The Truth about Lying

by Stephen Costello

  These are the lies we tell; we tell them to others and sometimes we even lie to ourselves either knowingly (‘no, our relationship will be fine; there’s no cause to worry’ as we blithely go about our business ignoring the problems lurking there) or unconsciously, in that, in this case, the lie has become so powerful and prevalent that we are convinced that it’s the truth. Here, the illusion comes near to being a delusion. I guess what separates the ‘normal’ neurotic (most of us) from the psychotic (madman) is one of degrees in that the former usually know when they’re lying whereas the latter lives the lie so it becomes their truth. For example, when we say ‘I’m God’ we are usually joking (hopefully); when the psychotic says it he believes it; he is suffering from delusions; we, by contrast, are engaging in wish-fulfilments. Either way, we are not going to be hauled off in a straight-jacket. This raises the interesting question about the relationship between lies and mental illness. The question is: Can a psychotic person lie?

  ‘In this treacherous world Nothing is the truth nor a lie. Everything depends on the color Of the crystal through which one sees it.’ – Pedro Calderón de la Barca

  The Lies of Madmen

  We can’t cure a madman with our truth; they won’t believe us – there is just no convincing them – probably just as well. To take an example that Slavok Žižek, the contemporary Slovenian philosopher, cites: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed (the lie: he’s not, he’s a man but clearly he doesn’t know he’s lying) is taken to a mental hospital where the doctor does his best to tell him the truth – that he is not a seed but a man. When he is ‘cured’ and convinced that he is a man and allowed to leave the institution, he immediately comes back inside shaking. There is a chicken outside the door and he’s afraid it will eat him. The doctor says, ‘My good man, you know very well that you’re a man and not a grain of seed’. The man replies, ‘Of course I know that, but does the chicken know it?’

  The unconscious itself (in this case, the psychotic’s unconscious) must be brought to assume the truth; it is not enough to convince others about their unconscious truth. The question is: how to do it? How do you go about convincing others that their visual or auditory hallucinations are precisely that: hallucinations? So the psychotic lies from our perspective but from his perspective he is telling the truth. Sometimes a literal telling of truth is a sign or symptom of psychopathology, of mental abnormality. Autistic children are unable to lie; they cannot pretend or conceal. Similarly, the psychotic has repressed nothing and so has no secrets he keeps from himself. Those with Parkinson’s disease show difficulties too in deceiving others. There is a term for compulsive lying: pseudologia fantastica. Mythomania is the term used to designate and describe an excessive propensity for lying. And did you know that speech is shorter when lying than when telling the truth? Lies tend to be tight, just as truth is tangential.

  The above discussion touches on an interesting topic raised by Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, whom we quoted in the Preface, and it is this: is all truth fiction? Is all fiction interpretation? Is truth merely a perspective? (We considered above the case of the psychotic whose ‘truth’ is our lie; does this mean that our lies are his truths?) If I don’t see twelve pink elephants running around the room and he does I would say I am sane and he is insane but we have to distinguish between material (physical) and mental (psychical) reality, so what ‘reality’ are we talking about? Perhaps we see the same world but see it differently to each other? Partial truths and truthful lies, so. Let’s go into the matter in a little bit more detail.

  Lies with Truth

  Every truth is partial; truth is a perspective (this according to Nietzsche). If this is true then is every lie a partial truth? ‘Why are you saying you’re glad to see me, when you’re really glad to see me?’ One can be too suspicious. Sometimes we do mean what we say. Imagine. ‘Say what you mean.’ If only! Protect me from what I want. I just might get it. If someone says (consciously), ‘Don’t lie to me’, they may very well mean (unconsciously), ‘Please lie to me’. It’s like the proverbial patient who came to Freud, who questioned him about his dream, and said, ‘I can tell you one thing for definite – it’s not about my mother.’ Guess what? It’s about his mother!

  In 1873 Nietzsche wrote, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’, in which he offers a number of subtle reflections on the psychology of lying, ones that were to influence Freud and his creation of psychoanalysis. According to Nietzsche, the art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man:

  ‘Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendour, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself, … is so much the rule and law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; … man permits himself to be deceived in his dreams every night of his life.’

