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Why Ukraine is so obsessed with lie detector tests

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KIEV — If you believe that a country’s reality TV tells you something about the national character of the people, then consider Ukraine’s “Love for Survival,” a show that puts relationships of participating couples to the test with a polygraph exam focused on fidelity.

The popularity of “Love for Survival” and its most recognizable star — the lie detector — makes sense, says psychotherapist and vocal critic of the polygraph, Irina Muzychuk. She believes there’s a cultural reason for this: In “highly unstable societies like Ukraine,” lie detectors give “hope that the truth will be found.”

Since breaking from the Soviet Union in 1990, the country has suffered from three decades of corruption, oligarchy and conflict. A continuing proxy war with Russia is now the greatest source of national paranoia. Roughly 13,000 Ukrainians have died since fighting broke out in the Donbass region of the country in 2014. Meanwhile, Ukrainians continue to get bombarded by propaganda and disinformation.

It’s no wonder, then, that Ukrainians are susceptible to a technology that promises to deliver truth. And that collective longing has meant big business for the polygraph industry, despite the practice being widely discredited in many parts of the world.

The industry has enjoyed rapid growth over the last decade. The All-Ukrainian Polygraph association started with just 12 members in 2014, but it now has over 300, according to the association’s Executive Director Volodymr Vehmid. That popularity has extended into other parts of Ukrainian society.

Polygraph tests have become a common part of a job interview for bankers, tax inspectors, cleaners, military personnel and anti-corruption officials. And unlike much of Europe, Ukraine even allows polygraph evidence in court, the most notable example being the case against Nadiya Savchenko, a former member of Parliament who was arrested in 2018 for her alleged role in an attempted coup d’etat.

Even the Ukrainian government is catching on to the trend. Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor now wants to weaponize lie detection technology in the country’s war against Russia. During a television appearance in January, Colonel Gen. Anatolii Matios announced he was developing a “polygraph program.”

His proposal is still in development, but essentially he wants to use a computer-based lie detection test, which bears some similarities to an unconscious bias test, to quickly, and on a mass scale, weed out collaborators with Russian separatists.

This Orwellian-sounding tool, developed by the makers of Ukraine’s own “Rubicon” polygraph, has a claimed accuracy of around 70 percent.

When pushed on the alarming human rights questions his proposal raises, Matios seemed more interested in the expedience it promises: “People can’t wait for years while the state establishes whether they are guilty or not. Polygraphs will make it all easier, as well as screening tests and tools.”

VICE News visited Kiev to get a behind-the-scenes look at the popular reality-TV show, and the tool that underpins Ukraine’s new obsession.

This segment originally aired March 21, 2019, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

Saturday Night Live Wades Into the Chaos of the Mueller Report

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Last Saturday, the day after Robert Mueller released the report detailing his team’s findings about whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, Saturday Night Live was wrapping up a three-week-long hiatus. There was no show, then, to offer immediate reaction to the completion of the years-in-the-making assessment from the special counsel.

The delay that resulted could’ve been a liability for a show premised on quick reactions to a dizzying news cycle; in this case, however, the schedule-enforced slowness was an asset. Quinta Jurecic noted this week in The Atlantic that the Mueller report and its aftermath can evoke the feeling of living in a state of suspended animation, with nothing fully decided or confirmed, despite the report’s official conclusion. SNL used its return to lean into the chaos and explore the consequences of that feeling—and to find humor in the ways the report has lived in American politics in the week since it was delivered to Congress. The episode was an uneven effort, but at its best it led to nuanced treatments of the Mueller report as a cultural phenomenon—aided by the fantastic guest host, Sandra Oh.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O22U8JDxGuM]

The show’s cold open played pretty much as you’d expect: Robert De Niro reprised his role as a jaded and prosthetically square-jawed version of Robert Mueller; Alec Baldwin appeared once again as a simpering, pucker-mouthed Donald Trump; Aidy Bryant played William Barr, the newly appointed United States attorney general who, in his capacity as the nation’s top lawyer, last Sunday provided a four-page-long summary of Mueller’s 300-plus-page report. (That her characterization in this case was notably bland offered its own commentary on Barr as a public official.) SNL, making use of split screens, took aim at the absurdities of the report-condensation process itself—a game of telephone, the show suggested, only with the muddled messaging coming not as the result of accidental mishearings but rather of political strategy.

“I am submitting these 380 pages,” De Niro’s Mueller put it.

“I am writing almost four pages,” Barr translated.

“I am reading zero pages,” Trump declared, “but Sean Hannity has read it and he was so excited that he texted me an eggplant.”

The sketch went on like that: call-and-response-and-response, the (still unknown) substance of the original Mueller report getting lost in the fog of determined presidential triumphalism.

“On the charge of obstruction of justice,” Mueller said gravely, “we have not drawn a definitive conclusion.”

