The “Wedge” of Deception

“Beside Leopold, Nero, Caligula, Attilo, Torquemada, Genghis Khan and such killers of men are mere amateurs” wrote Mark Twain in the New York World, December 3, 1905. King Leopold II tops the list of mass murderers, responsible for the deaths of over ten million Congolese during his personal ownership of the territory from 1885 to 1908. In his unending quest for the area’s rubber, he mutilated, massacred, and enslaved with wanton abandon, laying waste to the native population and deceiving hundreds of millions across the world in the process. One of the greatest examples of “la politique” to date, he was the orchestrator of perhaps the most complex and widespread campaign of deceptive manipulation regarding his colony in Africa. Leopold masterminded deceit elaborately, wielding credibility by bribing experts, creating confusion through dozens of committees, and systemically controlling rhetoric through newspapers, dramatic explorations, and even the words of U.S. Presidents all while silencing investigators and opposition. The story of the Congo thus heralds many insights into the nature of human susceptibility to lies, misinformation, and delusion, ultimately asking what enabled Leopold to create and sustain such an extensive facade of morality. This paper shows that authorities like Leopold’s Congo Free State deceive by playing on the public’s desire for a stable reality and melding external reality to match these expectations.

In order to illustrate these points, this paper will examine the case study of King Leopold II’s Congo. To provide a brief background, King Leopold II was the king of Belgium during the late 19th century and the primary orchestrator of, first, his, and, second, Belgium's possession of the Congo, a region of Western Africa. In capturing the Congo, Leopold secured the media, bribing newspapers and his personal conquistador Henry Morton Stanley to publish dramatized accounts of his territory grabs, ultimately controlling the Congo rhetoric to echo tones of philanthropy. Furthermore, by assembling a committee of objective pre-eminent explorers and scientists, he leveraged the credibility behind the the International Africa Association’s name—which quickly dissolved to be just him—to lay legal claims to the Congo under the guise of creating anti-slave trade stations for purely scientific purposes. And finally, in each of these endeavors, he played the benevolent and magnanimous leader, sowing seeds of personal and moral integrity, while laying personal claim to a massive area of the African interior (Hochschild).

Emerging from the primary analysis of these events, as well as outside commentary, is an experimental framework that this paper will use to prove its argument, namely that the burden of deceit is actually shared between the authority and the public. Microeconomic theory proposes that the government, when levying a tax, inserts a wedge between the price a consumer pays and the price a supplier receives. In Economics, this wedge represents the tax revenue collected, in addition to some amount of deadweight loss. Applying this logic to the case of deception, authorities, when they lie, insert a wedge between the reality the public believes is true, and what Gayatri Spivak in her paper A Critique of Postcolonial Reason would define as the “native informant’s” reality. This theory, drawing on the laws of economics, proposes that, rather than one party, the authority, being responsible for the belief in a false reality, both parties share the burden. This will be shown through the discussion of psychology, political science, philosophy, Arendt’s analysis of the Vietnam War, and the applications of these ideas on the primary source.

Additionally, please note that any references to the public throughout this essay refers to the people of Western Europe and the United States.

Focusing first on the authority, the root of its ability to deceive is its appearance of trustworthiness. Leopold II shows that the authority may leverage three distinct facets of public appearance to augment its trustworthiness and create a cleansed public reality: 1) the media, 2) credible experts, and 3) personal portrayals and projections.

First, the media provides the most direct manipulation as the public regards it akin to fact, and, thus, the information conveyed in the media is accepted as the truth. In this sense, once control of the media is established, it is relatively easily maintained as evidence seen to contradict the popular sentiment of the media is seen to contradict the truth itself and be false. This was exemplified numerous times as photos and missionary reports from the Congo depicting children with severed limbs and captions condemning Leopold were labeled as dishonest misrepresentations. However, as is evident in hindsight, the public reality circulated through the media of harsh yet just action in the Congo to “tame the darkness” did not represent the truth of the native informant’s perspective (Hochschild).

