Poorly constructed lies

Our son recently sent me some thoughts about narcissists, particularly how they fail to read certain situations accurately because they cannot read other people accurately. It’s an interesting issue for many reasons.

For example, how did Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves allow themselves to be suckered into the recent winter fuel payment debacle? It’s worth using the word “suckered” because they seem to have been politically gullible, as if there was a covert intention to undermine their position and do it early.

With winter not so far away, Starmer and Reeves appear to have been lured onto the front pages of the freezing pensioner picture, as if someone knew they were gullible enough to buy it. As if that someone knew they wouldn’t see it as others were bound to see it. That’s the interesting possibility.

Our son used Chris Watts as a particularly extreme example to make the wider point more clearly - He (Watts) went out before the world media seeming pretty similar to a politician. Stupidly believed he could lie to the world and people weren’t going to see through his poorly constructed lies. He made all kinds of mistakes, referring to his family in the past tense and other awful errors.

Confidently at ease with public speaking, many members of our political class do appear to have this same inability to construct their lies convincingly, this same transparent focus on what they want, not how other people will read their words.

Narcissism is a spectrum of character traits and applying the concept to our political class has its limitations, but so often prominent public figures seem unable to understand the language of anyone they are not aligned with politically.

They don’t do genuine debate, being strangely intelligent and stupid at the same time. Curiously gullible too, much more gullible than they should be.