Lies

Mentira

Tu vida siempre ha sido una mentira
Una vulgar y estúpida mentira
Jugué a ganar y solo he conseguido
Ser un juguete más de tus Mentira

B. Richard

If you’re Argentine and you like eighties pop, you’ll think this song is by Valeria Lynch, but that’s a lie. It’s by Buddy Richard, “the best Chilean singer-songwriter of all time” (that’s a lie too). Actually, his name isn’t Buddy Richard (the lies keep coming), it’s Ricardo Toro, and he’s from Graneros (at least Graneros is in Chile, I hope (does anybody know Graneros?)).

Here’s Buddy:

Lies

The world is full of lies. Our society is built on lies.

Salespeople

Sometimes we lie so as not to hurt someone, other times we lie simply because we’re afraid.

Seth Godin:

“We’ve decided to hire someone with totally different skills than yours…” and then they hire someone just like you, but more expensive and not as good.

“We’re not going to buy a car this month, my husband wants to wait…” and then you see them driving a new car from that other dealer, the one with the lousy reputation.

“I’m just not interested…” and then you see the new RFP, one you could have helped them write to get a more profitable and productive outcome.

People lie to salesmen all the time. We do it because salespeople have trained us to, and because we’re afraid.

Prospects (people like us) lie in many situations, because when we announce that we’ve made the decision to hire someone else, or when we tell the pitching entrepreneur we don’t like her business model, or when we clearly articulate why we’re not going to do business, the salesperson responds by questioning the judgment of the prospect.

In exchange for telling the truth, the prospect is disrespected.

Of course we don’t tell the truth–if we do, we’re often bullied or berated or made to feel dumb.

There is nothing more unpleasant than being in that situation, where someone pitches you a project and, when you tell them you won’t be doing it with them, they give you a hard time… If you’re in the business of selling, I suggest you read Seth Godin’s full text, maybe it will shed some light on what’s going on…

Of course, that lie can have another cause, justified or not. Sometimes the customer knows something the salesperson doesn’t. Or it can be a deep lie, like the chosen vendor being a friend of someone on the board. Or simply that we’ve been fooling ourselves, and the other party is better.

Either way, lies always get found out.

Take it away, Stevie Nicks:

Tell me lies
Tell me sweet little lies
Oh, no, no you can't disguise

– Fletwood Mac

Politicians

Putting up with so many lies wears you down. Politicians should know that, but they don’t accept it, because they keep lying to themselves. The politician is the professional liar par excellence, so good at it that he lies to himself and ends up believing it. The worst part is that his circle, which is full of liars, develops mechanisms to perpetuate itself: they train new liars, they protect the others. I’m not sure whether what bothers me more is that they’re liars, or the fact that we keep electing them and keep paying their salaries.

We are sheep. But the terrible thing is how sinister this can get. Twice in my life I have received “messages” over comments I made about some politician. I find it unbelievable. What is that? If that happens at such a small and insignificant scale, what must happen at a higher level, in the “upper echelons of politics”?

The battles fought in congresses and government palaces around the world must be terrible. The terrible thing is that this is how the fate of all of us is decided.

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!

– The Who

Revolution

When we’re young we take to the streets, for different causes. I marched, or went to demonstrations, against the dictatorship. I voted. “Vamos a decir que no, oh, ooh,” as the jingle of the NO campaign went. And I also felt betrayed. Last year I went to a family march for education, full of hope, and I feel that all of it fizzled out. Summer vacation came along…

Maybe nobody has deep convictions anymore, or at least not enough of them to fight all the way to the end. Better to go to Cuba and kiss Fidel’s ring. Fooled again…

Let’s sing along with Pete Townsend:

The new generation of politicians is being trained to perpetuate the same lie.

“Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi”

– Lampedusa, Il Gatopardo

Lie, lie, some of it will always stick, Goebbels used to say.

Everybody lies

A lot of what Seth Godin says is also lies, or, to be more precise, bullshit. That’s the trouble with people who turn into gurus. Inevitably they end up “exceeding their mandate”.

Bullshit is nonsense. Not all bullshit is a lie, but the important thing is that it has no value whatsoever. And yet we accept it, and that, like every lie, ends up corroding people.

But what can we do, if in the end everybody lies, right?

Although evolution gave us the ability to lie (in a way it’s an evolutionary necessity for survival), it also made us individuals who are very good at detecting lies. Lying well is almost an art; sustaining a lie over time takes an effort so great that only very brilliant (and psychotic) minds can manage it. Telling the truth is cheaper.

When confronted, the liar will show 7 kinds of attitudes:

1. Denial: he reacts by denying everything (“it wasn’t me”).

2. Minimization: he tries to play down the seriousness of what happened (“so what”, “I’ve done it before and nobody said anything”).

3. Rationalization, excuse and justification (“everybody does it”, “let him who is without sin cast the first stone”).

4. Distancing: the situation is assessed from afar, without personal implications (“that’s life”, “this is ancient history”, “anybody could have done it”).

