Bonzer Words!: Half Truths
...Half-truths do not add up. Two half-truths don't make a whole truth. That is their great attraction for the dishonest. You cannot pin them down, as they are much more slippery than lies, damned lies and statistics...
Ken Silcock muses on statements which hide as much as they reveal.
Ken writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please do visit www.bonzer.org.au
We live our lives by 'relative-truths'—that is, things we perceive as true, relative to our level of understanding. A relative-truth cannot be proved beyond all doubt, but it takes only one exception to disprove it. We accepted the 'relative-truth' that 'all swans are white' until black swans were discovered.
Half-truths are different. 'A half-truth, like a half-brick, is better than a whole one. It carries further'. So said the humorist, Stephen Leacock, in the 1930s, at the head of one of his essays. The idea is endemic in our politics.
Half-truths do not add up. Two half-truths don't make a whole truth. That is their great attraction for the dishonest. You cannot pin them down, as they are much more slippery than lies, damned lies and statistics.
A half-truth seems to be a self-evident fact which the target audience will accept without question ('the bait'), to which layers of untruths are added, like the fish hook hidden in the worm, or the sugar coating on a bitter pill.
Use of half-truths goes back much further than 90 years. When most of the 'developed' nations of Europe adopted Christianity, at least on Sundays, they declared all other peoples to be 'heathen' tribes and therefore fair game who deserved to be robbed of their natural resources if they refused to be 'converted'.
In time, the European colonisers began to run out of new places to add to their empires, except by taking colonies from one another by force. To prevent this from developing into the all-out brutality sometimes seen in football finals, some of them agreed upon 'spheres of influence' without consulting those who lived in the respective 'spheres', or they signed agreements to come to one another's aid if attacked. But fight they did, and the half-truth that the loser must pay for the damage, even if it had no money to do so, led the loser's desperate people to follow a ruthless leader who took them into further damage to themselves and to others.
This year's worst half-truths were that a very powerful nation had a moral duty to depose one brutal dictator while ignoring others equally bad, and that it had the right to have, and use, weapons of mass murder against others.
One of our most prevalent half-truths is that the incumbent government manages, or mismanages, 'the economy', whereas it is more true to say that the economy manages our governments. It is not a valid argument to claim that government by a certain party would always cause interest rates to rise, as interest is set independently by the Reserve Bank.
But the most damaging half-truth in politics is that the thing of greatest importance is for some party to hold, or to gain, office no matter how misleading are the reasons given to voters. We deserve better.
That's behind us just in time for us to have many more half-truths dished out to us as tips on what horse will win the Melbourne Cup. Enthusiasts want to know which animals will come first, second, third and fifth, fourth place being, it seems, reserved for the animal declared to be 'the favourite'. Then, after the race, all the racing journos can be expected to write about why the winner, which they had almost ignored, had all the makings of a Cup winner.
Just a final thought comes to mind. Is the cause of taking from the poor to give to the rich better served by horse racing or by horse trading between our lobby groups (called Parties) in the market place we call our supposed House of Review? Enough said!
© Ken Sillcock
