“You deserve an A”

Man loves himself inordinately. Since his determinate existence does not deserve the devotion lavished upon it, it is obviously necessary to practice some deception in order to justify such excessive devotion. While such deception is constantly directed against competing wills, seeking to secure their acceptance and validation of the self's too generous opinion of itself, its primary purpose is to deceive, not others, but the self. The self must at any rate deceive itself first. Its deception of others is partly an effort to convince itself against itself. The fact that this necessity exists is an important indication of the vestige of truth which abides with the self in all its confusion and which it must placate before it can act. The dishonesty of man is thus an interesting refutation of the doctrine of man's total depravity.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man,

"It's not a lie if you believe it."

— George Costanza

I'm fascinated by what Niebuhr describes here as "the deception of others [as] partly an effort to convince [the self] against itself." The deception of others and self-deception seem inextricable. In a footnote to the passage above, Niebuhr also quotes this, from Philip Leon, "The self-deceiver does not believe … what he says or he would not be a deceiver. He does believe what he says or he would not be deceived. He both believes and does not believe."

I was reminded of that discussion when reading this LA Times story about President Bush's traveling road show promoting (or self-promoting, or self-assuring) Social Security privatization.

The president has been traveling from city to city to conduct "town hall meetings" in an effort to persuade the public to support his plan to reform Social Security.

Except none of that is true. The town hall meetings are carefully screened events not open to the general public. These meetings have nothing to do with persuasion — no one who is not already persuaded is permitted to attend. And, of course, the president refuses to make public the details of any "plan," offering instead a series of vaguely hinted at goals — the purpose of which is not to reform Social Security, but to replace it with a system of government-run private accounts paid for with the payroll taxes currently used to fund Social Security.

These town hall meetings are like a kind of postmodern theater. The meetings are deliberately misleading. The president knows this, and we know this, and he knows that we know that he knows this. Duplicity becomes multiplicity and one gets the sense that the president has lost his way in a hall of mirrors.

Consider the following exchange:

"You got any thoughts about Social Security?" Bush asked 22-year-old Concordia University senior Christy Paavola, one of five younger workers who appeared on stage with him [Thursday] at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

"Yes," Paavola said. "I don't think it's going to be there when I retire, which is really scary."

Many young people, the president commented, think they are paying into a retirement system that will never pay them back. He asked Paavola: "Got anything else you want to say?"

"I really like the idea of personal savings accounts," Paavola said.

"You did a heck of a job," Bush told her. "You deserve an A."

This "conversation" was as awkwardly stilted and unspontaneous as the banter written for awards-show presenters. Nothing in this exchange is genuine. The president begins by asking the student if she has "any thoughts," knowing full well that her response has been screened, revised, coached and rehearsed ahead of time to be the same as that of every other "representative" young person sharing their "thoughts" at these meetings.

(George W. Bush, we learn, is not someone with whom you want to share a stage if you forget your lines. "Got anything else you want to say?" is not the most seamless piece of improvisation.)

The Times article recounts the efforts of local Republican groups to solicit people from particular demographics who would be willing to share these pre-approved "thoughts" at town hall meetings:

… a memo circulated this week among members of one group, Women Impacting Public Policy, illustrates the lengths to which the White House has gone to make sure the right points are made at the president's public appearances. … The memo went on to solicit several types of people "who he would like to visit with."

This student was recruited by local party operatives acting on specific instructions from the White House. She was then screened, approved and coached to parrot a particular set of talking points. And President Bush acknowledges this.

"You did a heck of a job," Bush told her. "You deserve an A."

But here's the really astonishing thing: Bush seems to perceive these ritualized meetings as genuine evidence of public support for his Social Security schemes. He creates and orchestrates a carefully scripted scenario, then seems to respond to this scenario as though it were a legitimate and spontaneous outpouring of public opinion. Deception has become self-deception — "he both believes and does not believe."

The president really seems to believe, as one of his aides famously put it to journalist Ron Suskind, that "when we act, we create our own reality." The fact that his claims about Social Security — it's imminent "bankruptcy," the spectre of massive government default on Treasury Bonds, the idea that we must cut benefits by 30 percent today to avoid 20-percent benefit cuts 40 years from now — don't add up is only a matter of concern for those in the "reality-based community."

Bush doesn't live there anymore. He has created his own reality. And he believes it.