The problem with lying

“Lie, lie, something will always stick” – Goebbels

In Chile people lie, a lot and shamelessly, with no consequences. We all know it, and we let it slide. The problem with accepting lies, just like that, is that the cost is absorbed by all of us as a society.

Whenever I think about lying I go back to Samuel Clemens, the American writer known as Mark Twain. Reflecting on his work “Huckleberry Finn”, Joaquín Mª Aguirre Romero says:

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

This distance between what is said and what is done is irritating. It is what Twain criticizes with 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: the one we all know, and the one that makes us say something is black when it is actually white. It is what we now call “post-truth”, which ironically shows how right the author of Tom Sawyer was.

The effect of ordinary lies depends on the ends pursued with them: it can be self-protection, you can lie out of fear, or in order to gain some benefit illicitly.

But the other lies, the ones we now call post-truths, are more dangerous. Here it is not about saying that white is black, but about living as if it were. This is the one Twain calls the “Silent Assertion”, and that we have rebranded as post-truth. With ordinary lies we seek to deceive others; with the silent assertion we deceive ourselves.

The Lie of Silent Assertion 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.

This is the account of how Samuel Clemens remembers his first lies:

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, according to 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 it as moral progress, when in fact it has only made a certain kind of lie harder, and lying finds a way to express itself some other way. 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 lie of silent assertion.

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

Today it is easier to lie; we have automated lying. Social media lets us spread lies to the whole world. Nobody takes the time to verify: if a link on Facebook fits our self-deception, we pass it along to everyone we know.

In “The Mysterious Stranger”, a posthumous work by Twain, he 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.”