“There is a truth that I have learnt”, said former socialist Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González (PSOE, 1982-1996) yesterday, accompanied by Zapatero (2004-2011) and Pedro Sánchez (2018-) at a PSOE presentation for a campaign they’re running called 40 years of democracy, 40 years of progress: “in democracy, truth is what people believe to be the truth […] in the end, that truth, which is what people believe, translates into voting decisions and those voting decisions bring us closer or take us further away from power”. He just explained the whole game.
Two plus two doesn’t necessarily adds up to four in politicians’ heads. It depends. If voters think it adds up to five or seven, and that belief and those votes bring me closer to power, I’ll say with a nice smile that two plus two adds up to two-hundred and thirty eight. Because beliefs can be manipulated. I myself can manipulate them for my tribe, with my speeches and tweets and the presentation of my programme and ideas in media outlets friendly to our party, repeated again and again on the news programmes I control.
If I reckon 2 + 2 = 238 could get me more votes from more stupid sheep voters who don’t know what I’m doing, I myself will announce next Sunday at the next rally that that is the right answer and then it will become party doctrine and they will all applaud enthusiastically. Good socialists will believe that to be the case, it will become part of our tribal identity, defended in the ideological trenches against heretical suggestions from other parties that the real answer is four, and we won’t care about all the “expert” reports.
By election day, you will be a fanatical extremist supporter of 238.
If there is no irrefutable truth about anything, if everything can be manipulated, who cares what my ministers and I say about whatever the issue happens to be? The point is that voters believe it. And if they are as easy as that to manipulate, as I have just explained to the country with my enormous experience in these matters, they are certainly never going to work out how we made €680 million disapear in Andalusia or the arcane difference between “excessive deficit procedure” debt and “current liabilities” in the boring Bank of Spain pdfs. Trillions of euros we spent over the decades when we were short of money. Not a problem. We’ll just make people believe it’s not real.
Politicians of all parties know this is true.