In actuality, the media text is prone to the whims of the writer, and the writer is prone to the whims of the purse, and the public reality is, thus, quite malleable. This notion of flexibility is deepened by Arendt’s analysis of the Pentagon Papers: “Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible.” Most interestingly, this analysis almost directly aligns with a public relations text titled Crystallizing Public Opinion, which states that “he must analyze the public he is trying to reach” and, in doing so, craft a rhetoric which they desire to hear (Bernays 166). Presumably, without yet delving into why, the manipulation of public reality is predicated on this orchestrator whose “careful eye” and “analy[sis] of the public he is trying to reach” provides a happily consumed narrative. Leopold was such an orchestrator. He knew what the public wanted and preyed on their complacency to spoon-feed them false information.

While the media is the most direct path to, as stated above, “spoon-feed” the public information, it alone will not hold up to scrutiny. Informal investigations can easily reveal lies planted here; this, therefore, is the function of building credibility through expertise: to provide empirical grounds on which these lies may ostensibly dress themselves as facts. In the case of the Congo, this was accomplished through the establishment of the International Africa Association, a committee created by expert explorers, scientists, and geographers, under the strong encouragement of Leopold, to create humanitarian and anti-slave trade stations in the Africa interior. In this way, every sentence Leopold spoke, every initiative he began in the Congo, every tribe he discussed with was not merely amplified by his control of the media; its very essence was relabeled as neutral, objective, scientific, and altruistic. His deceit was so powerful that even the explorers and preeminent experts, when questioned about their positions on Leopold’s actions, defended him under the notion that he was operating true to the committee’s charter. In this way, the public reality was not just controlled by Leopold, but it was reinforced at every level by the agents who, knowing or unknowingly, were echoing his lies (Hochschild).

The final facet of Leopold’s control of public reality was his personal image, a rare mix of royalty, benevolence, and victim which enabled him to appear as a figure people both wanted to believe and couldn’t point to to blame. Leopold’s royal status immediately cast a veil over his intentions; someone who already possessed immense wealth and prestige seemed far more likely to be benevolent than malicious. This presumption was strengthened by the era’s widespread acceptance of the Great Man Theory—which framed history as the product of extraordinary leaders rather than collective forces—and, in retrospect, aligns with what we now understand as the Halo Effect. Because people attributed moral virtue to Leopold’s symbolic importance, his public persona generalized into something almost angelic. Crucially, this positive disposition persisted even as reports of Congo’s brutality surfaced, for the public struggled to reconcile the image of a benevolent monarch with the reality of exploitation—until evidence directly tied Leopold himself to the atrocities.

As opposed to the public reality that King Leopold shaped, the private reality refers to the individual’s independent pathway of analysis which is informed by these external events. This literal cognition draws upon the public’s morality, education, and belief system to craft an understanding of reality. These, however, are static and passive. In the case of the Congo, anti-slavery sentiment at the time clearly showed that the public was against any new colonies, let alone enslavement and massacres. Yet, when articles and testimonies from missionaries in the Congo slipped through into the public’s external reality, they were unaffected. Why? “Reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected for which we were unprepared” thus “lies are often much more plausible than, more appealing to reason, than reality” (Arendt) Though Arendt refers to reality in a different sense than here, the message is clear that a public still reeling from the global aftermath of colonialism and slavery would be significantly harmed by the prospect of its return. More than that, however, is the notion of preparation.

The public has prepared and is expecting the world to move towards a more morally-accepted condition, they are expecting that the trajectory away from this immorality will continue and is mathematically continuous, which is to say free of interruptions. What occurs then, with the lies of Congo agents, is a departure from the “native informants" reality and the continued, now positively angled, trajectory of the public’s reality. As the deceit continues, as the wedge is widened, as the deviation grows, the vertical difference between the public’s reality and the Congo men, women, and children becomes larger. And after not so long a time, the public’s ability to comprehend not just the difference but the informant reality altogether is greatly diminished. As the gap grows, the native informant reality becomes illegible, a distinct concept explored by Fricker as testimonial and hermeneutical marginalization. Testimonial marginalization refers to a silencing of native testimony by means of ignorance. In regards to the Congo, the public was blissfully ignorant to the true events of the region, but, most importantly, unable to understand the horrors because hermeneutical marginalization prevented natives from being able to convey the true gravity of these events in English. They lacked a conceptualization of the word “genocide” and, thus, an ability to truly see and comprehend what was going on around them. While this illegibility may seem like something the public wasn’t responsible for, this is not the case.

