Politicians lie for the same reasons anyone lies, to gain advantage or to escape unpleasantness. But I think that many people are of the opinion that politicians lie more than your average person on the street. Is there any evidence for this or any reason why that might be true?
I don't know if anyone has done a study on how often politicians lie. Our own experience of politicians, especially during elections, is that lying is pretty pervasive. In the last presidential election it got so bad that some candidates would reverse themselves on the same day. Some continued to tell the same lie even after it was found to be factually untrue.
So politicians do lie and may lie much more frequently than the population at large. Why would that be?
Who Runs for Office?
If you look at the occupations of politicians prior to running for office, you will find that many are lawyers. Many were in business or in the financial world. Many of these were well versed in lying before they ever entered politics.
Why Do They Run For Office?
Another very important factor in the behavior of politicians is the question, "Why do people run for political office?" The idealistic answer is that they want to serve their country. They want to make America a better place, to make life better for all Americans. It's possible that some people actually enter politics with such ideals. It's even possible that a few are able to retain their ideals through years of public service.
I believe the primary reason that people run for public office is for power. What kind of people seek positions of power? While it might seem counterintuitive, I believe that the people who seek positions of power are generally people who do not feel powerful. Anyone who feels a sense of personal power does not need to seek power in any of its forms.
Powerless People in Public Office
The irony is that the people who run for office are the very ones who do not feel powerful. They think that they will feel powerful once they have gained office. Unfortunately, they find out that they were wrong. Even though they gain the power of office, they still don't feel powerful. Therefore, they must exercise their power in some way to make them feel powerful. Whatever that might be, it doesn't work either.
Did you ever wonder why, with 300 million people in this country, it seems so difficult to get amazing and wonderful people to run for high public office? Out of 300 million people shouldn't there be a handful among this multitude who could be the very best leader this or any other nation has ever had? Of course there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in this country who would make incredible presidents, congress-people, and Supreme Court judges.
Why don't they run? Because they don't feel any need for positions of power. The ones who do are those do not feel powerful. The very worst of these are actually sociopaths/psychopaths. As a group, sociopaths probably feel the least powerful of any. It is because of this that they are constantly trying to get into positions of power and use that power to give them a feeling of power.
Power, Sociopaths, & Lying
This also explains the greater volume of lying among politicians. Sociopaths are pathological liars. Being completely devoid of conscience, lying is the easiest thing in the world for them. One psychiatrist suggested that psychopaths make good CEOs. I don't know what he meant by "good." I do know that many CEOs and presidents of companies are nothing more than obscenely overpaid liars. They lie to their employees, they lie to the shareholders, and they lie to the public. If necessary, they will lie to their boards.
The current economic crisis is largely due to decisions made my sociopaths in business, finance, and government. Those who are "trying" to resolve this crisis are the same ones who were responsible for creating it. The psychopaths are minding the store. That store is your tax money.
The danger of the sociopath comes from the fact that no position of power ever works for very long to make the sociopath feel powerful. So they need to exercise their power, thinking that doing so will make them feel powerful. That also only works for a short time.
So the sociopath, whether in government or business (or in the military), must continually escalate their exercise of power. But it will never work. They will never feel powerful no matter how much external power they have or how much they exercise it. True power never comes from the outside. If you do not have inner power, then you do not have power.
The Solution
There is no easy solution to this problem. How can we encourage decent Americans to run for office? How can we stop psychopaths from running for or winning high office? The president of the United States has to take a physical every year. He or she never has to take any psychological exam. What is most important for a president of this country, with all of the power he has at his fingertips? Is the president's physical health most important or his mental health?
I read that there is a simple test for psychopathology. If there is, every candidate for high office in this land should be required to take it. We can no longer have sociopaths determining the course of this nation. We are on the verge of losing our democracy entirely if we have not lost it already. Any candidate for president should certainly be required to take a battery of psychological tests. That would eliminate most candidates.
Sociopaths/psychopaths make up a small percentage of our population, but like scum, they tend to rise to the top. We need to find our own sense of power and stop giving it away to crazy people.