“Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It’s the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they’re going to do something incredibly ... stupid.”
Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean

RICKY Gervais made a movie in 2009 called The Invention of Lying, about a fictional world where everyone would tell the truth. Everyone is straightforward in their expressions of what they think and feel. In this world, Ricky Gervais stars as the first human being with the ability to lie. Hilarity ensues.

Picture with me for a minute the opposite situation. A country where no one can tell the truth. The few that continue to speak what they feel is true, do so disinterestedly and with care, so as not to tell the whole truth. In this world, there are journalists, politicians, generals and judges who engage in whataboutery whenever possible.

In journalism, the only difference between the normal analyst and the total analyst is that the normal analyst will only accept an action by the people they support as being less than proper if they are allowed to justify it in the same breath by telling you how the other side did the same thing earlier. Meanwhile, the total analyst will simply deny that the action in question was improper at all.

When the heavens fall, they bring down a fair few angels with them.

In politics, all that really differentiates the different parties is the time that has lapsed since they last took orders from the fictional establishment. Those who took orders this minute make up the front desks of the treasury, those who took them this morning are their allies, and those who took them last year are the revolutionaries in opposition.

Amongst generals, ferocious debate rages upon the definition of neutral. In that it means anything but neutral. Amongst the variously contentious meanings is a set of people who argue it means piddling along in third gear, whilst another camp feels it means to go in reverse.

After spending a decade recovering from image losses incurred due to misgovernance after direct interventions in the running of this imaginary country, it was decided by the generals there that, henceforth, interventions in government will never happen when they are happening. So that the flak of poor governance falls upon the uninformed and un-uniformed. To begin this project of having your government and eating it too, the first order of the day was to give the country a chief executive of their own choosing. That isn’t currently going according to plan.

Amongst the judges in this country, there exists a similar disinterest in the letter of the law or the constitution. Caught in bitter turf wars fought over fragile egos, a few disconnected old men teach us what the constitution must mean. This, coincidentally, aligns with what these old men want the constitution to mean.

Though heavens may fall, let justice be done. This legal maxim is used mainly to explain how justice must be done at any cost. In the imaginary country full of lying, the other end of this quote is also glaringly significant. That when justice isn’t being done there must be consequences, no matter how disastrous they may appear. A lack of action upon an order of a court, or any dithering middle road, would weaken the very perception of justice itself. To leave the rule of law optional, is to leave it altogether.

Another quirk of the heavens falling is that they bring down a fair few angels with them. Some of these angels may have spent the best part of their previous year trying to hold up the heavens with both hands in our fictional country of lies. When they crash down amongst mere mortals, wings aflutter and red in the face, it doesn’t bode too well for the institutional legitimacy of heaven or its pretend keepers.

But the side effect of the heavens falling is also the invention of truth: where some people discover the ability to tell the truth without conditioning it. When you see images of people running away with a general’s peacocks, you can now explain that the world is not binary. That you can understand why people are burning down houses after stealing food from their kitchens whilst at the same time calling these acts of vandalism deplorable. That there is no grand design behind it all; no battle of good and evil. That it is all a chaotic mess of miserable people, brought to their knees by successive compacts struck between the elite to guard each other’s interests. With only one constant: that in the compacts of power, one side always dresses the same when going to work. Except this time, the thief who took the peacocks brought along his friend, who made away with the freshly ironed uniform too.

The writer is a lawyer.
Twitter: @jaferii

Published in Dawn, May 13th, 2023