The Truth About Lying
A man I know--in fact, he’s related to me by marriage--was recently interviewed by a corporate headhunter. After an interrogation worthy of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the consultant paused for a moment over my relative’s not inconsiderable resume.
“You know what your biggest selling point is?” he asked. “You’re honest.”
My friend, thinking this was a compliment along the lines of “well, you have good personal hygiene,” rose to leave.
“No, no,” the consultant said. “We can really sell you. People are willing to pay big for honesty these days. There’s not a lot out there.”
They’ve been coming at us fast and furious, the revelations, exploding like cherry bombs thrown skyward by the handful at the end of a fireworks display. The biggest have echoed from the chambers of Grand Inquisitor Starr. But we’ve been losing journalists left and right too--Mike Barnicle, the Boston Globe columnist, was the latest, resigning after it was proved he had fabricated story material. And if all that weren’t enough, now it turns out that Sybil--she of the multiple personalities--may have been nothing more than a hoax, her personalities induced by a publicity-hungry therapist.
Lies, lies, lies--one would think the average American would be staggering around like Jimmy Stewart’s double-crossed Mr. Smith, slapping the newspaper against the tabletop and scanning the gallery for one honest face. But no. We’re bearing up beautifully if we do say so ourselves. Pollsters keep pestering us like some needling aunt after the divorce--darling, are you sure you’re all right? I don’t see how you have the strength to go on . . . well, I’ll just keep checking in. Yet we are steadfast. We don’t want to hear anything more about the tie or the dress or any substance containing DNA. Too distasteful. Monica and Bill have admitted they lied, and so the lie is no longer really a lie. It’s more like a version.
The truth is out there; it just hasn’t been subpoenaed yet.
And as for Mr. Barnicle, one assumes he will get a book deal, as reportedly did Stephen Glass, the brazenly deceptive New Republic reporter--and then we can read about that tricky line between “he said” and “he-would-have-said-if-he-had-actually-existed.”
The truth is out there; it just hasn’t gotten an agent yet.
So why aren’t we more upset? There was a time, if we believe Jane Austen (and I think we can), when a man’s word was his bond, and the breaking of that bond resulted in social censure. Mendacious members of the social elite were no longer received, their names not spoken by those of good breeding; those with less monetary insulation were tossed in the stocks or in jail.
That didn’t keep people from lying, or course; we are a resilient genus, and the thing that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is not the opposable thumb but our willingness to look another of our kind straight in the eye and say, “I swear to God, I put the check in the mail yesterday.”
But now, it would seem, we are less than scandalized when a lie is revealed. People lie on their resumes, their tax returns and certainly on first dates. We lie about our age, our income, our marital status, the number of times we have seen “Titanic.” Big ones, little ones shimmering by in deepening shades of gray. We have made lying an industry--lobbyists, diplomats, lawyers, salesmen, advertisers--these are just a few folk who, many would argue, are essentially paid to lie. Politicians? Don’t get us started. Although in these cases, we don’t like to call it lying; we like to call it “spin.” Spin, which sounds fun, like a child’s game, 6-year-olds twirling on a wide green summer lawn somewhere. Wheeeeee.
“We seem to have adopted a more relativistic attitude toward truth,” says David Blankenhorn at the Institute for American Values in New York. “The tendency you see now, which you wouldn’t have in the old days, like the 1970s, is people defending their position regardless of larger issues--prudence, justice, fair-mindedness--now it’s all subordinate to making my case for my guy, regardless of the bigger picture.”
Blankenhorn, like many of us, was raised to believe that truth, in and of itself, was an absolute value. Tell the truth and shame the devil. That ideal, he says, does not last long in an increasingly secular world.
“What disturbs me,” he says, “is people are now trying to make distinctions between types of lies, some are pardonable, and some are not. The mere act of lying is not enough for censure.”
