A lie can be defined in more than one way. I have found it useful to define a “real” lie simply as the intention to deceive. There are members of our species who can tell such lies with the greatest of ease and unfortunately they are far too often believed. We, as a species, seem to be particularly vulnerable, even naive, in this respect. Maybe that is because we concentrate too much on the meanings of words and have, unlike dogs, lost the innate ability to immediately see/feel deception when it is staring us in the face.
Neurologists have understood that there are a group of patients that cannot be lied to. They suffer from aphasia and so because they can no longer grasp your words so they can no longer be deceived by them. This dog-like behaviour is very well described in “The President’s Speech” a chapter in the strangely named but wonderful book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by the neurologist Oliver Sacks.
I try very hard never to lie and those that ever lie to me really do risk losing my friendship and respect. Trust flies away at the same moment and is unlikely ever to return. My reasons for avoiding lying do not stem from any high moral standpoint. They are far more functional than that.
In the first place, very few lies stand the test of time. The truth nearly always eventually comes out. I was once told of a Polish expression whence “a lie has short legs”. This provided me with an amusing vignette of a lie trying to escape detection but unable to do so because it couldn’t run fast enough.
In the second place, a lie once told has to be remembered or else the game is likely to be given away in the future. This involves unnecessary effort and usually it gets more and more complicated as subsequent lies have to be created to cover-up for earlier ones. The ability to remember what had been told in the past gets worse if different lies get told to different people. If you prefer a simple life then avoid lies. Some “economy of the truth” may be necessary at times but even then be careful.
Most of us know the oath taken by a juror: “To tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. This may apply in court but in real life the whole truth can sometimes be too much. If a patient is diagnosed with cancer should one immediately explain this and all the ramifications or is it acceptable to use some euphemism and then wait to truthfully answer any follow-up questions? How explicit should one be when a child asks “where did I come from”? To say “the stork brought you” wont satisfy the child for long so some restraint in “telling all” whilst not saying anything untrue would seem sensible. There are no real guidelines in such cases because each case is unique and will benefit from good judgement. Good judgement is more likely if such dilemmas have been thought about and discussed with others in advance.
It is so, so easy (perhaps even natural or instinctive) to want to always be seen by others in a good light and to never be in error. So much so that a lie can so easily slip out. We all have a degree of innate pride that is necessary for our psychological well-being and yet our stature can (paradoxically or not) actually be increased by being able to openly acknowledge when one has been wrong. No one is always right. We are all fallible. Thank goodness for it.
For me, amongst the most destructive lies are the ones that one tells to oneself. It takes the sort of courage that DH Lawrence’s poem refers to in order to live with the greatest integrity. It reads: “What makes people unsatisfied is that they accept lies. If people had courage, and refused lies and found out what they really felt and really meant and acted on it, they would distil the essential oil out of every experience and like hazel-woods of Autumn, at last be sweet and sound. And the young among the old would be as in the hazel-woods of September nutting, gathering nuts of ripe experience. As it is, all that the old can offer is sour, bitter fruits, cankered by lies“.
The complexities of truth lie at the heart of Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon” in which at least four different characters relate different versions of the murder of a man and the rape of his wife. Other complexities of truth can be seen when police witnesses of the same event tell different tales. The point is that truth is easily distorted particularly when people intend to deceive but also because the mind can fill in or alter holes in its own memory to make everything “fit together”. So untruths can told without any intent. That is why an untruth differs from a lie. One is a mistaken fact the other pure deceit.
The word deception is a “false friend” between the English and the French. Deception in French means disappointment in English and deception in English becomes tromperie in French. So be neither deceived nor disappointed by such usage. False friend is a good description of such words that don’t translate literally but there is another sort of false friend and that is the sort that bears false witness. For me amongst the most invidious lies are those that involve false witness. The reasons for blackening someone else’s character are bad enough if true but disgusting when they are untrue. Such false witness may come from envy or to hide one’s own fault but when it comes from pure bigotry and prejudice (and especially from state institutions) the results for mankind can be devastating. If the world stands silent at such times it has to share in that culpability and share in the shadow that it creates in the unconsciousness of us all. The dark shadow in our collective, hidden, instinctive and inherited unconsciousness that we would love to deny but which we cannot escape from.
