The act of
telling a lie is nothing new. In the English language the word “mendacity” has
hardly changed from its ecclesiastical Latin origin, mendacitas or 'lying'.
Individuals
lie. Often they are only fibs with harmless intent, like those that preserve
innocence about belief in the Easter Bunny.
Governments
lie too, sometimes with minor consequences — to escape political
accountability, to bolster popularity, or to avoid public retribution.
There are
different classes of mendacity. Society can tolerate political and bureaucratic
lies, up to a point. But when the consequences are too injurious — that is to
say, when the policy makers or their proxies are reckless enough to have
“gambled” (to use Stan Marshall’s word) and lost, or worse, possibly having
contrived the fundamentals going so far as to assure billions in profit— a
minimum expectation is that the culprits will be held to account.
