Lying and reactive leadership
The state of things in our beloved country Kenya has left many to wonder if really we have a leadership concerned about the welfare of the people they serve and represent. Tragedies befalling us would have been avoided if only the leadership was sincere in their call to serve. The leadership approach exercised is one that seems to have failed and which is achieving so little.
It has been witnessed in the past and even now that our leaders have time and again perfected in lies when making their comments in regard to an incidence that has happened. This has made little to be achieved in terms of rebuilding the lives of the victims and their families. It has been false hope after another that we shall do this, implement that, pursue it among other comments. What amazes me is that their minds are so narrowed forgetting that they have been recorded and an archive of their comments is available only later to disown whatever they said.
Lying is when a person makes a statement that he knows or suspects to be false in the hope that others will think it is true. A lie is a positive action designed to deceive the target audience. Lying can involve making up facts that one knows to be false or denying facts that one knows to be true. But lying is not only about the truthfulness of particular facts. It can also involve the disingenuous arrangement of facts to tell a fictitious story.
At the most general level, one can think about lying from either an absolutist or a utilitarian perspective. Absolutists like Immanuel Kant and Augustine maintain that lying is always wrong and that it has hardly any positive effects. Lying, according to Kant, is "the greatest violation of man's duty to himself." Utilitarian’s, on the other hand, believe that lying sometimes makes sense, because it serves a useful social purpose; but other times it does not. The key is to determine when and why lying has positive utility.
Specifically, a person is lying when he uses facts—even true facts—to imply that something is true, when he knows that it is not true.
Neoconservative thinking about the broader public's inability to handle truth is captured in the following comment by Irving Kristol, one of the founding fathers of that movement: "There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy.
It has been witnessed in the past and even now that our leaders have time and again perfected in lies when making their comments in regard to an incidence that has happened. This has made little to be achieved in terms of rebuilding the lives of the victims and their families. It has been false hope after another that we shall do this, implement that, pursue it among other comments. What amazes me is that their minds are so narrowed forgetting that they have been recorded and an archive of their comments is available only later to disown whatever they said.
Lying is when a person makes a statement that he knows or suspects to be false in the hope that others will think it is true. A lie is a positive action designed to deceive the target audience. Lying can involve making up facts that one knows to be false or denying facts that one knows to be true. But lying is not only about the truthfulness of particular facts. It can also involve the disingenuous arrangement of facts to tell a fictitious story.
At the most general level, one can think about lying from either an absolutist or a utilitarian perspective. Absolutists like Immanuel Kant and Augustine maintain that lying is always wrong and that it has hardly any positive effects. Lying, according to Kant, is "the greatest violation of man's duty to himself." Utilitarian’s, on the other hand, believe that lying sometimes makes sense, because it serves a useful social purpose; but other times it does not. The key is to determine when and why lying has positive utility.
Specifically, a person is lying when he uses facts—even true facts—to imply that something is true, when he knows that it is not true.
Neoconservative thinking about the broader public's inability to handle truth is captured in the following comment by Irving Kristol, one of the founding fathers of that movement: "There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy.
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