Politics is a best lie game. The reasons for this are many but stem mainly from the very business of leadership.
Leadership requires either you have a dictatorial relationship with those you lead or you rule through consensus. If dictatorial you don’t mind what you do or say, your aim is to maintain your leadership. If you did not mind whether or not you maintained your leadership you would not be a dictatorial leader.
If you rule through consensus then you will have competing opponents wanting your position, and they will stop at nothing to get it. Only in crises have there ever been unity Governments and they do not usually last that long. This level of infighting produces the need to lie because the truth would destabilise one’s position.
The lies though are not just given to one’s opponents but to everyone. Even those to whom you have no real reason to lie, the voters. The only time you have to lie to them is about your intentions at election times. The adversarial nature of politics in the Western world makes people lean more to lying than not. But as with all lying this means they lie to themselves as well, as seen in the greatest lie given by leaders today; that capitalism can continue unabated to swallow up the resources of the world in ever increasing quantities.
They are so terrified of losing power, they are allowing people to go headless into chaos.