Has the New Scientist inadvertently backed Bruce's defence of Alistair Carmichael?

The social harmony of the nation was disturbed last week. On Tuesday morning (26th May) Sir Malcolm Bruce, in a radio interview, claimed that all MPs lie and thus we shouldn't overreact to the fact that Alistair Carmichael also lies.

Image taken from here.

This admission, of course, didn't go down very well with anyone not a member of the Lib Dems. Instead of smoothing ruffled feathers, Bruce's disturbing revelation helped push forward a crowd-funded legal challenge against Carmichael's general election victory in Orkney & Shetland.

However, in horrific timing, the New Scientist has inadvertently waded into the middle of this argument with its 30th of May issue. The front page of the weekly science magazine voices Carmichael's secret hope: Getting Away With It.

The article isn't all about telling lies and includes a wider list of "guilty pleasures you can sometimes indulge - and the ones you can't." As well as the expected warning on drinking and smoking it also contains discussions on inactivity, late nights and various other "indulgences."

But lying is the first "guilty pleasure" tackled and the article says some interesting things:

Lying is a vital, smoothing part of the social fabric. We develop the skill young: most 3-year-olds will lie about not having peeked at a toy you told them not to look at. The average UK adult admits to lying 10 times a week – even if these tend to be little white lies, like inventing reasons for not answering a phone call.

From this we see that Alistair Carmichael lied just like a toddler, pretending he didn't peek at the Frenchgate memo when he had. But if this is innate human nature, are we hypocrites for wanting to punish him? The article concludes that:

We probably all lie much more than we realise. In one study, Feldman filmed students interacting with a stranger for 10 minutes. When he replayed the footage, the volunteers were surprised at how much they had lied - on average two or three times.

We all tell lies, even when we don't realise it. Does this mean the New Scientist backs Sir Malcolm Bruce's claims? Was it actually the revelation about how natural and widespread lying is that really disturbed the nation?

It may be true that we all tell 'little white lies' to make our social interactions easier but they are generally done for positive reasons. To avoid hurting someone's feelings or to steer an awkward confrontation towards a happier outcome, for example.

The concept of 'little white lies' is completely different from premeditated "complex deceptions" (as the New Scientist article calls them). Alistair Carmichael wasn't trying to smooth over an awkward social situation when he leaked a memo that smeared Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's First Minister, during the general election campaign. He was doing the opposite.

Carmichael leaked the memo in order to damage the SNP's chances in the general election and then lied about knowing who had leaked the memo when, in fact, he not only knew all about it but was the one who had authorised the leak in the first place.

So why do we believe people if so many of us tell 'little white lies' so often? The New Scientist article quotes Robert Feldman of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Liar: The truth about lying:

"Most of the time we assume that people are telling us the truth. It's really cognitively exhausting to always be assessing whether other people are telling the truth or not."

Perhaps this is something politicians have known for centuries. If every electorate finds it "cognitively exhausting" to assess who is telling the truth, it explains why politicians and the media spin things the way they do.

But the internet has taken the strain out of "cognitive exhaustion" and allowed an almost Borg-like collective cognition to emerge. This 'group think' has quickly punctured the lies and spin of many politicians and newspaper front pages.

So what of Sir Malcolm Bruce's claim from Tuesday morning:

“If you are suggesting every MP who has never quite told the truth or even told a brazen lie, including cabinet ministers, including prime ministers, we would clear out the House of Commons very fast, I would suggest.”

Little white lies are a natural part of human nature and there's nothing we can do and probably nothing we'd want to do about them.

But premeditated "brazen lies" and "complex deceptions" are in a different league altogether. These are 'big black lies' and should not be tolerated within our society. Instead of smoothing the social fabric, they actively disturb it.

And that's why Carmichael must go.

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