not outright, bare-faced lying they are evading, obfuscating and misleading as if their lives depended on it. And according to the well-worn phrase, even abstracts such as statistics lie almost by definition.

The will-it-never-go-away McCann disappearance drama has not been kept afloat for six years on a raft of incontrovertible truths; rather, press and social websites vie with each other to construct an ever more complex web of deception, conspiracy and downright evil. Somebody, somewhere knows something crucial and that somebody, or somebodies, is keeping schtum… and keeping a whole shameful industry of deception buoyant in these uncertain economic climes.

Green energy advocates routinely lie about the efficacy of wind turbines while – let’s call them ‘red energy’ cheerleaders – invert their hockey stick graphs and claim they alone know the truth. The lights will go out, the future is orange, the glass is half full, think yourself thin… Bang! And the dirt is gone! Advertisers, mediums, healers, preachers, shaman and charlatans lie to us every day of our lives and we even enshrine some of those lies in weighty tomes we then call holy, allowing people in court to swear on a pack of lies that they will behave for a short while in a matter that is contrary to the acts that landed them in trouble in the first place.

As Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessop put it, we can’t handle the truth. Acting itself is the very art of lying; of pretending to be somebody or something we’re not and we clap and cheer and hand out awards to its best practitioners even as parents – who lie to protect their children from the world – fight a losing battle of trying to teach their children (liars by instinct) that telling fibs is wrong.

Lying it seems to me is entirely natural  - many animal species lie by camouflage, by omission, by stealth in order to hunt, to hide, to protect their broods, to eat… to survive. Why should humans be any different? And it’s a long established falsehood that honesty is the best policy and crime never pays. Both are palpable lies against the evidence of the ages that unthinking honesty can land you in hot water, while a bit of crafty subterfuge can net you huge rewards.

Literature, history and folklore is littered with liars: Walter Mitty, Billy Liar, the boy who cried wolf, Charles Ponzi, Richard Nixon… Pinocchio. The list is long and these are just the acknowledged liars. Delve into society and you soon realise that lying, far from being aberrant behaviour is part of the fabric of human existence itself. You look well, congratulations, oh this old thing, I forgot, I don’t know, the cheque is in the post. We should be ashamed, but we’re not.

So next time you call your kid out on a falsehood, next time you pass judgement on a disgraced public figure, the next time you try to convince yourself that you are holier than your neighbour just remember, you’re probably only lying to yourself.