Dixon Wragg
WaccoBB.net
The Gospel According to Dixon
Column #13: The Tangled Web of Lies
"Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive."
--Sir Walter Scott
In an earlier column, I insisted that life isn't just an illusion, as some would have it. But it does include plenty of illusion, one of the biggest sources of which is the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Our ability to separate truth from falsity, reality from illusion, is very substantially impaired by the web of lies we all create.
Lying is an important part of life for many species. Camouflage is lying. "I'm not a tasty bug; I'm just a bump in the tree's bark." "I'm not a hungry leopard; I'm just dappled light shining through the leaves." And similarly, "I'm not a con artist trying to rip you off; I'm your friend." Bugs that are toxic or nasty-tasting tend to be brightly colored to warn off predators, so some species that are perfectly good to eat also evolve bright colors as if to say "If you eat me, you'll sicken or die." Some butterflies have big eye-like wing spots that make them look like much larger creatures. A hog-nosed snake will perform a dramatic death scene to dissuade a would-be predator. All lies.
Because lying confers advantage, it's a big part of our evolutionary legacy: Lie to get something to eat. Lie to avoid being eaten. Lie to get sex. Lie to get and maintain the kinds of relationships that meet our needs. Lie to get the things we want, and then lie to keep them. Lie about the fact that we lied, even to ourselves. And throughout, try to see through the lies of others. The nicer side of the coin is that, as a social species, we've also evolved such countervailing traits as honesty and dependability—but that's another story.
The most obvious sort of lie is the plain old explicit lie. We get mad at someone and tell lies to hurt them. We lie to get a job. We lie to stay out of trouble when we've screwed up. A guy may tell a woman he loves her when he really just wants to get into her pants. A women may tell a guy she just wants to have fun when her real agenda is to manipulate him into a committed relationship. Swing your partner 'round and 'round...
Then there's the "little white lie" or fib, which many tell themselves isn't even lying (and of course, that's a lie). These may indeed be harmless, at least sometimes. How do we answer when asked "Do I look fat in these pants?" or "Do you like my poem?" Perhaps pleasant fibs are the grease that lubricates the gears of our social lives. But I feel they should mostly be avoided. For one thing, we end up living in a world wherein you can't get honest feedback from anybody, maybe even your best friend. What if you really want to know whether you look good in your new jacket and no one will tell you that you don't? Hiding our real opinion is hiding part of ourselves, and it implies that we don't trust our friend to still love us even if we think their new jacket is ugly. When we manipulate one another with sweet lies, is that really friendship? Where's the intimacy?
Another way to lie is to state something as if we know it's true when it is actually just speculation. I guess some people think this makes them look intelligent, authoritative, and sometimes it does indeed fool people.
Then there's the type of lie which is insidious because it's silent. The lie consists in what isn't said, because silence is a sort of passive endorsement of the status quo. We maintain our silence because we're afraid to be real, even when there's a moral imperative to dissent. People express racist or sexist or heterosexist or imperialist or other noxious beliefs in our presence and we don't speak up, thus appearing to assent. People talk disparagingly of pornography and we nod our heads, not mentioning our own enjoyment of it. Thus are "phantom community standards" created and maintained. We live the lie we think is expected by others, but they're only playing that phony role because they think we expect it of them. Such lies reciprocally co-create each other, building into an edifice of phony community values, to the point where, for instance, prosecutors can say with a straight face that pornography isn't consistent with the values of their community even though the local porn stores are doing brisk business. Trying to appear "normal" and "moral" is a dishonest enterprise.
Another kind of lying is trying to make a good impression, or "putting your best foot forward". We "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative", hiding our imperfections like a cat hiding its poop in the sand. This sort of lie is particularly intense on first dates, which involve phony Supermen and Wonder Women projecting their fantasy images. How ironic it is that we hope to start a relationship of purported "intimacy" by presenting flawless masks to one another. To a degree, we may conduct our entire social lives this way. One of the things I learned in group process classes when I was working on my MA in counseling is that the people who seem the most confident and "together" are just as insecure and scared as the rest of us. And, ironically, when people divulge their insecurities, I respect them more and feel closer to them! There is also the role-related lying of a parent portraying him/herself as perfect to the children, or a doctor to the patients, teacher to the students, therapist to the client, etc. Even real experts know less than they'd often have us believe, and some of what they do "know" will turn out to be wrong. The impressive picture they may paint of themselves is a lie.
Most of the forms of lying I've mentioned constitute our trying to "sell" ourselves. The enterprise of trying to sell a product, service, religion, philosophy, idea, brand, or political policy is called "advertising and public relations". Advertising is not inherently dishonest; it's possible to truthfully show people the real benefits of your product and encourage them to buy it. But most products are not the best option available, and some are downright useless, toxic or, in the case of ideas and policies, immoral or even brutal. Selling these products requires lying.
