by R. Sathasivam
There is something almost comically modern about a powerful politician asking the public to trust him because he is showing them “the real me”. The President of Sri Lanka has not offered the public an audited balance sheet of trust, a catalogue of measurable achievements, or a rigorous accounting of promises fulfilled and promises abandoned. Instead, he has offered something much softer and much more difficult to falsify. Authenticity. “This is the real me,” he says in effect. Trust me because I am not manufacturing an image. But here the political joke begins. Who is going to authenticate the authentic self? The politician himself? The same tongue that tells the public that it is sincere? If the proof of sincerity is the speaker’s declaration of sincerity, politics has entered a wonderfully convenient philosophical circle. I say I am genuine, therefore I am genuine, and because I am genuine you should trust me. The argument requires remarkably little evidence and an extraordinary amount of faith.
The psychoanalytic language lurking behind this is striking. Donald Winnicott’s distinction between the “true self” and “false self” was developed to describe very different psychological phenomena, not presidential public relations, but the vocabulary is revealing. A false self is a constructed presentation that conceals or protects something deeper. The political version turns this into a seductive proposition. Do not judge the image, because the image is false. Wait for the real person to emerge. But there is a delicious problem here. A politician can manufacture an image of being the politician who does not manufacture images. “I am authentic” can become the most carefully manufactured image of all. Contemporary research on political communication has repeatedly shown how claims of authenticity can become powerful instruments of political self-presentation. Research on Donald Trump’s communication, for example, has examined how an apparently unfiltered style helped create an aura of authenticity even when assertions were not accompanied by evidentiary grounds. The lesson is not that Dissanayake is Trump, nor that their politics are equivalent. The lesson is simpler and more uncomfortable. Authenticity is itself a political technology.
There is an even more serious question. What happens when authenticity becomes a substitute for accountability? A government can be sincere and still be wrong. A politician can be personally convinced of his own honesty and still make disastrous decisions. A leader can genuinely believe an explanation and still be explaining away failure. Political psychology therefore gives us a more useful test than asking whether a politician “feels sincere”. We should examine attribution. When something succeeds, who receives credit? When something fails, who receives responsibility? Does the leader say “we got this wrong”, or does responsibility migrate towards predecessors, officials, institutions, conspirators, international circumstances, hostile interests and inherited problems? None of those explanations is automatically false. Governments really do inherit crises and encounter resistance. The intellectual test is whether responsibility is distributed consistently or whether success is personalised while failure is externalised.
This is where the broader information environment becomes dangerous. Propaganda does not have to consist entirely of fabricated statements. It can also consist of selective framing, repetition, emotional identification and the gradual replacement of evidence with narrative. Political psychology has shown that people are not simply passive victims of misinformation. Partisan identity, motivated reasoning and social transmission can determine which claims people accept and repeat. Research published in the American Political Science Review, for example, found strong evidence that partisan hostility can motivate the sharing of political falsehoods. Other research has found that conspiracy theories can erode trust in the wider informational environment. The consequence is not merely that citizens believe one false story. It is that they become increasingly unable to agree on what counts as evidence.
That is where the political comedy can become tragic. A society saturated with manufactured narratives eventually produces citizens who defend politicians not because they can demonstrate what happened, but because they have already decided what must have happened. Evidence becomes secondary. Suspicion becomes evidence. Association becomes proof. A Facebook post becomes a psychological confession. A rumour becomes an explanation. A political opponent becomes the presumed source of every failure. And social-media personalities can become prosecutors, judges and historians simultaneously, often without having established the elementary fact that their allegation is true.
The real test of the “real me” therefore cannot be another declaration of authenticity. It must be conduct under pressure. When the government fails, does the leader accept responsibility where responsibility belongs? When a promise cannot be fulfilled, is the failure acknowledged without theatrical escape? When evidence contradicts a preferred narrative, does the narrative change? When supporters circulate claims without evidence, are they corrected even when politically convenient? When criticism is justified, is it answered with evidence rather than psychological warfare?
The tongue can declare truth. It can also declare sincerity. Neither declaration constitutes proof. A government cannot indefinitely ask citizens to believe in the purity of its intentions while postponing the harder question of measurable performance. Eventually the “real me” must leave the Facebook post and enter the record. That record is where authenticity stops being a beautiful word and becomes a proposition that can actually be tested.
