We Have Met the Enemy ...

The world is full of Pharisees, phonies, mountebanks, and charlatans. We knew that, right? It's too obvious. A writerly friend loves to quote the adage “95% of everything is bunk.” This much is old to anyone who has read the New Testament.

But here’s a recent thought that's new at least to me: it’s not just the fault of the Pharisees. All of us are egging them on.

This revelation came to me while watching one of CNN’s house ads in a hotel room in Abu Dhabi. It was describing all the fascinating, controversial, interesting people you would encounter on one of their programs. “Mavericks!” the voice-over rang out breathlessly, as a photo of Al Gore appeared on the screen.

Al Gore!?!? A former Vice President of the US? When has he ever bucked a trend, as opposed to settling in for the ride? Whose opinions on anything have been more utterly predictable? Who on earth can be left to represent the political establishment?

It’s not as if the current US political street doesn't offer more obvious candidates to illustrate the term: Joe Liebermann, Arlen Specter, John McCain, Ralph Nader, Jesse Ventura, Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan … Assuming the people who run CNN have a minimal knowledge of their own business, how do they come up with such a non sequitor?

Because, is seems to me, most people prefer a lie to the truth. It is Pharisaism with which they feel most comfortable—just like the mob that cried out “Give us Barrabbus.” It was safer in their minds, and it is safer in ours, to free a known murderer than a genuinely honest man. Without this sentiment from the mob, the Pharisees wouldn't last a day.

Jesus was a maverick, if anyone was. The very concept of a maverick, someone who thinks for himself instead of following the established consensual line, is necessarily frightening to anyone invested in a lie. As just about all of us are, in one way or another: the lie that we deserve all the money we have, say, or that we are really much smarter than everyone else, or that we will never actually die, or ...

Any real maverick threatens this. It seems wisest, therefore, to co-opt the term; ideally, to co-opt it for its opposite. Lies persisted in breed bigger and more terrible lies, to protect themselves, hiding the truth everywhere behind double-switchbacks. If you cannot damn “mavericks” as such, damn them instead for being “conformists.”

I’ve seen this double-lie happen politically many times in my 56-odd (very odd) years. When some golf club a few years ago would not admit Tiger Woods to play in a tourney, another friend of mine, the oft-mentioned left-wing columnist, lamented this example of “systemic discrimination.”

It was, of course, the opposite of “systemic discrimination”: currently, the “system” discriminates aggressively in favour of African Americans. It was an incidence of personal prejudice, shared by a small group of individuals in defiance of the system. But “systemic discrimination” is a comfortable lie, because it absolves all of us, as individuals, of any present or past guilt. The devil made us do it, so to speak.

If, on the other hand, real “systemic discrimination” came up and bit us on the nose—why, that wouldn't be discrimination at all. For admitting it was would be bucking the system, questioning the shared consensus, and where would we be then? Obliged, sadly, to confront truths bare. Consider “feminism”--really the systemic discrimination against men. Compare, after all, the historic fate of women with that of American blacks—a group truly and obviously discriminated against. Blacks had to give up their seats on the bus; women were the first ones seated. Blacks were served last at restaurants; women always went first. Blacks were obliged to work at hard, manual labour until they dropped in the open field. Women were excused from any manual labour as soon as their family circumstances or society's circumstances permitted it. And so on and on: the term “discrimination” has been co-opted to describe the opposite, and to justify and add to the special privileges privileged members of society already have. The rich get richer, and the poor get further stigmatized, so we needn't feel guilty about it.

Skillful Pharisees are merely able to exploit this bottomless public appetite for being deceived. David Suzuki springs to mind: when environmentalism gained enough steam to look mainstream, he, already entirely an establishment figure, was able to rush to the front of that parade and claim leadership. People embraced him, over the real founders of the movement, because Suzuki, being establishment, could be trusted not to really rock the boat in the end. He could rail and shake his tiny fists; everyone knew he was fully invested in the status quo, and would never do anything that might actually rattle our morning teacups. So everyone now could pretend to be an “environmentalist,” blame the poor, outlaw the real environmentalists, do something symbolic, and carry on as before.

So again, when some politician suddenly changes his or her stripes, in blatant response to an opinion poll or the sentiment of some new electorate, we almost always happily go along with the sham. We act entirely as though we still consider their newfound political views principled, though all of us must know they are not; it's very much like the “willing suspension of disbelief” needed to appreciate a good novel. We all now accept that Mitt Romney is a conservative, for example. Far from being troubled, we feel we can now trust him, because he has made public his final Pharisaism. No danger here from Mormon principle: we can trust him, like the rest of us, to predictably behave in his own self-interest, instead of inconveniently seeking truth, justice, or any nonsense of that sort.

This craving for charlatans over the genuine article makes the world go round. We always want a charming rascal, not an honest man, in the van.

It is the source, I suppose, of such cryptic sayings as “The devil is the god of this world,” or “the devil is a gentleman.” The entire social sphere is corrupted, fallen, from this tendency, so much so that it constantly breeds wild conspiracy theories. Everybody knows there is a vast selfish conspiracy in control of the world, deliberately manipulating it; and they are right.

What they fail to realize is that we ourselves are the conspirators.