Caution too is needed when making any promise, for a broken promise very rapidly can become a lie that not only hurts the other but also damages one’s own integrity. To borrow and never to repay is a well known way to lose friendship, whether by intent or by simple default. Either way such a debt is often rationalised as being something the lender can afford to lose. If that is the mentality in place it denigrates both borrower and lender. The same is true of any broken promise be it by intent or not. Hurtful to everyone.
Lies can also be “told” by omission and these are no better than those that are explicit. My sister and I were half-siblings because of an affair my mother had with her dying father’s nurse. We were brought up believing my father to be our father until we were aged twenty or thereabouts. Once we knew the truth it became clear why there had been certain ambiguities in the past. Why, for example, there had been an awkward silence in the room when someone said to my sister “Oh Mary you are so like your father”. During our childhood my sister and I had seldom been really close but knowledge of this particular truth brought as much closer together. In the end she was almost certainly my best friend and a person whom I still love unreservedly.
The extent to which one can fool oneself can be exemplified by the human ability for self-denial. One of the grossest examples of this that I recall was a woman (she was in fact the wife of a GP) who presented in an out-patients’ clinic with such an advanced breast cancer that it had perforated through the skin and was purulent and ulcerated. “I only noticed it last week” she claimed. I, myself, carried-on smoking cigarettes until, one night, I had a heart attack having previously lived in a state of denial that nothing bad would ever happen to me.
There is another sort of invidious and often unrecognised deception when an individual (or group) manipulate or selectively collect data to “prove” their own ideas or concepts or, possibly worse, to disprove or denigrate opposition. I have seen specific examples of this in so-called scientific medical research. I remember a professor at university, who had an unconventional theory but instead of initiating proper research to prove it he spent an inordinate amount of time in the medical libraries searching for anything that he could quote in his favour but also, and crucially, disregarding those articles against his belief.
This is a growing problem on the internet, which can so rapidly disseminate deception and misinformation and which helps contribute not only to conspiracy theories but also to the promulgation of erroneous theories and frank deceit. The causal relationship between types of immunisation and autism should, by now, have been totally debunked. The chief perpetrator of this idea has not only been proved to be wrong but has also been removed from the medical register for falsifying his results. The sad thing is that too many still believe his findings and many children have suffered, got brain damage, gone blind or died as a result of not having protection from certain and preventable infectious diseases.
An attendant conspiracy theory runs that the advice from the WHO (regarding the benefits to certain groups from influenza vaccination) is simply a result of lobbying from the multinational manufacturers. It is then believed that therefore the advice must be wrong and should be ignored. Whether there be lobbying or not, it is the facts alone that need to be understood and circulated.
There are and always have been (right back to the serpent in the very first garden) false prophets. One of Christ’s warnings (and one that I wholeheartedly endorse) is: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits“. The whole of Islam nowadays rises up in anger if there is the slightest criticism of their prophet and incite their followers to riot. I merely say look at the current fruits of Islam and its associated Islamofascism and judge for yourself. Pretty rotten fruit right now I would say.
I am writing these thoughts down to help me reflect on my own integrity and maybe to cause any readers to contemplate some of these things for themselves. I do not deny that I have sometimes wanted to be other than I actually was. I had, as an example, and like many of the “Anglo-Irish”, a romantic attachment to Ireland for a long time and was appalled by the way the country had been treated by the British for centuries. The lie that there had been potato famines in the eighteenth century being just one of these. It was in fact a starvation because large quantities of grain were exported to Britain during these times as cash for the absentee landlords. It was I suppose because I wanted to identify and feel solidarity with the Irish than I became a bit more Irish than was my natural state. I even developed a sort of Irish accent so that the Irish mostly still thought me English but the English would take me as Irish. It was a sham, of course, but as I have grown in my own self-confidence I have managed to drop these illusions excepting for such times that it is simply for fun or entertainment.
