Truth, Lies, and Venezuela
CAMBRIDGE – Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has a problem with me again. The government-controlled national television station recently broadcast
an illegally taped private phone conversation in which I proposed a
study to explore how to rescue the Venezuelan economy by leveraging the
support of the international community. The government unsuccessfully
edited the recording to make what was said sound nefarious, lied about
the conversation’s meaning and about me, and plans to prosecute me.
This
got me thinking about the eternal problem of evil. Is it entirely
relative, or are there objective grounds to characterize a behavior or
act as evil? Do all confrontations occur between legitimate parties –
with, say, one person’s terrorist being another’s freedom fighter – or can we say that some fights really are between good and evil?
As
the son of Holocaust survivors, I have always had an intuitive aversion
to moral relativism. But what objective grounds are there to say that
the Nazis were evil? As Hannah Arendt famously pointed out,
people like Adolf Eichmann were plentiful and “neither perverted nor
sadistic”; rather, “they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly
normal.” A similar normality emerges from Thomas Harding’s portrait of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, a man proud of having excelled at his assigned task.
Moral
philosophy has taken two very different approaches to this question.
For some, the goal is to find universal principles from which to derive
moral judgments: Kant’s categorical imperative, Bentham’s utilitarian principle, and John Rawls’s veil of ignorance are some of the best-known examples.
For
others, the key is to understand why we have moral sentiments in the
first place. Why have our brains evolved to generate feelings of
empathy, disgust, indignation, solidarity, and pity? David Hume and Adam Smith pioneered this way of thinking, which eventually spawned the fields of evolutionary and moral psychology.
According
to this latter view, moral sentiments evolved to sustain human
cooperation. We are programmed by our genes to feel concern for babies
and empathy for people in pain. We seek others’ recognition and avoid
their rejection. We feel better about ourselves when we do good and
worse when we do bad. These are the underpinnings of our unconscious
moral sense.
As
a consequence, I doubt that any modern society has ever broadly
supported what they saw as evil. Events like the Holocaust or the
genocides in Ukraine (1932-1933), Cambodia (1975-1979), or Rwanda (1994)
have been based either on secrecy or on the dissemination of a
distorted worldview designed to make evil appear good.
Nazi propaganda blamed Jews for everything:
Germany’s defeat in World War I, universal moral values that prevented
the Aryan race from exerting its superiority, and both communism and capitalism. Ukrainians were accused of being Polish spies, kulaks, Trotskyites, and whatever else Stalin could invent.
The
spread of evil requires lies, because lies form the basis of the
worldview that makes evil seem good. But the dependence of big evil on
big lies gives us a chance to fight back.
The biologist Martin Nowak has argued
that the only way humans have been able to sustain cooperation is by
developing cheap ways to punish misbehavior. To discourage A from
hurting B, the reaction of C can be important, because if A knows that C
will punish him for what he does to B, he might think twice before
hurting B.
But
if punishment is risky or costly for C, she may not do much to A,
making A feel unconstrained. But if C can punish A in a cheap and even
enjoyable way, the threat to A may be more substantial.
According to this view, the need to solve this conundrum is the evolutionary basis of gossip and reputation.
Humans love to gossip, and gossip can harm our reputation, which in
turn affects how others treat us. So punishment through gossip is both
cheap and pleasant – and A’s fear of becoming the subject of gossip by C
may be enough to deter bad behavior toward B.
This
opens an important avenue for the control of evil. As US Senator and
Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “Everyone is entitled
to his own opinions, but not to his own facts.” So one way to contain
evil is by attacking the lies on which it is based and condemning those
who propound them.
In
the US, there is a natural tendency to punish political candidates when
they lie, but mostly about their personal peccadillos. It would be
great, for example, if Donald Trump’s calumnies about Mexicans made him
unelectable. If a country’s political culture is such that all agree on
condemning intentional lies and liars, especially when their goal is to
promote hatred, a country may avoid big evil.
But
this is not the case in Venezuela. Its government has run the country’s
economy and society into the ground, overseeing the world’s steepest
decline in output, highest inflation rate, and second highest murder
rate, not to mention shortages beyond compare. And now it is
systematically lying about the causes of the mess it created and
inventing scapegoats.
Maduro’s government blames its economic collapse on an “economic war” led by the US, the oligarchy, and international financial Zionism,
of which I am supposedly an agent. The problem is that the government
has paid almost no cost for its systematic lies, even when these involve
scapegoating poor Colombians for Venezuela’s shortages, and illegally expelling hundreds of them, and destroying their homes.
While Latin American former presidents have spoken out
against this outrage, important leaders such as President Dilma
Rousseff of Brazil and President Michelle Bachelet of Chile have
remained quiet. They should heed Albert Einstein’s warning: “The world
is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from
those who actually commit it.”
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