Barr: “But I have, and my conclusion is: Trump’s clean as a whistle!”

“Free at last, free at last!” the president echoed.

Mueller: “As for conspiracy or collusion, there were several questionable incidences involving the president’s team, but we cannot prove a criminal connection.”

“No collusion, no diggity, no doubt,” Barr summarized.

Trump, at this, blew an air horn in celebration.

Kate McKinnon’s ghoulishly rodentine rendition of Rudy Giuliani made an appearance in the sketch, too, the Trump lawyer unable to resist taking a gleeful victory lap. “I will take the firstborn child of every Democrat, unless they can guess that my name is Rumpelstiltskin,” this version of Giuliani said.

McKinnon’s arrival was a relief. The scene, like many of the show’s recent cold opens, dragged on far too long. But it did manage to capture a truth that was not clear immediately after Mueller delivered his report: The document’s findings, overall, are not yet known with any precision, and they might not be anytime soon. And yet they will be weaponized. “I’ve included hundreds of pages of evidence,” De Niro’s Mueller said sternly. “Most of it provided on live television by the president himself,” Bryant’s Barr added. Which the celebrity president, using the language of an awards show, summed up like so: “Russia, if you’re watching, go to bed. Daddy won!”

The idea was further explored in a later sketch, this one detailing Russia’s own reaction to the Mueller findings. Beck Bennett reprised his role as Vladimir Putin, surrounded by deputies in an elaborately decorated conference room, as the underlings tried to process the idea that per the Mueller report, the American president had not colluded with the Kremlin.

“This—this cannot be, can it, sir? American president is work for Russia. Right?” one staffer asked, confused and crestfallen.

Another: “We look forward to report so much! You know, it was going to be Mueller Time, baby! All the world would see the power of Russia, and we were so excited!”

Another: “I was planning a party.”  

[Read: Americans can’t stop mythologizing Robert Mueller]

The joke ostensibly poked fun at Russia, but it came in fact at the expense of those who had spent the past many months convinced that Mueller’s report would find the Trump campaign guilty of collusion. Soon, Kim Jong Un (played by Bowen Yang, a staff writer on the show) appeared with an interpreter (Oh). The North Korean leader was questioning Putin’s influence over the American presidency, and Putin was attempting to assure him that he still had a troll army and so many more means of meddling—and, Putin noted, “We don’t know everything in the report yet. Plus, Mueller handed off a lot of stuff to the Southern District of New York. That’s where the real action is.”

To which Kim’s interpreter replied, “Glorious Leader says you sound like Rachel Maddow right now.”

There was more in this vein, as SNL reckoned with a report that is completed but not conclusive—and as the show explored what it feels like to live within the politics of suspended animation. The “Weekend Update” hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost compared the report to the Jussie Smollett case and to Duke’s recent men’s-basketball win. (“All the people I was told were bad guys all got away with it!” Jost said.) Cecily Strong reprised her impersonation of Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News host who is just returning to the network after a weeks-long reported suspension for Islamophobic comments she made about Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. “After this Mueller report, we in Trump Nation can do anything we want!” Strong’s version of the TV personality said joyfully.

The scene was a noted contrast to Jost’s introduction to this particular “Weekend Update”—and to the tone of an episode that mourned as it mocked. (All the people I was told were bad guys all got away with it.) As Jost put it ruefully, acknowledging all that had happened—and all that had not—in the days since Mueller delivered his report to Congress: “Well, this week made me feel insane.”

I Used to Write Novels. Then Trump Rendered Fiction Redundant.

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I’m often asked why I ditched writing novels for political commentary. Usually I respond: “Because Donald Trump rendered fiction redundant.” That may sound glib, but it gets at something profound.

The aim of the novelist is to enlist others in his fantasies, immersing them in an alternative reality so emotionally compelling that they willingly suspend disbelief. Trump has dangerously conflated this sort of storytelling with real-life presidential leadership, casting himself in the role of the archetypal savior-hero, battling the forces of evil. He’s our first novelist in chief.

I’ve written several psychological novels. Unavoidably, I view Trump in psychological terms, as a character whose inner life dictates his actions, often for the worse. Others have been more circumspect. Many psychiatrists cite their profession’s “Goldwater Rule,” which bars them from diagnosing individuals they haven’t examined in person—including presidential candidates. Most journalists argue that objectivity requires them to report statements and behaviors as they occur, leaving readers to reach their own conclusions about the source of Trump’s solipsism.

No doubt their professional scruples are, in themselves, admirable. But by putting Trump in the usual analytic boxes—populist, businessman, exemplar of reality TV—most commentators have missed what is truly distinctive and dangerous about Trump. In fiction and in life, there is no question one person can ask about others more important than why they behave as they do, and how this prefigures how they’ll behave in the future. The media’s acquiescence in Trump’s fantasies—parsing his positions, pontificating about his strategy, and marveling at his intuition—has turned Trump’s inability to distinguish fiction from reality into a form of political genius.