“Sanctioned ignorance” (Spivak) is an assumption of knowledge that demonstrates the culpability and role of the 19th century public in obfuscating the truth. In conjunction with the public’s desire for a continuity of their previous reality is their presumption of understanding the native African condition, and the impact of any Westerner on quality of life. Fed stories of bestial Africans in the interior through Henry Morton Stanley’s adventure drama’s, the public developed notions of an untamed race in a dark continent. In contrast with this shroud, they envisaged Leopold II as a leader ushering in light and civilization and, ultimately, uplifting the African race into a more evolved form. This could not have been farther from the truth. But the public didn’t make any attempts to search for truth, let alone acknowledge and consider factual reports from the Congo, placing their faith in the validity of their current reality. The trust the public issued to Leopold and the reality he crafted “went beyond the evidence and is directed toward something perceived as good.” Faith in Leopold’s mission bypassed even damning evidence until the critical mass of information altered the external reality altogether.

While the argument can be made that, before this critical accumulation of information, the public may have authentically searched for the truth, but been unable to find anomalies, this neglects the public’s complacency as Leopold continued to mislead them through various committee names. In fact, investigative journalists like E.D. Morel and Roger Casement analyzed the trail of conquest left by Leopold through legal documents referring to committees, eventually pinning the colony back to him. But the public made inferences which, as covered in Pragmatic inference : misunderstandings, accountability, deniability, overassumed the various committee names were one and the same. In reality, the International Association of Africa, The International Association of the Congo, The Committee for the Studies of the Upper Congo, and The Congo Free State, were each used meticulously for specific goals. One may have been to build international credibility with experts and the other to lay legal claim to the African territory. This inferential blunder stems from the recurring expectation that the Congo was being neutrally managed as Leopold had said it would be, and not contradicting the overarching anti-colonial sentiment of the period. As Elder states, however, “speakers can legitimately deny ‘knowing’ the content of implicatures that are additive, that is, where the implicature is communicated in addition to the explicit content.” So the public claims full responsibility in this regard for effectively enabling Leopold to continue leveraging these various committees to conquer, especially in light of the opposing information of E.D. Morel and Casement.

“For life is at the start chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear (Ortega).” There is an explanation provided, anchored in the essential drive of survival, for the ability of the authority to deceive. The public exists in an ever-changing reality where the shared notions of ideas and conceptualizations are largely static, as according to Nietzsche’s definition of “truth,” and, thus, unable to ebb and flow along with an ever-changing reality. In the face of this ongoing process of robbery, robbery of not just the meaningfulness of a private reality, given its disparity with the external, but by the means, the lexical metaphors, which we understand a public reality through, it is all but natural to desire a constant. In the case of King Leopold II, the public was robbed of the peace and ease of the conclusion to the seemingly unending battle against basic injustice. “All values, including truth, are subject to the paramount good of survival,” and, in this case, it was all the public could do to survive against a truth that threatened the nature of who they were growing to be, a truth that threatened to plunge them once more into the “chaos” (Martin). Continuity, but, moreover, progress, is what the human condition craves up until the very moment of death. We wish to continue friendships, continue accomplishment, and continue life. This is precisely why we can be deceived, for continuity is all but illusory in this world, and those who hold it, only do so through fiction. In fact, we crave these facades so much that just the notion of having continuity on good authority is all we need to believe the narrative. This is precisely why authority can so effectively deceive us. They prey on our most fundamental weakness and yet greatest strength, an inability to truly know anything more than what exists from one moment to another, from one nibble of truth to the next.