When is a lie not a lie?
We all tell little mistruths, sometimes; we may even believe them to be ‘noble lies,’ but there is no difference between these outright dishonest intents in practical terms.
Of all the stories we tell ourselves, the most potent self-deceptions may come from the permission we give ourselves or others to lie. Sometimes we use names like 'white lies' or 'noble lies' to explain what we are doing, but is it any different, and can it be justified? In the last posting, we looked at the truth, so it may be worth spending a couple of minutes on lies.
What they are and if they are ever justified.
Why we lie
According to a piece in Forbes, we like: to save face, to avoid hurting other people's feelings, to impress others, to shirk responsibility, to hide misdeeds, as a social lubricant, to prevent conflict, to get out of work, and many more reasons.
While saving face or avoiding hurting other people's feelings don’t sound too bad on the surface, they are still, in the words of Paul Ekman, Ph.D., a psychologist from the University of California, "a deliberate choice to mislead." While media pundits and politicians will see a difference, we should accept, says Ekman, that there is a clear line between lying, which involves intent to deceive, and simply making false statements. False statements may come from your memory, misinterpretation, or individual belief without intent to deceive. So how do you know if you are lying?
When you say something, are you either concealing something or falsifying something? While you may be doing these to reduce complexity in your day with no harm intended if you do either, you are lying, and we all do it very often.
In a survey of 1,000 adults that Serota conducted in 2010, 60% said they told no lies on a given day, meaning 4 out of 10 did. In another study, detailed in the journal Psychiatric Quarterly, 18% of college students claimed they lie daily. Ekman reports that younger people tell more lies than older people, and men tell more lies than women.
Brianna Verigin, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Portsmouth in England, showed the most common types of lies were: White lies, exaggerations, hiding information, burying lies amid truths, and just plain ‘making shit up.’
I found a list of 30 reasons people lie here if you want more ideas!
The justification for lying
Thinking about this from a Thinking Fast and Slow (also see here) point of view, sometimes we may want to argue that we told a mistruth "because it's just easier than stopping and getting into a whole thing there and then." System One gives you an out without engaging System Two and thinking about it.
"How are you today?
"I'm great."
It feels so much faster than ...
"How are you today?
"Well, I am glad you asked ...."
Here are two reasons people give for acceptable lying:
The White Lie: a harmless or trivial lie, especially one told to avoid hurting someone's feelings
Plato's Noble Lie: untruth knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or advance an agenda
While it is hard to get too upset with a 'small' white lie (e.g., you look lovely in that outfit), the hardest one for me to accept is The Noble Lie. While there may be moral grounds for telling a mistruth (think protecting slaves with The Underground Railroad and hiding Jewish people from Nazis) is there a vast difference between those examples and what, say, Fauci did? I pick Dr. Anthony Fauci as a 'lightning rod' for much of the current debate around COVID and lies.
It was reported that he said face masks were not valuable in the early days of COVID to protect the supply of N95 masks for healthcare workers. If we all had rushed out to buy face-covers, the logic went, healthcare workers would have been shorted, and this situation would have been much worse and cost more lives. Therefore, that was a noble lie and could be acceptable.
While the basic logic may be acceptable, this noble lie, like most noble lies, must be seen in the context. The 2020s are a very different time to tell lies - of any sort.
The challenge of lying today
Many buzzwords sum up communication today, but if you want effective communication, you should pay attention to 'authenticity' and 'transparency.' By combining the authenticity of the quality of 'being real or true' with transparency, or the quality of being done in 'an open way without secrets,' then we get an excellent proximation of living in the internet world. What lives on the internet never dies.
Let's look at an example from last week. Here is a comment from Douglas Murray to David Lammy. I have no idea who Lammy is, nor do I fully understand the whole context of the words, but it is interesting how Murray (whom I do know and like) calls out Lammy for something he said five years ago, and Murray calls him out for what he thinks is hypocrisy. Yet there are multiple explanations for this, here are three, and I am sure you could add others.
Lammy could be a hypocrite and use deception for a political point.
Lammy could have genuinely forgotten what he did five years ago and, in hindsight, now wants to question what he said more recently.
Lammy may have learned things in the last five years, making him want to approach things differently.
Either way, Lammy (who probably doesn't care) gets caught in the time machine that is Twitter. Let us learn three critical lessons from this.
Firstly, and I have discovered this personally, the Internet and Twitter are context and conversation-free. When you say something or write something, it is often part of a narrative with someone or even yourself. Five years later, the conversation will be lost, and the context will change - making your words come back and bite you.
Secondly, and probably more pertinent to this posting, a lie or fabrication will apply over time. A small 'white' lie may, unchanged and unchallenged, become a noose that someone else wants to hang you with.
Finally, in respect of the Nobile Lie, like Fauci at some point, you will have to come clean and admit you lied. While you may justify it was warranted to yourself and others, it's still a lie. Imagine the legal drama on TV where the attorney points at the unlucky person on the stand, shouting, "if you lied about this, what else were you lying about?" The Internet is an excellent place for someone to research that question.
We know better.
Hopefully, by now, most of us have gotten over the need to lie with malice deliberately. If not, you probably stopped reading this post a long time ago. However, we all sometimes wonder if a 'little lie' is more manageable (or better) than a bit of bad news. There are three quick quotes to dissuade you from jumping for the lie.
"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." Mark Twain
"I'm not upset that you lied to me; I'm upset that from now on, I can't believe you." Friedrich Nietzsche
Yet it was a meme I found while researching this posting that most struck me:
Of course, it’s not always easy, but the correct answer is to find a compassionate way of telling the truth, not avoiding it. Anything else is just a story you are telling yourself.