大象传媒

Somewhat unexpectedly, I would say, cats have achieved a certain prominence in the US elections. After the Presidential debate on Tuesday night, Taylor Swift, a self-professed 'childless cat lady' endorsed Vice President Harris. Meanwhile in the debate itself, Donald Trump's assertion that Haitian migrants in a city in Ohio are 'eating the dogs . . . they're eating the cats', prompted some immediate fact checking - not in his favour - and the moderators had to come to the rescue of the truth on a few other occasions as the evening went on.

Taking a thirty year perspective on truth and politics can seem discouraging. Back in the 90s and noughties, spin seemed to be what politicians were chiefly suspected of - glossing a story in the most favourable way. We seem to have moved on from spin to outright - and at best careless - falsehoods. The truth seems more in jeopardy now than back then.

Of course, in a longer perspective, the truth has always been at risk. There are no cats in the Bible, but there are politicians, and perhaps the most consummate and admired is King David. Yet even David needed the help of a moderator to keep the story straight. The prophet Nathan confronts David with an artful tale about a rich man stealing a poor man's sheep - for the sake of getting David to admit his wrongdoing in taking Bathsheba from her husband Uriah, disposing of Uriah in battle the meanwhile.

Psalm 51 - the most penitential of the psalms - is traditionally headed 'a psalm of David when Nathan the prophet came to him after his adultery with Bathsheba'. And it imagines David now possessed of the most clear-sighted self-assessment: 'I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is always before me.' From self serving and delusional denial, to utter clarity - Nathan's fact checking is stunningly effective in eliciting a confession of error. We've yet to see that on camera.

But what this story says to me is just that the falsehoods that really bind us - the ones which are most difficult to overcome - are not the falsehoods which politicians and ordinary people carelessly or cynically tell to try to win a debate, smear a rival, or simply to get out of a hole. The more tricky and the more sticky lies are the ones we tell ourselves, so desperately wanting them to be true that we can fool even ourselves, not just others, into believing them. Around our lives, our motives, our characters and our intentions, we can tell the most self-serving stories - vice versa with the lives and motives of others. The hardest task is not to fact check other people, but to learn the disciplines of self-examination and confession which cause us to fact check ourselves.

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