Watching this process as a fiction writer made me sort of, well, crazy. To write a novel, I would sit down at my desk and enter an imaginary world in which, out of predisposition and necessity, I wholly believed. The characters I wrote about became, in that moment, as real to me as family. I’ve spent a bit of time pondering whether the drive to create fiction emanates from psychic scars: the need to distance oneself from reality, or to assert a control unavailable in real life, or to resolve conflicts in more satisfying ways than actual experience affords. In particular, I understood from the get-go that one of my most popular characters, an American president, reflected my human desire to somehow resurrect Robert Kennedy.

But when I got up from my desk, real people awaited me. I saw my kids as the distinctive individuals they were, not as self-projections in a tableau of wish fulfillment. My career may have reflected some form of psychic adjustment, but it was also a means of sending my daughters and sons to the college of their own choosing. Because I never confused my fictions with my life, I remained, at least arguably, sane—not least because I understood the ineradicable boundary between me and an external world driven by other people and their needs.

To me, Donald Trump was more than the prototypical protagonist of a psychological novel—he was a fiction writer run amok, the hero of his own impermeable drama, resentful of editors who would prune his imaginings. He feels little need to heed advice, or to learn anything much from anyone. Most of what he says is provisional, ever subject to change, and based on nothing but his transient and subjective needs.

But the crucial difference between Trump and a novelist is that his fancies are not confined to the page, and Americans can’t put them back on the shelf.

Like any other best-selling novelist, I had publicists who helped me. But Trump has an army: the media, particularly cable news. In the run-up to his nomination, cable gave Trump $3 billion in free media—effectively, a sustained infomercial consisting of his rallies and rambling press conferences. This open microphone made him unique among all candidates.

Trump used it like a novelist would—to re-create himself as a fictional archetype, the lonely sheriff who drives the bad guys out of town. In his acceptance speech, he proclaimed, “I alone can fix it,” then amplified this in an inaugural address in which he portrayed himself as a gunslinger rescuing a cartoon country. He evoked a national dystopia: cities awash in carnage; sclerotic schools; shuttered factories; predatory nonwhites; the crooked denizens of swampland Washington. Like Gulliver amid the Lilliputians, Trump’s America was a helpless giant tied down by tormentors at home and abroad.

But at last Donald Trump had arrived, the solitary symbol of salvation. Simply by virtue of his inauguration, the supposed carnage “will stop right here, and stop right now,” and “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no more.” All the problems of a complex society, however exaggerated, would evanesce overnight. As Ernest Hemingway wrote to climax perhaps his greatest work of fiction, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

For millions of Trump’s followers, this fantasy world is too pretty to relinquish. Relentlessly, Trump has induced the sine qua non for any successful novelist: the willing—indeed, willful—suspension of disbelief. On some level, Trump’s followers know that he is lying, and choose not to care. For them, his false narrative is so emotionally enveloping that it sublimates truth to what Coleridge called “poetic faith.”

He engenders this enthrallment by a classic fictional device: pitting himself, as the protagonist, against an imaginary world filled with pitfalls and peopled by antagonists who evoke fear, hatred, and contempt—the deep state, the media, Muslims, immigrants, minorities, freeloading Europeans—as well as fictionalized versions of real people such as Robert Mueller. In turn, Trump’s blustery pretense of intuitive expertise on subjects as varied as climate change, trade, counterterrorism, and geopolitics licenses the angry and insecure to spurn the expertise of a despised elite, whether they be economists, globalists, environmental scientists, in favor of bogus nostrums that corroborate what they wish to believe. By governing through seductive fictions, Trump has substituted fancy for objective fact as a basis for political discourse.

Watching this, I’m reminded of my writing mentor, a very fine novelist who called fiction “a collection of lies which are ultimately true”—by which he meant true to human nature. Trump’s lies are true to his deepest needs and those of his followers.

Among them is Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative classicist and military scholar. In a New Yorker interview, Hanson describes Trump as the tragic hero of a classic Western—Shane, High Noon, or The Magnificent Seven. “They all are the same—the community doesn’t have the skills or doesn’t have the willpower or doesn’t want to stoop to the corrective method to solve the existential problem, whether it is cattle barons or banditos,” Hanson explains. “So they bring in an outsider, and immediately they start to be uneasy because he is uncouth—his skills, his attitude—and then he solves a problem, and they declare to him … ‘We don’t need you anymore.’”

For millions, Trump’s alternative reality is now a source of comfort and escape, a balm that simplifies a harsh and complex world, the gateway to an America that never was or will be. The question now is who will write its final chapter—and whether Trump’s fantasy of self will end in catharsis or in tragedy.

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