It has achieved these things – the return of stability while treading more lightly on our lives – in eccentric ways. Here’s a few of them (by no means exhaustive): the introduction of randomised policing; the cancellation of elections; the effective dissolution of the national borders; the introduction of de facto infanticide; the bewildering surrender of overseas territories (with the twist that we seem to be both buyer and vendor at the same time); the immiserating amplification of cultish environmentalism; the fetishistic regulation of speech; and the criminalisation of silent prayer in public, although only in those places where it is most needed.
Its most recent contribution to the spiritual health of the nation? The proposal that childhood in all its innocence, enchantments and bafflements can be in some circumstances an opportunity for irreversible medical experimentation.
This is not really what most of us were expecting. For some, the thing to focus on here is the lying. To me that seems a bit odd. If a husband tells his wife that he missed dinner because of traffic, when in fact he was out murdering a sex worker, I’m not sure that the lie is the worst thing going on in that situation.
It is true that lying is morally wrong, more so with some lies than with others. St Augustine gives the unimprovable analysis in his sermon De Mendacio. A lie, to count as such, must be a deliberate attempt to mislead. And a lie can never be justified since God is truth, and it can never be morally right to say that the world is not as He has willed it to be, when you know that this is what you are doing.
You shouldn’t even lie to bring about something good, or to avoid something bad. Why? Because lying corrupts the soul, and the tedious formulations of moral relativism or utilitarianism are inapplicable to the deeper truths of spiritual physics.
But all that is by-the-by when talking about this Government, which isn’t so much composed of liars as bullshitters. And in some ways bullshitting is worse than lying....<<<Read More>>>...
