DECEPTION

Author: BY ANDREW STEPHENS

Date: 04/06/2011

Publication: The Age

From the well-intentioned falsehood to the baldfaced whopper, untruths find their way into every conversation. Social bonds are sealed on insincerity and punishments avoided in the blink of a lie. But as we stray from the path of absolute honesty, do our little white lies make frauds of us all?

HE TELEPHONES his boss one unspectacular morning and says he won’t be in because his nine-month-old daughter is ill. It’s what we call a white lie. The truth is that ennui has engulfed him. He can’t stand another day at his boring job. He loathes his tedious boss. But he won’t say this, so he lies slightly  what’s the harm?  and unwittingly provokes unforeseeable consequences.

In this short story by T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Lie (now a forthcoming film directed by Joshua Leonard), the fib told by the character Lonnie goes so wildly awry that what begins (he thinks) as a size-S deceit becomes an XXXL one. That is what white lies are wont to do. We might think them harmless, we might imagine they spare other people’s feelings and smooth the complex gears of social interaction (“No, your bum doesn’t look fat in those jeans”) but, really, fiddling with the truth on any scale is risky territory.

It’s ironic, of course, that it is through the realm of fiction that we often find the deepest truths. Writers and filmmakers are magnificent liars. In this instance, The Lie takes the path of humour and human drama to hit home with truths. Another film directly addressing this all-too-human attribute, opening here next week, does the same. French director Guillaume Canet’s Little White Lies is a sort of European The Big Chill about a group of friends whose “harmless” little deceptions, blurrings and omissions cause complicated scenarios and rifts.

On the non-fiction literary scene, lying is also under inspection right now: the internationally renowned Australian-born psychologist Dorothy Rowe last year released the exceptional analysis Why We Lie, while British writer Ian Leslie’s Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit hits bookstores next month.

Indeed, almost the whole spectrum of media seems to focus on some aspect of truth and lies  from supermarket glossies outraged at Arnold Schwarzenegger “living a lie” (while themselves peddling many a spurious yarn), to quality broadsheets dedicated to truth-seeking by exposing and analysing police or political corruption.

Michael P. Lynch writes in True to Life: Why Truth Matters (2005) that we are increasingly cynical about truth, especially as it is expressed in public life. “We often don’t care about truth as much as we should: we dissemble, hide behind ambiguity, refrain from speaking up, we turn away, stop asking questions, ignore reasonable objections, fudge the data and close our minds,” he writes. “Not caring about truth is a type of cowardice.”

Certainly, all this attention comes at a point in history when we seem particularly exposed to an inordinate amount of fakery: spin has spun wildly, almost ludicrously, into excess; politicians, bankers and corporate bosses are simply expected to lie (and to get away with it); the advertising industry thrives on blatant deception; yet, somehow, we collude with it all  while still loudly protesting that lying is an affront to our moral sense and while also forgiving ourselves an exaggeration here, an omission there and an outright porker way over there. Is there a way through all this?

The nature of truth has always been a favourite for philosophers, though no one seems quite able to ascertain precisely how small a lie has to be to be “white” and permissible: we each have an individual interpretation (probably to suit each situation as it arises). Rowe doesn’t let us off the hook with white lies. Born in 1930, she’s had a lot of time to observe, especially in her job as a psychologist. When she told people she was writing a new book examining why we lie, the unvaried response was: “Of course, you don’t mean white lies, do you?”

“But I did mean white lies,” she told the Perth Writers Festival in March. And, she elaborates in her book, she meant black lies and all the shades of grey in between. “I had a simple definition of a lie  words or actions intended to deceive. The key word was ‘intended’.”

Why do we do this to ourselves and to others? The most common white lie we tell is a daily one-worder  “Fine”  when asked how we are. Rowe builds a compelling, rich landscape in her book, one that includes an exploration of white lies, arguing that while we might think we tell such fibs for the benefit of others, in truth we lie primarily for our own benefit: we don’t want to be disliked, because being disliked erodes our sense of being a person.

“One form of questioning I have always used in my work is looking for the reasons behind the reasons,” she told the festival.

“Being disliked is so frightening … and when you go through looking for the reasons behind the reasons, what emerges is a lie in order to protect yourself and make sure that people like you.”

In her book, she says we lie over the most stupid things and “will lie when telling the truth would lead to a better outcome; we will lie when we do not know why we are lying; we will lie to people who do not matter to us and to people who do … Persistently, unthinkingly, we will lie to ourselves.”

Newborns, she says, don’t rest in their cots wondering if their parents like them. They are simply there, interested in what is happening. “Within two years, three years, that totally unselfconscious, self-confident baby has turned into an anxious toddler, who is worried about being liked, worried about not doing what he is supposed to do, not living up to the expectations of adults,” she says.

“This happens so early in our lives, it is the basis of all our feelings of inadequacy.” Thus, we think we are impostors, not as good as we ought to be, when in fact we are OK. And we lie to cover.