  So even dreams deceive; they lie themselves. Freud held this too – that every dream is a disguise, a distortion, a deception intent on leading us astray. The unconscious itself can’t lie, but a dream is not the same as the unconscious. For psychoanalysts, consciousness is deceptive. What then is truth? In a famous passage, Nietzsche describes truth as a ‘movable host of metaphors, metonymies, … Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions – they are metaphors that have become worn out’. And in his book, Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche wonders whether convictions are even more dangerous enemies to truth than lies. There is one fundamental difference between the ‘normal’ neurotic (as I am calling most of us) and the psychotic in this regard: we doubt things whereas the psychotic is certain. He just knows. Convictions can be very stubborn and extremely hard to shift even in the face of incontrovertible truth to the contrary. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche puts the question more definitively and we are not left wondering as to his answer:

  ‘Is there any actual difference between a lie and a conviction?’ What a lie is in the father can become a conviction in the son. Lying is thus akin to a conviction: ‘I call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse to see it as it is: …. The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself.’

  Nietzsche felt that lying is more natural than truthtelling. Goethe, the German playwright, had likewise opined that, ‘Truth is contrary to our nature’ in his Maxims and Reflections. In his 1873 thesis, Nietzsche had gone as far as to say that truth cannot even be recognised. For him, the pleasure of lying is artistic and artistic pleasure ‘speaks the truth quite generally in the form of lies’. Interestingly, for Richard Rorty, the American philosopher, truth is opposed not to falsehood but to pleasure. Later, Oscar Wilde would scandalise Victorian society with his Nietzschean aphorisms and epigrams (and we shall read his reflections on the subject later on as well). For Nietzsche, truth can be a cloak to disguise different drives and desires. Truth can be selfish, sinister, a smoke screen for subversive and submerged intentions. Freud, a sometime follower of Nietzsche, wrote in a letter to Arnold Zweig (31 May 1936) that ‘truth is unobtainable; humanity does not deserve it’.

  The minute someone says, ‘Truth is here’, if it is proclaimed by Confucius or Mohammed or the Christian Church, ‘the priest lies’, as no one has ‘the Truth’. All we have are truths – lower case and pluralised; Nietzsche calls it the ‘holy lie’ and to believe in God is the ultimate, the ‘longest lie’ (for both Nietzsche and Sartre). If, to believe in God is to lie to ourselves, for these atheists the question becomes for René Descartes, the French philosopher and believer: does God deceive us? Let’s see what he has to say on the subject. Some might say that Descartes put ‘the cart before the horse’. I know, dreadful joke.

  Does God Deceive Us?

  Descartes, for a while at least, entertained the thought that perhaps God could deceive him, that God could be an evil genius, a malignant rather than benevolent deit
y, a thesis he ultimately rejected. If God is all perfect (a common enough description or definition of God), He can’t deceive us as deception implies imperfection.

  We are told in numerous places in the Bible that God cannot lie (Num. 23: 19; Ps. 89: 35; Hab. 2: 3; Heb. 6: 13-18), but there are also examples of God lying (2 Thes. 2: 11; 1 Kings 22: 23; Ezek. 14: 9). The eighth commandment tells us not to bear false witness against our neighbour. There are, however, instances of lying in both the Old and New Testaments. Rahab lied to the King of Jericho; Delilah accused Samson of lying to her; Abraham tells his wife Sarah to lie to the Egyptians. And Jesus Christ refers to the Devil as the father of lies (John 8: 44). Satan, we are told, was a liar from the beginning. And St. Paul commands Christians: ‘Do not lie to one another’ (Colossians 3: 9). Now I just want to bring these quotations to your attention without delving into the intricacies of a theological debate on the subject. It seems logical enough (logical to me, at any rate) that if God exists He is good and therefore wouldn’t lie or choose to deceive us. I, for one, would have no interest in a God who toys with or lies to us. ‘As flies to wanton boys so are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport,’ as King Lear’s Gloucester says. Who would be interested in this type of lying, deceiving fiend? Either God is good or God is not, surely? Well, we now move from gods to dogs. We know that we humans lie and that God, if He exists, doesn’t (don’t we?). The question now is: Do animals lie?

