Forgetting Is Human, Hypocrisy Is a Choice: On the Metaphysical Realm

It is said that the universe contains two kinds of courtrooms. The first is the courtroom of this world, where people arrive in their best suits, clutching thick files, armed with arguments as long as a railway line and with memories that turn according to the wind. There, facts are still open to debate. Documents are still open to interpretation. Sentences can still be twisted until their own authors are baffled that they ever uttered them. And mistakes can still be given other, more polite names: a breakdown in communication, developments on the ground or, for those in luck, a policy the public has yet to understand.

The second is a much quieter courtroom. There are no cameras. There are no microphones. There are no press conferences, no spokespeople, no legal team seated in a solemn row behind you. There is no chairman rapping the table to announce, “Time’s up.” There is no button marked “no comment”, and no corridor in which to dodge reporters while walking briskly. There are only questions. And answers.

In this world, people quarrel with one another about what actually happened. And the quarrel almost always opens with a set of phrases we know by heart, so often have they been used:

“I don’t remember.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“I never discussed that.”

“I never agreed to it.”

These sentences are scattered like dry leaves in the autumn of politics, piling up in the courtyard, swept away by the cleaners, then falling afresh the next morning. Oddly, the more important an event, the more people suddenly lose their memory of it. It is as though human memory came fitted with an automatic sensor: the higher the stakes, the faster it switches off.

Notice how selective this affliction is. No one forgets when receiving an appointment. No one forgets when receiving applause. No one forgets when the group photograph is posted in the press, complete with a smile arranged from the most flattering angle. No one forgets the name of the room in which they were sworn in, the colour of the tie they wore, or who shook their hand for longest. Yet when history presents its bill, memory so often takes extended leave without leaving a note. It may be the only kind of amnesia that never strikes at harvest time and always strikes at collection.

Perhaps this is because human beings are too accustomed to living among other human beings. We are used to judges who can be persuaded. Journalists who can be avoided. Opponents who can be rebutted. Supporters whose spirits can be stoked. A public whose opinion can be split, and then split again, until only fragments remain, busily blaming one another. Armed with all that, anyone feels reasonably safe. But there is one opponent that nobody, however strong their team, has ever managed to defeat: the trace.

The trace has a deeply undemocratic character. It does not care about office. It does not care about party. It does not care about rank, title, or how long the string of letters after a name may be. It does not care who is in power, and cares even less who is popular. A signature remains a signature. A document remains a document. An archive remains an archive. And the record has an extremely irritating habit, especially for those who were counting on it: it refuses to forget along with everyone else. It cannot be lobbied, cannot be taken to lunch, and is never swayed by the words “let’s look to the future.”

So one can imagine that, some day, there will be a very simple conversation. Not long. Not complicated. It will require no constitutional lawyer. It will require no political communications expert, still less a consultant paid handsomely to craft the phrase “I am not in a position to comment.” It will require no polling firm to establish which answer the public prefers. There will be just three questions:

“Were you present?”

“Did you know?”

“Did you agree?”

Three simple questions. So simple that it is hard to hide behind a speech. So simple that the intricacies of politics suddenly lose their use, and every trick that once seemed so potent, from the artful dodge to the deliberately elongated foreign term, becomes ornament nobody will buy. In that room there is no point answering, “In our considered view, the context needs to be examined first.” The context is already there. The context is what actually happened.

Perhaps that is the genius of the metaphysical question. It does not ask, “Who won?” It does not ask, “Who is the strongest?” It does not ask, “Who went viral?” It cares nothing for follower counts, nothing for approval ratings, nothing for whose hashtag lingered at the top of the trending list for three days. It asks only, “What actually happened?” And, unfortunately, such a question often knows the answer before it is posed. It asks not because it does not know, but to see whether the person questioned is willing to be honest.

In this world, a person can argue with a journalist. A person can argue with a judge. A person can argue with an academic, or with an entire panel discussion at once. A person can even argue with a document, and win, at least in the eyes of their supporters. But it is exceedingly hard to argue with a conscience. For a conscience keeps an archive that has never been printed. It is not stored on a server. It is not stored in a filing cabinet. It is not stored in a digital cloud that can be wiped with a single click by a suddenly diligent member of staff. It is stored in the one place that goes wherever its owner goes: into the meeting room, onto the podium, and under the duvet at three o’clock in the morning.

And so we begin to understand why there is a saying that is so brief and yet so fierce: “Forgetting is allowed; hypocrisy is not.” Forgetting is a defect of memory, an ailment that can befall anyone, from the car park attendant to the highest official. Hypocrisy is a conflict between what one knows and what one admits. Forgetting is a human weakness. Hypocrisy is a decision. Forgetting makes a person lose the way. Hypocrisy makes a person pretend never to have walked that road, though their shoes are still muddy and the driver of their official car still remembers the turning.

In truth, the world is fairly forgiving of the first. A person who says, “I’m so sorry, I really have forgotten,” with a face that truly looks forgetful, is usually still offered a cup of tea and a second chance. What cannot be forgiven is the forgetfulness that arrives right on cue, that always turns up before the final question, and that, curiously, attacks only the inconvenient parts. That is not an illness. That is a strategy.

And in the end, perhaps every political controversy will finish in the same way. The news will sink, buried under news that is newer and noisier. The hashtag will vanish, leaving a few loyal accounts to repeat it alone. The debate will go stale, and the pundits who were so certain yesterday will move on to the next topic with equal certainty. Supporters and opponents will go looking for a fresh issue, since outrage, like food, cannot be stored for long. But the archive will stay quietly on its shelf. Waiting. Patient. Not angry. Not shouting. Not campaigning. Not buying advertising, not hiring online mouthpieces, not holding a clarification briefing. Simply waiting for someone to come, and say, softly, without a script, without a spokesperson:

“Yes, that is indeed my signature.”