Often this lying is the explicit kind—making false claims, or falsely denying criticisms of the product. Clergy often don't believe all of the claims they preach1, just as celebrities may claim to love crappy products they would never really buy. Perhaps even more common is the type of lie implicit in the sounds and images used to manipulate the buyer on the unconscious emotional level—"Buy our product and you will have romance with beautiful people like those in our ads", "You are ugly and socially unacceptable without our product", "A vote for our candidate is a vote for peace, freedom and justice", etc. ad nauseam. Even what passes for news is largely a pack of lies, evasions, and distortions, a sensationalistic product designed to sell advertising as it attracts viewers by appealing to their prejudices and emotions, and to further the social/political agenda of the news corporation. In 1994, Fox News even spent big bucks defending in court their "right" to broadcast lies as news—and won! And it wasn't just Fox claiming that "right"; five major media outlets (Belo Corporation, Cox Television Inc., Gannett Co. Inc., Media General Operations Inc., and Post-Newsweek Stations Inc.) filed briefs of Amici Curiae to support Fox’s position. Lying is a widespread and fairly explicit norm in corporate "journalism".
There's also the lying we do to ourselves. Again I'm reminded of the quote from Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool." Our natural insecurity, fear and egocentrism incline us toward some common self-lies, which may be very important to us and constitute strongly reinforced social agreements, rejection of which may get us ostracized, fired, spat upon, reviled, beaten, or worse. With as much honesty as you can muster, look over this list of a few samples and see how many apply to you (some of these may not be, at least in your case, lies):
And this brings us to the meta-lie: lying about lying. Especially regarding the lies we tell ourselves, lies don't work well if we admit they're lies, so we have to lie about the fact that what we just said is a lie, and more generally about the fact that much of what we say and imply and believe is lies. And evolution has probably selected for the ability to self-deceive because if we've fooled ourselves we can more convincingly fool others. Reasoning with people would be so much easier if they would just say "I've lied myself into this pleasant belief and I can't be reasoned out of it, so don't waste your time." Instead they tell the lie, even to themselves, that they're honestly seeking truth when they are in fact just seeking excuses to believe what they like. The lie about not having lied is a padlock on the mind.
- Everything is going to be alright.
- Everything happens for a reason.
- We don't really die.
- The bad stuff in the world is caused by those others, not by you and your group.
- Those who oppose you (or your country or religion) are evil.
- Crime doesn't pay.
- The way you make your money is honest and moral.
- Good will defeat evil in the end.
- You're happy.
- You live in a democracy.
- You're in love with your spouse.
- You're not attracted to anybody but your spouse.
- You're glad you had children.
- You're doing your best.
- You're better than average at your job or in general.
- You're certain about your cherished beliefs.
- You're more open-minded than those who disagree with you.
- You don't lie.
Is lying justifiable sometimes? Sure. If we're transporting contraband—drugs, Bibles or whatever--and the authorities ask us what's in our truck, lying to them to avoid unjustly being thrown into a dungeon is surely moral. And many of our "little white lies" are probably harmless. But lies are also a necessary underpinning for all kinds of evils—imperialism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, fraud, exploitation, rapacious consumerism, superstition. We need to stop telling ourselves the lie that we're not lying and the lie that the lying we do acknowledge is justifiable or harmless. We need to lie a lot less than we do, and get better at seeing through lies, especially the ones we love to believe. And, as critical thinkers, we need to acknowledge the considerable degree to which we are swimming in an ocean of lies so we can make compensatory corrections in our thinking. Such corrections include healthy skepticism and appropriate levels of certainty, which are bound to be lower than we'd like to think in a world constructed largely of lies.
NOTES:
1. For example: https://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/...ing-Clergy.pdf
2. The late great 20th Century philosopher Snakefinger briefly discusses the issue of lying here.
About Dixon: I'm a hopeful monster, committed to laughter, love, and the Golden Rule. I see reason, applied with empathy, as the most important key to making a better world. I'm a lazy slob and a weirdo. I love cats, kids, quilts, fossils, tornadoes, comic books, unusual music, and too much else to mention. I’m a former conservative Christian, then New Ager, now a rationalist, skeptic and atheist. Lately I’m a Workshopping Editor at the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form (That’s right!), and my humor is getting published in the Washington Post and Fantasy and Science Fiction. I’m job-hunting too, mostly in the Human Services realm. Passions: Too many -- Reading, writing, critical thinking, public speaking, human rights, sex and sensuality, arts and sciences, nature. Oh, and ladies, I’m single ;^D