Wittgenstein and the fatal propensity of politicians to lie

Lying is a terrible thing in any circumstances. When politicians and governments lie, it is a sin against society as a whole, against justice and civilisation. In Ray Monk’s admirable life of Wittgenstein, I learn that at the age of eight he asked himself the question: ‘Why should one tell the truth, if it’s to one’s advantage to tell a lie?’ This was the first time he posed a philosophical query. His answer was a kind of Kantian categorical imperative: ‘One must be truthful, and that is the end of the matter. The “Why?” is inappropriate and cannot be answered.’ He concluded, quite young, that one had an inviolable duty to be true to oneself, and part of this duty was to be truthful to others.

As for politicians, Wittgenstein’s youthful hero was the satirical truth-teller Karl Kraus, editor of Die Fackel (the torch), which he founded in 1899, when Witters was ten.