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We know that most politicians pursue hyperbole as an avocation, and some are better at this than others. It is generally agreed that President Donald Trump is a master of the art of persuasion by exaggeration. But he is not a lone practitioner. In a serious democracy, practitioners would receive a death sentence for misleading the public.
In every hyperbole, a staple of all comedy, a lie lies asleep
in bed with a truth. To lie is knowingly to say the thing that is not. The only lie consistently reproved by
our free – and increasingly thin and costly newspaper media – is hypocrisy. But
there is a saving grace to hypocrisy which, we are told, is “the compliment
vice pays to virtue.” To mislead is a vice, but the politician who gives
himself over to hypocrisy hangs onto the truth with one hand while bidding it
good-bye – hopefully, temporarily – with the other. The hypocrite is not
morally deracinated. He knows that the exception he relies upon really does
prove, rather than replace, the rule.
The father of lies is always on the hunt. Unlike the
hypocrite or the hyperbolist, pride, one of the seven deadly sins, will not
allow him to relax. And through a sense of unearthly pride, he believes his
lies. For this reason, the devil is a convincing and dangerous fellow, the sort
of person you would not allow your niece to date, even on a harmless trip to
Dunkin Donuts.
In one of his moral tales, Feodor Dostoyevsky had the devil
himself – without horns and cloven feet –make his appearance as a persuasive,
foppish dandy.
The principal character in Crime and Punishment, Rodion Raskolnikov, is a former law student,
inoffensive on the surface, who decides to murder an old woman who stores money
and valuable objects in her flat. By illicitly acquiring wealth in this manner,
he hopes to free himself from poverty and perform ennobling deeds. Having
swallowed the reductionist philosophy of his day – a heady mixture of social
anarchism and socialism, Raskolnikov manages to convince himself that even murder,
when it advances the goals of “extraordinary” men, is justifiable, provided its
end is justifiable. Murder, when it leads to social reformation, may be
redemptory.
Dostoyevsky died February 9, 1881, more than three decades
before the storming of the Winter Palace by Bolshevik agitators. The outpouring
of affection among Russians was spontaneous. It was, one writer confessed, “the
most extraordinary demonstration of public feeling ever witnessed in the Czar’s
dominions.” Sorrow was nationalized. “The loftiest and the lowliest alike
lamented; the cities were in tears. Forty-thousand men followed the coffin to
the grave. ‘When I heard of Dostoyevsky’s death,’ said Tolstoy, ‘I felt that I
had lost a kinsman, the closest and the dearest, and the one of whom I had most
need.’”
Even today, serious analysts regard Dostoyevsky’s novels as
a prelude and a fitting commentary on modern times, crowded with pious monks,
students with social anarchy eating their brains, religious simpletons, false moral
exemplars, and immoral, shameless, wealthy practical atheists. Here was the
funeral of a Russian prophet. Friedrich Nietzsche at one point vowed that
henceforth he would read only the works of writers whose lives were blighted by
fear and personal tragedy. He thought Dostoyevsky was a master psychologist.
And indeed the prophet had laid out vividly in his novels the temper of his
times -- and ours.
Suppose, just to suppose, Vladimir Putin had gone to school
with Dostoyevsky rather than Karl Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Russia today
would not be teetering on the edge of anarchic terrorism, and Ukraine would be
safe from the murderous designs of an ideologically possessed utopian practical
atheist every bit as morally deracinated as some of the characters featured in
Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed,
also titled The Devils.
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