“Here there are subtler hypocrisies - and the subtlest lie of all is the full truth.”
- Michael Moorcock, The Bane of the Black Sword
There are few authors who can blend together politics, philosophy, and crooning demonic swords quite like Michael Moorcock. The opening quote is from the short story “To Rescue Tanelorn”, which appears in the Elric novel The Bane of the Black Sword. Moorcock’s albino sorceror would go on to inspire the famous Andrzej Sapkowski character who shares Elric’s nickname (the White Wolf). This particular tale, however, does not include Elric, and focusses instead upon the Warrior Priest Rakhir the Red Archer. Rakhir seeks to defend the fabled city of Tanelorn from a horde of rabble who are trying to destroy it, and in this quest he finds himself opposed by his former paramour, the sorceress Sorana, who speaks the line about the subtlest lie being the full truth.
The message of ‘the subtlest lie’ can be hard to recognise, yet it is easy to explain. When deceit is your purpose, as it is for every liar, the truth or falsehood of the individual statements is not necessarily what matters. It is perfectly possible to deceive with the truth, and as Sorana states, the subtlest deception of all can be to reveal the truth. Precisely because it is true, an artfully wielded truth has great power to deceive. This is something the intelligence communities have long since realised, perfecting a technique known as a ‘limited hangout’, where factual information is publicly released in order to distract attention from far more nefarious skulduggery that is kept secret.
Intelligence agencies are undeniably problematic. They are expected to lie, which makes it rather difficult to know how we are supposed to trust them. Before the twentieth century, the nature of the role of the spy was to feign allegiance to another faction in order to gather knowledge of their political and military movements. In the twentieth century, this role of ‘intelligence gathering’ transformed and intensified into seemingly endless layers of propaganda and deception. Supposedly, loyalty to one nation anchors the spy’s purposes... pragmatically, such accomplished liars give us few reasons to believe this is so. It seems rather more likely that they are motivated by mere self-interest, which probably explains the frequency at which spies are caught swapping jerseys.
Let’s suppose we accept the frankly outrageous premise that it’s a good idea to invest our tax money maintaining a class of pet villains who are encouraged to lie, authorised to kill, and accountable to almost no-one. We may as well ask: who else should we be accepting lies from...? I reject the assumption that marketers are necessarily liars, although certainly shampoo and skin care products are exceptionally deceptive when they fraudulently cloak themselves in the aura of scientific language. The boundary between spin and lying becomes exceedingly thin in commercial advertising. But then, this has also become true of politicians, civil servants, and public health officials - professions that ought to depend upon the public’s trust.
Somehow, against all sense, we have reached a point whereby political and scientific representatives no longer feel obligated to resign if they are caught lying or otherwise acting nefariously. No doubt certain self-absorbed political figures of each and every factional stripe have intensified this problem, but this is really no excuse. The root of the problem is that once your vote is committed to one party (or equivalently, is committed against ‘the other’ party), politicians and those who serve them have a free hand to do whatever they want. This would be bad enough in itself, but when the freedom to lie for political ends infests public bureaucracies that we are supposed to trust, we enter the world of abject disaster.
Tanelorn, the place Rhakir the Red Archer seeks to save from destruction in the story quoted above, is described within this tale as impossible to destroy. That’s because it is an ideal more than it is a place - the ideal of the free co-operation of a community of equals. Moorcock does not equate this with representative democracy... he sees it as more likely to be attained through a conscious interrelation of people with common ends. Every time the subtle liars seize more of our planet as their own, I find myself pining for Tanelorn, and seeking, like Rhakir, a desperate attempt to rescue it.