Yeah, Right

Lies Are Unacceptable in a Democracy

The story below is becoming the new normal.  A public figure conducts a crusade against this or that perceived public evil, all the while being guilty of the very same thing.  Here are the details, according to The Guardian:

France's former budget minister admits lying about secret offshore account

Jérôme Cahuzac plunges Hollande's government into crisis after shock confession to hiding €600,000 for more than 20 years

The French government is in crisis after François Hollande's former budget minister and tax tsar was charged with tax fraud following a shock confession that he had held a secret foreign bank account for 20 years and had repeatedly lied about it.

Jérôme Cahuzac's sudden admission that he hid €600,000 (£510,000) offshore for more than two decades is the biggest scandal to hit Hollande's presidency.

The public admission by the man who led France's fight against tax evasion that he secretly defrauded the taxman and was "caught in a spiral of lies" is a huge embarrassment for Hollande, who promised that his government would be beyond reproach after the corruption allegations that dogged previous French administrations.

One reaction to this kind of thing is jaded cynicism.
  The power and monied elites are corrupt and venal.  They all use their positions of influence to line their own pockets.  A politician and his money are never parted, and so forth. 

A worthy question is, How could someone be captured by such hypocritical deceit?  In a general sense the Bible gives an unequivocal answer.  Evil is intrinsic to the fallen human heart--a condition we all share from the fall of our head, Adam from the beginning.  The heart is indeed deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, as the prophet Jeremiah tells us. 

But more specifically, what rationalisations may Jerome Cahuzac have gone through to maintain such a deception, in the first place and to accept a public responsibility to fight tax evasion?  The cognitive dissonance would have been disabling, one would have thought.  Here are some thoughts as to how Chuzac may have rationalised his hypocrisy.

He may have told himself that his anti-tax avoidance zealotry was for the good of the nation as a whole and therefore it was a good and noble thing to militate against tax fraud.  "For France" (or Russia, or Germany, or England or New Zealand) is a much nobler and bigger cause than one's own personal peccadilloes.  In fact, the stronger the public travail, the more he may have felt atoned for his own sins and shortcomings.  He was "making up" for the wrong he had done. 

He may also have told himself that the law was for ordinary people, not those whose importance to the Republic placed them above the law.  Just as Stalin and his coterie lived in luxury whilst they systematically impoverished a nation, believing that they were a special class who deserved special consideration and treatment, so governing elites throughout the West increasingly consider themselves above the law.  The law which they personally subscribe to is the law of entitlement.  This "law" is the deeper law, the functioning constitution of the polity.  It turns out that Western democracies produce governing aristocratic elites just as powerfully entrenched and just as implacable in the defence of their own interests as a was the case in any feudal age.

The French prime minister attempted to regain some moral traction for the governing elites.

The prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said "lies are not acceptable in democracy" and rushed to appear on the prime-time news to limit the damage. 

Lies aren't acceptable in a democracy.  Really?  Yes, really! But the impression is increasingly given that lies are intrinsic to modern democracy.  When damage limitation is the objective, lies are inevitable.  Damage to whom, one asks?  To the vested interests of the elites, of course.

None of this should surprise us.  The West has systematically despised and rejected the Living God.  It has relentlessly told itself that life is a cosmic accident.  Morality is nothing more than preference and prejudice codified, without warrant.  The real question the French and the West generally have to face up to is, Why are lies not acceptable in a democracy?  What on earth could be wrong with lies?  After all, modern Western sophisticates believe that the only "ethic" is an instrumental drive for survival.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with lying: survival and success and power and control are the ultimate values and the ultimate goal of existence.  If lying helps, all power to you.

The only valid and consistent political arrangement under such an ethic is rule by a ruthless power-elite.  Increasingly, Western democracies are devolving into a new aristocratic feudalism.  The only ethic is the ethic of securing and maintaining power.  It is the key to survival.  It is an inevitable fruit of the established religion of our day.  All hail the new governing classes.  Machiavelli would have been proud.