5. Self-deception: the subject fools himself, and ends up telling something about his behavior that is false or distorted.

6. Controlling the situation: nervousness leads him to control his behavior, and he talks. The liar overestimates how detectable his internal states are. He falls into a state known as the “illusion of transparency”, which leads him to overcontrol his behavior, and it comes across as artificial.

7. Personal attack: when questioned, he attacks the person asking. This is a strong indicator of guilt, but it must be told apart from natural indignation.

The universal conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie

If anyone was ever obsessed with lying it was Samuel Clemens, the American writer and humorist, known the world over as Mark Twain. After writing “Huckleberry Finn”, and publishing it in 1884, Clemens began a period of deep criticism of his society, which finally led him to a deep disappointment with humanity.

In that work Twain puts forward his thesis, which he develops as follows: “Huck is a half-socialized boy. He is on the lowest rung a white person can occupy in the American society of the time; only the blacks are below him. That marginalization has had a positive side: Huck has lived far from most of the social mechanisms. His natural goodness or, if you prefer, his innocence, is perverted by contact with society. Evil reigns there, but there is one small detail: society calls its vices virtues; it calls perversion education; it proclaims that all men are equal but does not believe that blacks are people; it talks about brotherly love but, for some, everyone else must be distant cousins, etc.”¹

That distance between what is said and what is done is what bothers Twain.

He developed this idea in his concept of the “universal conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie”:

\[\...\] The universal conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity or a sham, never in the interest of a thing fine or respectable. Is it the most timid and shabby of all lies? It seems to have the look of it. For ages and ages it has mutely laboured in the interest of despotisms and aristocracies and chattel slaveries, and military slaveries, and religious slaveries, and has kept them alive; keeps them alive yet, here and there and yonder, all about the globe; and will go on keeping them alive until the silent-assertion lie retires from business–the silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.\[1\]

For Twain there are two kinds of lies. There’s the one we all know, the one we’ve been talking about so far, the one that makes us say something is black when it is actually white. The effect of this kind of lie depends on what it is meant to achieve. As we have seen, it can be told for protection, out of fear, or to obtain some benefit illicitly.

But the second form of lie is more dangerous. Here it’s not about saying that white is black, but about living as if it were. That is the silent assertion. With the first form of lie we deceive others; with the second kind we deceive ourselves.

The silent-assertion lie allows injustice to reign at all times, because all men live ignoring the truth or, more precisely, wanting to ignore the truth. The most effective and common way of passing on lies is education. In 1908 he writes:

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

In recounting his first lie, Samuel Clemens gives us his deepest thinking:

I do not remember my first lie, it is too far back; but I remember my second one very well. I was nine days old at the time, and had noticed that if a pin was sticking in me and I advertised it in the usual fashion, I was lovingly petted and coddled and pitied in a most agreeable way and got a ration between meals besides. It was human nature to want to get these riches, and I fell. I lied about the pin–advertising one when there wasn’t any. You would have done it; George Washington did it, anybody would have done it. \[\...\] Up to 1867 all the civilised children that were ever born into the world were liars–including George. Then the safety-pin came in and blocked the game. But is that reform worth anything? No; for it is reform by force and has no virtue in it; it merely stops that form of lying, it doesn’t impair the disposition to lie, by a shade. It is the cradle application of conversion by fire and sword, or of the temperance principle through prohibition.²

Men, for Twain, lie out of ambition. They lie to get something better for themselves, even at the expense of others. A change in conditions does not mean a moral change: “if you can’t get pricked, you can’t pretend you got pricked”. Society fools itself by changing the surrounding conditions and sees that as moral progress, when all it has really done is make a certain kind of lie harder, and the lie finds a way to express itself otherwise. Social reforms leave everyone satisfied. They have been imposed as a great advance, a form of progress, when in reality they are just a form of self-deception by society. It is the silent-assertion lie.

Decadence

Friedrich Nietszche has a line that is so simple, yet captures what happens to us with lies: “What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you.”

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel that our society is on its way to accepting lies as the most normal thing in the world. There isn’t even an attempt to disguise them anymore. Maybe it’s the same thing Twain felt in his day; perhaps it’s human nature. But in our time I see a lie-manufacturing machine, powered by technology and psychological manipulation.

We have filled up with charlatans who have powerful media resources at their disposal. The press no longer does its job of investigating, politicians lie, and even at work the lie settles in among employees who do their job badly and hide their mistakes.

If we want to explain the origin of the economic crises we are suffering, we will see that they are crises of confidence: doctored financial statements, prestigious auditing firms issuing reports riddled with lies and distortions. We can’t even be sure that the measures taken in earlier crises are anything more than silent assertions, new lies replacing the old ones in the form of procedures and new laws.

In a posthumous work Mark Twain writes:

“Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted self-deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one. It regarded itself as gold, and was only brass.”³

I think he was absolutely right.