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Political Philosophy

Trust, Truth & Political Conversations

Adrian Brockless wants a recognition of human value in political debate.

In this article I discuss the relationship between trust and truth, their value, and our inherent need for them. In particular, I want to explore how these concepts function in political conversations between individuals and in conversations between political parties and the electorate. I will argue that these ideas both constitute and express how we conceive of one another. This suggests that they’re deeply intertwined with our understanding of humanity. Politics is bound up with what we believe to be important for ourselves and others. It involves persuading others of particular views, and of the practical implications of those views. This is evident in the legacies of political thinkers,such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Surveying the landscape of politics offers the possibility of shedding light on how political arguments interact with the concept of humanity in ways that may not be immediately obvious.

Truth Values

The term ‘political spin’ and ‘fake news’ became prominent in recent years, the former during Tony Blair’s government and the latter during the rise of Donald Trump. But these practices are far from new; they have simply been rebranded into modern parlance. In Ancient Greece, for instance, the Sophists – who can be thought of as the equivalent of modern political spin doctors – were highly sought after for their rhetorical skills, which could sway public opinion. Gorgias, a renowned Sophist, claimed in Plato’s dialogue that bears his name, that sophistry allowed him to answer any question put to him (truthfully or not). Long before ‘fake news’ entered our lexicon, on July 17, 1900, both The Times and The Daily Mail published a false story about the slaughter of Europeans in the British embassy in Peking (the incident never occurred). Such examples illustrate how the media has long been willing to manipulate the truth to influence public opinion – it is frequently as political as the politics it reports. This has contributed to widespread cynicism towards politicians and the media, which is perhaps more entrenched now than it has been in living memory. Plato expressed a similar disillusionment with politics, most famously in his Republic, where he ranks democracy only just above tyranny as a form of government.

Rather than dwelling on falsehoods and misinformation, I want to emphasize why truth and trust are so vital in politics. Understanding this relationship helps explain why figures like Trump have been able to dominate the political landscape, why experts are often derided, and why ‘alternative facts’ are now taken seriously by so many.

First of all, a distinction needs to be made between truth-telling and truthfulness construed as sincerity. While this distinction is well-known in philosophy, it is often ignored in politics for reasons of political expediency. Telling the truth is generally conceived of as stating facts or true propositions. However, if truth were just about factual accuracy, it could be reduced to trivialities such as stating how many shirts one owns. Thus truth alone is not a fundamental human need; nevertheless, its instrumental benefits for education and scientific progress (among other things) make it valuable.

Viewing truth solely in instrumental (‘usefulness’) terms, however, can compromise sincerity, much like how charitable giving for reasons of personal satisfaction can undermine the idea of genuine (that is, selfless) charity. Having an inbuilt desire to know and tell the truth matters because this attitude underpins genuine love, grief, and other human experiences: authentic love and grief etc cannot be separated from truthfulness. For instance, near the end of a life, there is often a need for a truthful understanding of that life, whether or not this brings comfort. And if truth did not matter beyond its instrumental value, we would not worry whether someone’s love was real or counterfeit, beyond any material impact that it might have. Therefore if we see truth purely instrumentally certain aspects, fundamental to our idea of humanity, drop away. Our understandings of love, grief, and morality, would be impoverished if truth became valued only for its utility.

Being truthful at heart does not guarantee truth, of course – one can utter something inaccurate, while believing one is telling the truth – but it does ensure that our actions and beliefs are sincere, and sincerity is essential to correctly conceiving humanity. Truthfulness is tied to how we view others as moral beings. For love to be intelligible, it must make sense to say about the beloved that they can be wronged. This is part of recognising morality. And the type of love that can be wronged is absent in relationships with objects that cannot suffer wrong, such as carpets, or ice-cream. Moral descriptions apply fully only to human beings, not to inanimate objects, or even to animals, where moral ascriptions are always limited by the attenuated moral possibilities of animals. If we fail to see the difference between love for a pet and love for a person, then our concept of humanity has been corrupted by sentimentality. Even when people are beyond our capacity to love due to their moral failings, the fact that we can make such judgments indicates that we still recognize them as moral beings. We would not consider Hitler or Pol Pot as evil as we do, if we viewed them morally in the same way that we view dogs.

Olive Branch by Abigail Vettese
Image © Abigail Vettese 2025 Instagram: @theshapeofsanctum Website: abigailvetteseart.com

Talking Politics

Thus far I’ve tried to clarify the interdependence between truthfulness as a basic human need and how we conceive of one another as moral beings of a particular kind. Without a desire for truthfulness, independent of truth’s instrumental value, the idea of love would be impoverished, as would our moral answerability to one another. In other words, as I mentioned, sincerity and morality both constitute and express how we best conceive of ourselves and others. How we are morally answerable to one another provides the bedrock for many of our political conversations about what we believe matters. And so it is to political conversations that I now turn.