Thus I am wholly fallible in many ways but if I have learned anything in my life to date it is to, at least, attempt to never be afraid of being myself. In important interviews I have twice answered truthfully even though my replies were unconventional and would normally have been viewed badly. On both occasions I got the job – probably because truth is nearly always simple and more easily seen for what it is. I try not to wear any masks and in the end this is important to me in the following “spiritual” sense. If I get to stand on my maker’s threshold I want to be still recognisable as the me that was created; was created naive, naked and wearing no mask or disguise at all. If I am not recognisable what hope for my future thereafter.
That was going to be the punchline of this epistle but in recent months I have been reflecting on many things and that includes the nature and importance of “self belief” because it is real self-belief and not pride; it is real self-love and not vanity; it is real self-confidence and not ones fragile ego; it is real self-truth and not simple belief that can help one sleep well at night and make life on this planet more worthwhile and less nonsensical.
Such self-confidence and self-conviction can achieve much against the odds but to do so may take a lot of effort and a lot of pain. I recently saw the film about “Eddie the Eagle” (the only British Ski Jumper to participate in the Olympics and against all sorts of opposition). But he had great self-belief and although he came last in the competition his personal achievement was simply fantastic. Some people are lucky enough to have various talents. Usually having talent is not enough on its own but if worked-at it can bring huge rewards – materially, physically and psychologically. To deny such development to oneself is a sort of lie if it happens because of laziness or apathy or by being side-lined to other things of little real importance. Few achieve much in life without good work, study and practice.
I believe that to achieve a state of true self-reliance and self-belief one must eschew deceit and question most things that one is ever told in order that they become truly one’s own. Such freethinking is too often decried by the established order whether from a state or from a religion. Without the freethinkers of the enlightenment; without the self belief of such as Saint Joan; without the so-called nihilism of philosophers like Nietzsche and Sartre; without the evidence of “our eyes” and the doors opened by the real science behind Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Darwin and others I believe that the collective unconsciousness of the “West” would be in a much worse place. Those that fear the Islam of today would do well to reflect on the days when Christendom was extremely brutal. It appears that Islam needs some free thinkers more than ever before.
So the world may yet have to suffer much at the hands of the new Russian “Czar” or to the Caliphates of revolutionary Islam or from the effects of global warming and exponential population growth but there is still hope and no need yet for despair. It is individuals who have been the main catalysts for change and not the masses or the results of ‘consensus groups’ or, by definition, the reactionary stance of most of the world’s religions. I believe that there is much truth and eloquence in the statement that: “Individuals are sometimes guided by reason. Crowds never“. It will take much time, maybe too much time, for the world to evolve into a better state of harmony and détente but for it to do so will require that we see more individuals of stature with real courage and not the grey mess being expounded by most of the political and religious institutions of today.
So stay alert, don’t be afraid to be a sceptic and bear in mind Alexander Pope’s words; “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man“.
Postscript 30/3/20
Mendacity derived from the Latin mendax simply means untruthfulness or lying. It is embodied in the 8th Commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbour” and so it runs fundamentally counter to all of the three semitic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism). That there are those who seem able to turn it into an art form does not give it one iota of respectability.
George Washington’s “I cannot tell a lie” is a myth. A very different president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said somewhere that “repetition does not transform a lie into a truth” and more eloquently, at the beginning of his inaugural address at another very hard time in 1932, said “This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. One might also contrast how Roosevelt, crippled by polio managed to largely conceal this, whilst Trump’s heel spurs saved him from Vietnam though not from the golf course.
What a contrast with today’s incumbent. The gross irony when Donald Trump repeatedly cries “Fake News” should not numb our senses nor our consciences. It is incredible just how so many have succumbed to his denigration of truth and of the press in particular. We must all up the ante of learning how to discern what is fact and what is fiction, what is true and what is false and indeed what is right and what is wrong.