Language can be a femme fatale in Public Relations. The beautiful story is often the most dishonest. In the real world, the truth can be ugly. Words can be molded to create stories we want to believe, and which resist removal by factchecking, despite our better judgment.
I think this has something to do with the reconstructive nature of memory and imagination. A good story tells you just enough for you to use the rest of what you know and what you recall to fill in the gaps. Dishonest communications often play on this, grafting tales that have the intuitive flavor of correctness to our pre-existing knowledge, creating a robust combination that resists easy, uninformed skepticism, and reinforces false beliefs for the uncritical.
This phenomena aids those who want power, but who also like to treat it like a zero-sum game, where their customers, their constituents, and their investors are on the losing end.
The trouble is, lies become their own traps. An Enron executive or Bush Administration official who tried to act on what they knew to be true would find that their actions drew attention to their lies. Liars detest exposure, so they often are forced to avoid doing what's right in order to preserve the illusion that what they're telling people is true.
Acting on truth requires a culture prepared to take such action. In absence of the will to act on truth, the cultures develop to do what people are told to do, and to cover for the things that the liars do not want to see the light of day. Almost by default, that becomes an avoidance of truly productive behavior.
The price of cultural dishonesty is dysfunction, and all the evils that come with it. Worse still, the price is also the fact that one day one must turn back towards the right and the true, or face disaster. Like it says in Star Wars: Once you succumb to the darkside, it forever dominates your destiny.
What do you folks want to dominate your destiny?