Human discourse takes many forms.We have banal conversations, trivial conversations, deep conversations, conversations in which we reminisce, conversations in which we mourn loved ones, conversations that express bitterness, conversations that express consensus, conversations based on disagreement, and so on. All kinds of conversation require at least two people. Moreover, the importance of any kind of conversation is that it is mainly through their speaking or writing that we can come to understand the reasons others give for their actions. So through such means we can come to understand authentic forms of love, grief, and other central aspects of human life besides. However, it’s also through the same means that we can come to understand others as deceitful, gullible, and so on.

Most of our conversations involve a certain level of trust, and we do not usually ask whether some kind of sophistry is being practiced on us. Excluding exceptional cases, our everyday conversations exemplify a tacit conviction that we are not being deceived. But where deception is attempted, and recognised, the target of the deception recognises themselves as being used merely as a means to the deceiver’s ends. They’re not being acknowledged as a moral being of the same kind (or on the same level) as the deceiver conceives of themselves – that is, as not being merely a means to someone else’s ends.

In the quest for votes, politicians often find irresistible a ‘persuade at all costs’ strategy that is frequently characterised by manipulation of statistics, rhetorical flourishes, and in some cases, false claims. Political rhetoric often does draw on actual facts for support; but its power lies in how politicians frame those facts. For example, a political party may claim that there is too much immigration, and you might treat this as a fact if you too believe immigration is a problem. If you do not see immigration as a (potential) problem, then the same statistic will not support the idea that there’s too much immigration. Political conversations between the electorate and politicians can be either sincere or insincere; but if they’re insincere, they cannot at the same time be truthful, even if they’re augmented with factual statistics in an attempt to persuade. When politicians engage in this kind of truth-manipulating practice for instrumental benefits – usually, gaining votes – they also show insufficient respect for the electorate as people having genuine perspectives on the world, and reduce them instead to mere objects of persuasion, that is, as mere means to an end. But to treat someone as merely an object to be persuaded is to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity – namely, their need for truth.

Politicians Are Human, Too

Today’s political landscapes in the West have become polarized in ways not seen in living memory. Many are incredulous at the amount of political influence wielded by figures like Donald Trump. “How can politics have come to this?”, is a question often asked in bewilderment. Others ask the same while talking about ‘draining the swamp’ and what they see as a movement towards oppression by those who identify as liberals. In both cases, an important aspect of acknowledging the humanity of one’s political opponents has been lost. This lack of acknowledgment can also be characterized as treating those political opponents as objects to be persuaded or defeated, rather than as equals having perspectives on the world. Their humanity is being recognized only superficially, so to speak.

Many believe that electing Trump was obviously wrong. Contrariwise, many Americans who felt abandoned by the political system – seeing nothing within it as capable of representing them – view Trump as a disruptive force, and so support him perhaps despite their discomfort with some of his rhetoric. Similar sentiments drove opposition to the UK’s membership of the European Union: some voted for Brexit to disrupt the status quo; others because they saw the EU as undemocratic or as eroding national sovereignty; and for many other reasons besides. But each side now tends to believe itself self-evidently right, often resorting to accusing the other side of stupidity, conspiracy, racism, fascism, oppression, and more. Genuine political conversation, in which participants may express themselves passionately but remain open to having their minds changed, has become rare. Winning the argument at all costs, regardless of the methods used – such as cancelling, no-platforming (sometimes on the gounds of providing ‘safe spaces’) or political spin – has become the priority. The focus is increasingly on preventing what you do not want to be said, rather than engaging with those who hold opposing views. But attempting to legislate out of existence those views with which one passionately disagrees will not stop people from holding them. By contrast, a person might argue the classical liberal view that, provided the legislation does not cause harm and increases happiness, then rights to act in ways with which they personally disagree should, nevertheless, be enshrined in law. One might think of gay marriage in this regard. Others may disagree. Silencing dissent through legislation, especially when backed up by accusations of bigotry or inferior intelligence, denies a conversational space. Once this happens, each side sees the other as merely an object to be defeated. This in turn legitimizes tactics like lying, spin, and no-platforming, and wipes out the opportunity to unite in our shared humanity through genuine conversation.

The recent polarization of political discourse is arguably due to a widespread failure to see our interlocutors as anything more than objects of persuasion, and this itself is partly because the recognition of our interlocutors as having specific perspectives on the world, with intrinsic value, has diminished. What remains is a kind of political aggression focused solely on victory, expressing a thin conception of humanity. Once this mode of political conversation becomes dominant, the art of authentic conversation and of treating one’s political opponents justly is lost, and, indeed, risks becoming unintelligible.