While Immanuel Kant, who believed all lies harmful, might have been similarly disturbed, the ranking of lies by subject matter is certainly not new to this decade or even this century. St. Augustine, no slouch in the censuring department, came up with eight categories, the worst being lies in the name of religion; Thomas Aquinas narrowed them down to three; and Benjamin Disraeli claimed there were “lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Many of us consider President Clinton’s extramarital “inappropriate relationship” none of our business--we elected him, we didn’t marry him--and so the subject of the lie is not particularly harmful to us.
Sissela Bok, in her 1989 book “Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life” (Vintage), takes a strong stand against this utilitarian belief that a lie is only as bad as its actual harm.
“Most lies do have negative consequences for liars, dupes, all those affected, and for social trust,” she writes. “And when liars evaluate these consequences, they are peculiarly likely to be biased.”
Furthermore, she admonishes in a recent newspaper article, we should take seriously lying by public officials because when “citizens lose confidence in what leaders say, they are disempowered.”
Americans have always prided themselves on being honest and forthright--if we lacked the manners of the European courts, we lacked their hypocrisy as well. Our primary all-American myth--the story of George Washington and the cherry tree--makes it clear to even toddlers that telling the truth is always preferable no matter what the consequences. So what happened?
A few things.
* History. Full-disclosure biographies whittle many of our heroic standards down to life size. The indiscretions, dishonesty and general self-centeredness of everyone from FDR to Charles Dickens have been presented and picked over so thoroughly it is difficult to muster high expectations for anyone.
* Watergate. The tapes, the break-ins, the slush fund--the greatest hits of the Nixon administration proved what we had all suspected: that politicians will cheat and steal, then lie when asked about it. A generation whose cartoon-viewing was interrupted by the remonstrations of John Sirica has a less-than-idealistic view of the presidency.
* Cheap Talk. Human failing, inconsistency and shortcoming are the stars of the modern breed of talk show. As deeds previously deemed repugnant present themselves in the shape of real, live humans who have real, live rationalizations, the moral bar slides a few notches south. It’s easier to pass judgment when one is shocked. But the staying power of Sally Jessy Raphael and Jerry Springer has made this state almost impossible to achieve.
* Peter Pan. As the puer aeternus generation becomes society’s adults, we are experiencing a singular lack of parental figures. Raised to believe I’m OK, you’re OK, the baby boomers avoid anything that smacks of moral construct; they’ve turned the word “judgmental” into the ultimate pejorative. While this self-forgiving camaraderie may seem a refreshing alternative to the traditional patriarchy of podium and pulpit, there is always a danger of summer camp turning into “Lord of the Flies.”
* Glass Houses. Self-examination has become a national hobby, and we have a hard time keeping the results to ourselves. Memoirs and autobiographies, Web pages and one-person plays--many of us live our lives in first person. So we know a lot more about one another than we probably care to, including specific examples of the very human tendency to lie.
Deception, according to David Nyberg, author of “The Varnished Truth” (University of Chicago Press, 1993), “is not merely to be tolerated as an occasionally prudent aberration in a world of truth telling; it is rather an essential component of our ability to organize and shape the world . . . to cope with uncertainty and pain, to be civil and to achieve privacy, to survive as a species and to flourish as persons.”
It could be argued that our expectation and tolerance of deceit is somehow more sophisticated, more evolved than the condemnations of our puritanical past. Yet almost every structured path of self-enlightenment, be it religion, psychotherapy or a 12-step program has one bottom line: no lying. Because even those who do not believe in a name-taking, lightning bolt-wielding God recognize that lying harms the deceiver as well as the deceived. One lie rarely suffices, and sooner or later great portions of the liar’s life become devoted to lie maintenance. (This is the real reason it’s better not to lie: The truth is easier to remember.) Which is why almost every religion has some ritual of atonement; the need to come clean is as basic to us as the tendency to lie.
All of this--the lying, the denying, the confessing, the atoning--takes quite a while, of course, as we have seen in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Think of how much more free time we would have if everyone told the truth. That alone might make it worth the effort. And then there’s the shock value. As Mark Twain said, “When in doubt, tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.”
You might even get a job out of it. Or a book deal.
