Don’t stop believing
To live in a more truthful world, we not only have to stop telling so many lies: we also have to stop wanting to hear them, writes Anna Hartford
In early childhood we develop what psychologists call “theory of mind”. We grasp that there’s a distance between what we know and what other people know, and in turn we grasp that we’re able to manipulate this distance. We can get someone else to believe something that we ourselves don’t believe. We start out as terrible liars: vastly overestimating our powers of deception and underestimating how transparent our efforts to deceive are to other people. But over time we become more and more sophisticated — we figure out what sounds plausible, what “rings true”. what is and is not easily corroborated — until at last we become rather good at lying.
Worryingly good, even.
“It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces,” the novelist, Philip Roth, reflected, envying the fictive powers of your average suburban adulterer. “Before the audience of the betrayed spouse, they act out roles of innocence and fidelity with flawless dramatic skill. Great, great performances, conceived with genius down to the smallest particulars, impeccably meticulous, naturalistic acting, and all done by rank amateurs. People beautifully pretending to be ‘themselves’.”
In this beautiful pretence, we lie incessantly: in ways both big and small. We pretend to be more likeable, competent and attractive than we really are and we pretend to everyone else that they are more likeable, competent and attractive than they really are. In this dance of mutual pretence, we are estimated to lie, on average, twice in every 10 minutes we spend speaking to a stranger. In some respects it’s hard to see how we’d get by if we didn’t. And while on the one hand we lecture children about how important it is to be truthful, on the other hand we also lecture them about how important it is to be complimentary and polite; to master the ancient art of telling people exactly what they want to hear.
PHILIP ROTH Author
There are, of course, many lies that are plainly self-serving or cruel, which are easy enough to condemn, but there are other lies that seem not only justifiable but necessary; even kind. Why hurt someone with the truth when all they really want is some encouragement, consolation or reassurance? Why insult someone when it would be so easy to give them false praise? In his short book, Lying, the neuroscientist and podcast celebrity, Sam Harris, sets out a moral case against lying, and he takes particular exception to these “white lies”, or the lies we justify in the name of compassion. He writes: “When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives.” Harris’s contention is that we are rarely entitled to take this paternalistic stance with regards to other people.
Nor are we really doing them a favour. When we encourage someone to persist in a comforting delusion, their life may be made easier in some ways but it will also be made a lot harder in others. We’re all trying our best to guide our lives, and our expectations, within our understanding of reality. But our grasp on this reality is determined in no small part by what others lead us to believe. In this sense, lying is an assault on another person’s autonomy).
Philosopher Robert Nozick famously introduced a thought experiment called the “Experience Machine.” Imagine that you had the option to either continue with your life as it is now, with all you deplore and dread about it, or wake up tomorrow morning in a simulated reality in which everything will start going your way. You will suddenly be blessed with all the success, love and joy you could hope for, but you will also suddenly be a brain in a vat. Would you choose the simulation? There are a few true hedonists who opt in, but for most people the notion is repellent. We value having a genuine grip on reality. Not just on reality as we take it to be, but as it actually is. Even when the stakes are less metaphysically drastic, we value hard truths over consoling fictions.
Or at least, we like to think we do.
But when we look at how we often behave it’s clear that we also love the lie. We see this side of ourselves all the time: in the false little poses we strike when we look at
It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit HARRY FRANKFURT Philosopher
ourselves in the mirror or into our phone’s cameras; at the way we delight in flattery and seek it out, even when we know on some level that it’s insincere; and in the way we indulge in hearing our own ideologies and views confirmed even as we’re dimly aware that things might be more complicated than that.
It is in loving the lie and taking refuge in it that we become so easy to deceive. After a while we even recoil from the truth. When we see a photo of what we actually look like from anything except our favourite angle we think of it as unflattering. When someone tries to give us constructive, well-meaning criticism we struggle to distinguish it from a malicious attack. And when we’re being manipulated by other people’s political agendas we cheer them along, provided that they serve our pre-existing notions.
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” the moral philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, begins one of his most famous essays (auspiciously titled “On Bullshit”). Frankfurt wrote this essay in 1980s America, which from where we find ourselves now — i.e. living in some sort of nightmare Armando Iannucci is having while sick with Dengue fever — seems like a positive Utopia of straight-talk and accountability. Bullshit, in Frankfurt’s treatment, makes lying sound almost principled. In their perverse way, liars are guided by truth: they recognise and acknowledge truth but attempt to conceal it. In turn, the liar can be exposed by the truth and shamed by it. The bullshitter is in no such vulnerable position. “He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does,” Frankfurt explains. “He pays no attention to it at all.” Bullshit can only really thrive, though, when this attitude broadens: when not only the bullshitter, but also the bullshitted, start to share in this essential indifference.
When we vow to start living more truthfully what we usually have in mind is telling fewer lies. But perhaps the greatest thing we can do in service of the truth — in both our private and public lives — is just to start wanting to hear it. To create more spaces for other people’s sincerity to emerge and to be accepted without fright or offence.
Perhaps when it is more welcome, our own sincerity will follow.