What Happened: The Culturing of Deception

Former Bush Administration Press Secretary Scott McClellan‘s new tell-all book, What Happened:Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, hasn’t even officially hit the bookshelves yet and there is already a ton of reviews and political analyses, thanks to advance copies provided to the well-connected. My local Borders is not among the elite, however, so I’m going to have to rely on others for the accuracy of the quotes provided herein.

The emerging consensus is that the book contains little, if any, in the way of new revelations. What’s being emphasized is that judgments about same are coming from a once loyal Bushie insider. McClellan was one of the Administration’ chief propaganda mouthpieces, a go-to guy responsible for bamboozling the public and what he describes as the “complicit enablers” of the Fourth Estate.

The latter is probably the real public policy meat of the book. And the one guaranteed to receive the least amount of analysis by that self-same media, if the controversy over the Pentagon’s reverse embed “message force multipliers” is any precedent. This makes it ripe for evisceration by the liberal blogosphere. (See, for instance, the perspectives of the relentless Glenzilla, and Editor and Publisher’s Glenn Mitchell .)

Meanwhile, the right wing blogosphere and their counterparts in the MSM will do what they do best–ignore the message and attack the messenger, especially since they haven’t found any actual factual content to take issue with.

Given that the MSM and the blogosphere are our virtual agora (where just about everything has been said but not everyone has had a chance to say it), I’ll direct my comments to a dimension of the story that I haven’t seen addressed yet– what Scottie’s little morality tale tells about the ingenious ability of the human mind to deceive itself and others. And how that, in turn, can be used to appraise Scottie’s own truthfulness.

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Deception, in both human and non-human primates, was selected early on by evolution for its obvious survival advantages. Tossing a rock into the brush to fool a rival sentinel, or distracting a fellow tribal member from a piece ripe fruit (or a ripe female) would help insure an individual’s genes would be propagated down the evolutionary time tunnel to thee and me.

Naturally, conspecifics developed such that the ability to detect deception in others was also selected, precipitating an evolutionary arms race of sorts. Effective deception detection, especially since the inception of human language, requires the ability to read a variety of neurolinguistc “tells.” These include facial expression, parlance, prosody, voice quality, eye movements, small movements of extremities, and emotional microexpressions. (Stevens, et al. (2007). Deception, Evolution , and the Brain. Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience. MIT Press, 18, 517-540)

What, then, is the adaptive response, the counter to the counter? How does the deceiver mask all these powerful yet subtle electro/chemical/somatic clues, working so insidiously behind conscious awareness to betray our true, i.e false, intentions?

In a word, self-deception. By convincing ourselves of our own lies, we can more effectively deceive others. Thus are deliberate falsehoods consigned to the unconscious, which requires fewer metabolic resources to maintain.

(Further refinements in the evolution of self-deception involves the use of the narrative and autobiographical parts of the brain to construct false but plausible versions of a given reality. Other psychological phenomena that testify to the power of human deception include confabulation, delusion misidentification syndrome, delusion redupliciation syndrome, false memories, and false recognition; ibid.)

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Fast forward to the Chimpocentric Universe, whose present coordinates in the time-space manifold are found at 1600 Pennslyvania Ave, Washington, D.C., USA, Urantia.

Imagine, if you will, a master manipulator— call him Darth Cheney— has taken control of the White House. In order to mask his true intentions, he removes himself from public scrutiny as much as possible, setting up a redundant, deception detection deflection machine composed of people convinced of their own integrity and idealistic correctness, all the better to propagate his desired falsehoods with a patina of complete sincerity.

The first brick in the firewall was, of course, our easily manipulatable, intellectually incurious president. A self-described CEO who doesn’t even bother to follow the news. An undoubting, unreflective, man born to privilege who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “accountability.” For instance, when he was asked by Timmeh on MTP whether in retrospect he saw Iraq as a war of choice or of necessity, W. [told Scottie] that he was “puzzled” by the question, and indeed he was. “Puzzled” was also word used initially by Administration hacks to describe their reaction to McClellan’s book.

Here was a president, the very personification of self-deception, who immediately surrounded himself with eager sycophants only willing to feed his malignant narcissism and delusions of messianic grandeur, carefully insulating him from anything that might cause him even a moment of cognitive dissonance (if for no other reason than to not be on the receiving end of one of his legendary outbursts of rage). A president who, according to McClellan, invaded Iraq because he saw an “opportunity to create a legacy of greatness.”

By his own account, McClellan has finally seen through the years of spin and propaganda— he can’t quite bring himself to call them “lies.” He decries the replacement of public policy with the Bushie mindset of the permanent political campaign, so relentlessly overseen by Karl Rove who lied to his face about his own treasonous role in the Plame-Wilson outing.

Scottie says he still admires Bush, but realizes now that Bush is deluded, clinging to the hope that he will somehow be vindicated by history for what the rest of us outside the “White House bubble” see as his monumental, strategic and operational blunders. Scottie’s disillusionment with the Great Man began when in 1999, at a hotel “somewhere in the Midwest,” Bush replied to rumors that he had once been a cocaine user by telling him:

“The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors. You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.’

Says McClellan:

“I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true. And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious— political convenience. . .”

I hate to tell you this, Scottie, but “political convenience” is only the tip of the cognitive iceberg. But do go on.

“[Bush] has a way of falling back on the hazy memory to protect himself from potential political embarrassment. In other words, being evasive is not the same as lying in Bush’s mind…It would not be the last time Bush mishandled potential controversy. But the cases to come would involve the public trust, and the failure to deal with them early, directly and head-on would lead to far greater suspicion and far more destructive partisan warfare.”

Perhaps ten years from now Bush won’t remember ordering the invasion and destruction of Iraq. Or that he wasn’t greeted as a liberator in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina stopped by for a visit. . .

The authors of The Urantia Book write:

Never hesitate to admit failure. Make no attempt to hide failure under deceptive smiles and beaming optimism. It sounds well always to claim success, but the end results are appalling. Such a technique leads directly to the creation of a world of unreality and to the inevitable crash of ultimate disillusionment.

Young Scottie seems to have gotten the message. But I sincerely doubt that old man Bush ever will. He has been culturing deception for far too long.