She writes of her own childhood, hectored by an obstinate, controlling mother who would brook no ideas contrary to her own. “All too often I forgot this. I would be excited by an idea or an event and out it would come. If what I said conflicted with the way my mother wanted to see the world, she would shut me up with, ‘You’re lying’, or ‘That’s not true’.”

Rowe says her mother, in calling her a liar, was as destructive to her as she would have been had she attempted to murder her.

Little wonder that Rowe, when she left Australia and her mother behind, turned her attention to a meticulous search for truth. She isn’t like a bossy parent telling us not to lie; rather, she encourages us to explore shared truths, which make society and relationships possible, and individual truths, which are the essence of who we are as people. It is for this reason that she classifies “denial” as lying  and the things we are most in denial about are uncertainty and aloneness. To avoid them, we lie, all the way along the spectrum from white to black.

Princeton University professor Harry Frankfurt  author of On Truth and On Bullshit  agrees. Writing in the essay collection The Philosophy of Deception, he notes that while many philosophers insist that lying undermines the cohesion of human society, the real damage is done to oneself.

Lying, he writes, inhibits intimacy, denying us an elemental mode of human connection  that is, knowing what is or isn’t in another person’s mind. With lies, even white ones, we keep others at bay.

LYING requires imagination  the bedrock of the arts  so it is no surprise that authors such as M.J. Hyland say that being a successful fiction writer is about being “a persuasive liar”. In a 2009 interview, Hyland revealed that she used to be an unstoppable fibber. “I’d rationalise it as proof of the size and depth of my imagination,” she said. “It all wore off by the time I was 20.” But it continued in her fictional worlds, where “writing fiction and telling lies are interrelated”.

All writers must work with this. Peter Carey is celebrated for the way his fiction joyously toys with smacking realism up against wild imaginings. He says he has something of a habit of using unreliable narrators in his fiction, such as Herbert Badgery in Illywhacker (1985), who introduces himself as a 139-year-old liar.

“I have such a character for many reasons. First, to celebrate the nature of the game of fiction together with my readers. Second, to allow my protagonist to relate events he could not possibly have observed  that is, to offer first- and third-person narratives, which we can enjoy even while understanding they may well be lies. Third (more fundamentally perhaps), I have been interested in the big and small lies a nation tells itself: the idea that the Holden could possibly be ‘Australia’s own car’ (when the design was American and all the profits were repatriated to Detroit).

“More important is our biggest lie, the false assumptions of terra nullius, which shaped our history from first settlement to the present day.”

But while novels might reveal deep truth, they can also fail it. Carey says the novelist’s failures are “imaginative cowardice, laziness, cultivation of prejudices, habitual repetition of unexamined belief and, most of all, those comforting cliches that coat the raw and bitter truth with their own sweet poison”.

Writers or not, perhaps we are all programmed to lie  or to at least spend a good deal of our time only guessing at the reality of the world.

In Born Liars, Leslie writes about the extreme limitations of our senses, how our brains fill in the gaps and, literally, deceive us. In May, New Scientist devoted much of one edition to this with features on “The Grand Delusion”  articles on how we never actually see what is really around us and on the extreme limits of memory and the illusion of free will. We are, it suggested, designed to deceive ourselves. Probing this aspect from an evolutionary point of view, Leslie writes about how baboons, as well as other primates, octopuses, birds, snakes and even some plants, regularly use deceit to survive.

For humans, lying and deception have been essential to us surviving  how else could we evade predators, snare food, seduce mates and outdo our competitors?

Is it, then, any wonder we lie as a matter of course? If everyone told the truth to each other all the time, Leslie says, life would be intolerable. “What do you think of my haircut?” “It makes you look like a teenage boy.” “How are you today?” “I’m really angry and upset and here’s why (goes on for hours)”.

“Without lies and evasions we would be constantly offended and upset by each other; fights would break out; relationships would collapse,” he says.

Would this be the case? Some, such as Rowe, insist it is the way we tell the truth that is important. She says we must be honest in a way that is not geared to harm others. With children, we must be truthful in a way they are able to understand and deal with; honesty becomes a part of them. “Truth-telling is really quite difficult but it’s a task that we really ought to improve in the way we do it,” she says.

THERE is a scene in Little White Lies where, around a table, the main characters must, when confronted, face the truth about themselves and their white lies. They move towards greater integrity and wholeness and intimacy blossoms, just as they face the uncertainty of life and death and their essential aloneness in the world.

If we must lie to others, Rowe writes, we must do it knowing that we are lying and be aware that there will be unintended and unimagined consequences.

“Never lie to yourself,” she implores us. “By recognising your own truths, no matter how painful and saddening these might be, you make yourself into a whole person who is much better able to deal with whatever life throws at you.” Such are the facts of life.

Why We Lie, by Dorothy Rowe, Fourth Estate, $24.99.

Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit, by Ian Leslie