For history, at its core, is not a collection of events. Events have passed and cannot be summoned back. History is a collection of confessions: what people eventually dare to admit about those events, whether before one another or before themselves in a room with no cameras. And that is why, among all the questions that might be put to a human being, there is one that is hardest to answer with a smile. Not a policy question. Not a question about figures. Not even a question about who was to blame.

The most frightening question is not:

“What did you do?”

Rather, it is:

“Why did you pretend you hadn’t?”

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Forgetting Is Human, Hypocrisy Is a Choice: On Archives and Amnesia

In a land like Indonesia, blessed with meetings, minutes, signatures, rubber stamps and paper trails, there lives one rare species that has somehow survived every law of the archive: the person who suddenly forgets. Its natural habitat is the air-conditioned meeting room, complete with lukewarm tea, a plate of biscuits and a stack of papers awaiting initials. They attended the meeting. They listened to the discussion with every appearance of attention. They nodded gravely at precisely the right moments, and when matters grew serious, they sometimes even signed the conclusions with a firm and confident hand. Nobody suspected a thing. The species looked healthy, its memory sharp, its gaze reassuring, right up until the wind changed direction.

Once, people created archives to help memory. Papers were bound, files were folded, folders were arranged in order, all so that later generations would not have to guess what had actually happened. Now archives exist to rebut forgetting. In the digital age, people can still forget, but documents cannot. Archives cannot. Screenshots cannot. And most dangerous of all, a signature never suffers from amnesia. It does not age, it does not feel embarrassed, it has no career to protect, and it cannot be talked round over a quiet drink at the club.

A photograph is a witness that cannot be bribed. A document is a witness that cannot be bullied. An archive is a witness that cannot be persuaded to forget. These three witnesses work without pay, without perks and without any fear of being reshuffled. It is hardly surprising, then, that for some people the greatest enemy is not the opposition benches but the filing cabinet standing silently in the corner of the room, watching patiently and waiting its turn to be opened.

Yet years later, when the political wind has shifted, their memories undergo a curious natural phenomenon. Everything that was once clear slowly dissolves into fog. What was bright becomes hazy. What was discussed becomes "I don't believe that was discussed". What was approved becomes "I have no idea where that came from". What was signed becomes, somehow, "probably just a routine initial". Strangely, the fog only descends around certain chairs, and only in certain seasons, usually just as the seat begins to feel rather warm.

Perhaps medical science ought to study this ailment more seriously, because its symptoms never seem to afflict ordinary people. How odd. One never hears of a fishmonger forgetting that he sells fish. One never hears of a cabbie forgetting that he drives a taxi. One never hears of a shop assistant forgetting that she took the payment, let alone a car park attendant forgetting that he has just asked for two pounds. These people live in a world that is unforgiving to the forgetful: miscount once, and the customer demands the difference on the spot. Perhaps that is why their memories are so well trained. In politics, however, a person can forget something whose trail is still preserved in documents, recordings, news reports and even in his own handwriting, and still sleep soundly, with a full stomach and a perfectly knotted tie.

More interesting still, forgetting in politics is not a permanent condition. It is a seasonal one. It arrives on demand. When a decision proves rewarding, memory performs flawlessly: the date, the time, the name of the room and even the sandwiches are recalled in loving detail, together with the claim that the whole idea was theirs. When the decision becomes a burden, memory abruptly takes early retirement, with no ceremony, no leaving do and no forwarding address. So the real problem was never forgetting.

Human beings are, after all, forgetful creatures. There are two kinds of forgetting. The first sends a person hunting through the house for the keys. The second sends a person hunting through the files for his own signature. We forget where we put the keys. We forget a friend's birthday. We forget to buy milk on the way home and arrive with everything except the one thing we went out for. That is perfectly normal. That is only human. Nobody calls a press conference to explain the missing milk.

But there is a great difference between forgetting because of human limitation and forgetting because of situational convenience. The one is born of a frailty of memory. The other is born of an agility of interests. The first leaves its owner embarrassed and apologetic. The second leaves its owner calm and requesting more time. This is what makes the satire worth writing, for the saying in its title is not really about memory at all. It is about integrity. It is about the courage to admit that we were once in a particular room, that we heard a particular discussion, that we were part of a particular decision, even if today that decision is no longer comfortable to remember.

In an age when everyone is racing to build a personal brand, honesty may have become a luxury good, sold in limited quantities, and not everyone can afford it. It is easier to change the story than to admit involvement. It is cheaper to quibble over the past than to take responsibility for it. And it is safer to say, "I have no recollection," than to say, "Yes, I agreed to it." The first needs only four words and a little acting. The second needs every ounce of nerve saved up since the swearing-in.

And yet history has a nasty habit: it likes to keep records. Archives have an even nastier one: they cannot join in the forgetting. They do not care who is in power, they do not read the weather vane, and they are never invited to the reputation-management seminar. They simply sit in the folder, in the file share, in the cloud, waiting for someone to open the right page. And once that page is open, no fog is thick enough to cover it.

In the end, perhaps the matter is quite simple. The country is not short of clever people. The country is not short of legal experts. The country is not short of politicians, least of all those who give eloquent speeches about honesty. What is often in short supply is the person who, when confronted with an old document, still dares to say:

"Yes, that is indeed my signature." For forgetting can still be forgiven, but disowning one's own signature in front of an archive that never forgets is no longer amnesia. It is a confession, merely delivered in reverse. And ink, unlike memory, has never had a vested interest.

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