By and large, in the West, there no longer exist in politics the conversational spaces in which participants are treated as more than objects to be persuaded or beaten. Democracy has become about winning an argument at all costs. Righteous indignation is often the weapon of choice; and those who wield it may act unjustly towards those with whom they disagree. However, this mode of discourse has, to a significant extent, undermined a genuinely fair-minded democratic process. We now risk entering the polling booth insufficiently informed, perhaps resentful of how we have been treated, or self-righteous in our obvious rightness, voting just to disrupt the establishment or to give a particular candidate or party a ‘good kicking’.

This negligence in our democratic duty stems from a failure to seriously consider the consequences of our attitude and behaviour for the ballot box. It is easy to see how this lends credence to Plato’s claim that democracy is ‘rule by ignorance’. I would still argue that Plato is wrong, but that is a discussion for another time.

The Fragility of Democracy

In America, attempts to remove Trump from the ballot for the sake of democracy were an expression of the kind of self-righteousness I have in mind. In the UK, referring to Brexiteers as ‘unintelligent’ or Remainers as ‘the liberal elite’ exemplifies much the same attitude.

There is, however, an obvious and far more democratic way to counter bombastic outsiders in politics. They appeal to many of the politically and socially disenfranchised, who feel they have been ignored by successive administrations, irrespective of party ideology. Instead of habitually treating such voters with condescension, or insincerely listening to their concerns, then mouthing empty promises, politicians could take the disenfranchised seriously. They could demonstrate a genuine willingness to learn from them, while also inviting them to understand the reasons behind their own positions. Engaging in this type of dialogue acknowledges others as equals rather than mere objects of persuasion. Here, sincerity/truthfulness is fundamental, because it allows us to reconceive our political opponents as fully human. If you’re convinced that you’re already fully right and there’s nothing you can learn from them, then you’re treating your interlocutors unjustly, and yourself too. So if our political landscape is to be restored, and our moral landscape not to remain impoverished by an inadequate grasp of the humanity of our fellow citizens, then it’s vital that we work towards, and maintain, a genuine appreciation of the need for truthfulness.

This task is far from easy, and that’s no accident. Politicians know they can persuade the electorate by manipulating psychological and emotional vulnerabilities, often through emotive language. But indeed, authentic political dialogue only becomes possible when one sees the humanity of one’s interlocutor in ways not obscured by a desire to persuade at the expense of all else. It is for this reason that genuine democracy is, and has always been, so fragile. Such fragility saw an end to Socrates, who was executed by the Athenian state for asking too many questions – in much the same spirit as Trump supporters tend to view Democrats, liberals, and others as problems to be swept out of the way without engagement. By the same token, treating the politically disenfranchised with derision – as ignorant, stupid, and so on – because one is so utterly convinced of one’s own rightness that it is unthinkable that one might learn anything from them, is what justifies ‘no-platforming,’ ‘safe spaces,’ ‘cancelling,’ and so on. The justification seems perfectly reasonable. How could it not be? After all, one is so obviously right. And yet it’s a form of arrogance that treats one’s political opponents unjustly, and in fact inhumanely.

The fragility of democracy is all of a piece with the fragility of the concept of common humanity. This involves acknowledging vulnerability to the many ways in which one might seek false comfort in one’s political beliefs, for example; but also acknowledging an openness to the possibility that one’s life might be completely transformed by others. That this makes sense at all is due to a human being’s fundamental need for truth, which itself is rooted in the requirement for truth in relation to love.

It is not accidental that the terribleness of war has often been the vehicle that has salvaged a genuine and fragile democracy. This salvation is born from witnessing the plights of others with whom, in peacetime, one might have found it difficult to establish much common ground. There are some beautiful and tragic expressions of this in poetry written during the First World War, in which those from wholly different backgrounds came to see each other’s humanity in the most dreadful of circumstances – often through conversation.

Our political ideologies, and how we express them, are interdependent with how we conceive of each other – how we understand the nature of humanity and how such conceptions change with fluctuations in our political landscapes. By the same reasoning, the thinning of our understanding of what it means to be human is critically linked to increasing levels of antagonism – because of the ever-increasing tendency to treat one’s interlocutors as objects to be persuaded or beaten. Only if we relearn the art of genuine conversation will we see a decline in the world’s political ills.

Adrian Brockless has taught at Heythrop College, London and the University of Hertfordshire. He was Head of Philosophy at Sutton Grammar School and has also taught at Roedean School and Glyn School. Adrian now lives on the island of Yell in Shetland, from where he teaches philosophy online (among other things). adrianbrockless.com