Theft at the Public Till
quantity of information from which to base an important decision adopts some form of heuristic a rule of thumb, a symbol for processing the infor- mation. For most of our politicians the convenient heuristic has become "what the media says goes." As Americans we believe in facts, but not in facticity. We do not know that facts are factitious, as their name suggests. It is in this belief in facts, in the total credibility of what is done or seen, in this pragmatic evidence of things and an accompanying contempt for what may be called appearances or the play of appearances - a face does not deceive, behavior does not deceive, a scientific process does not deceive, nothing deceives, nothing is ambivalent (and at bottom this is true: nothing deceives, there are no lies, there is only simulation, which is precisely the facticity of facts) that we remain a utopian society, with a religion of the fait accompli, with a belief in deductive reasoning, with a hope that things can be as plain and straightforward as they seem. All other societies contain within them some heresy or other, some dissidence, some suspicion of reality, the su- perstitious belief in a force of evil and the possible control of that force by magic, a belief in the power of appearances. Here, there is no dissidence, no suspicion. The emperor has no clothes; the facts are there before us. They may be "facts" solely created for our individual consumption, but no matter. Facts are facts. And we can believe everything we read or see on CNN. The proposition that there is no such thing as objective reality means that we who lack the tools, expertise and confidence to judge most infor- mation must delicately weigh results against motives before we believe any- thing. We are left adrift in doubt, losing our grip on one of our most potent tools. "As dupes we know what as liars we tend to blur," Sissela Bok wrote in her book, Lying. "That information can be more or less adequate; that even where no clear lines are drawn, rules and distinctions may, in fact, be made; and that truthfulness can be required even where full 'truth' is out of reach." We live in a rich symbolic world, partly cultural and partly of our own individual creation, and we thereby escape or expand the limits of our situ- ations, not simply through fantasies but in actions, with the meanings these have. We impute to actions and events utilities coordinate with what they
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