  The Lies of Animals

  Nature is a liar. There is in nature and the animal kingdom a huge propensity for cheating. In the survival of the fittest (which means the destruction of the weakest), deceitfulness becomes an ethic. In this depressing Darwinian picture, creatures must camouflage (nature’s craftiest trick) themselves from beastly, permissive predators who want to snack on them. There is mimicry and masquerade in butterflies, birds and beetles, in flora and fauna. Deliberate deceit, camouflage, concealment and cunning is more the rule than the exception as falsehood emerges through natural selection, variation and chance mutation. Play, pretence and poker faces are practised. As Heraclitus, the ancient Hellenic philosopher, once observed: ‘Nature loves to hide.’ Think of the changing colouration of some creatures for purposes of brute survival – ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. Certain animals and insects change their colour or their coats. When threatened, the hognose snake likes to fake its own death by emitting foul odours and hanging its tongue out of its mouth, producing drops of blood as it does. The cheetah (cheater), though, never changes his spots. But do animals have the mental ability to lie?

  The capacity to lie has been claimed to be possessed by non-human animals in language studies with great apes. Koko, the gorilla made famous for learning American sign-language, was once caught red-handed. After tearing a steel sink from the wall in the middle of a tantrum, she signed to handlers that the cat did it!

  Deceptive body language such as feints that mislead as to the direction of attack or flight has been observed in many species including wolves. A mother bird deceives when she pretends to have a broken wing to divert the attention of a perceived predator – from the eggs in its nest to itself – notably the killdeer. In the human kingdom there are some little boys who cry ‘wolf’ too many times to be believed. And there are, as we know, human wolves in sheep’s clothes. Such cheating animals are chameleons just as some men are lizards in love.

  Most animals leave tracks in their wake. Hunters look at these tracks to discover where their prey will be. The animal doesn’t efface his trace. A select few will make false tracks designed to fool the hunter. But some hunters will know that the tracks they see are signs that the animals did not pass this way. Humans, however, set real tracks that are intended to signal that they have not gone in the direction they suggest. We can tell the truth to lie.

  There is untruth at the heart of truth (for example, insects who appear to be part and parcel of the foliage). What, though, is the difference between man, understood as a ‘rational animal’ to give him Aristotle’s famous definition, and a non-human animal? An animal can feign but man can feign to feign. In other words, men lie in the guise of truth itself (we will see in detail what this means later). Such a man is like the Jew from an anecdote quoted by Freud:

  ‘Two friends meet on a train and one says to the other that he is going to Warsaw, to which his friend replies: “Why are you telling me you’re going to Warsaw so I’ll think you’re going to Lemberg, when you are really going to Warsaw?”’

  It acts as a double bluff. By telling the truth (‘I’m sorry I am late home but I swear I wasn’t playing golf; I’m actually having an affair with a co-worker’) while pretending to lie you’re really telling the truth. This would be in a world where everybody lied. Similarly, we could say, ‘Why are you complimenting me when you really mean it?’ Or, as Groucho Marx famously said: ‘He may act like an idiot and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.’

  The Politics of Lying

  Lying is universal. Should we always doubt what is being said to us? No, but we probably should take a lot of what we hear with a pinch of salt seeing how ubiquitous ‘the lie’ is. Telling the truth, after all, put Socrates, Jesus Christ and St. Thomas More, to cite but three examples, to death. In George Orwell’s 1984, a person who dared to speak the truth was liquidated by the State. There is, so, a politics of lying and of truth-telling. Politics is, after all, the art of the possible. And, at times, it is very difficult to distinguish between them. Life is lies, half-truth and evasion. We live in an age when trust is hard currency. We are lied to every day by the media, advertisers, lovers, friends and politicians (surely not?). As one unknown source says: ‘How can you tell if a politician is lying? When his lips are moving.’ Margaret Thatcher ruled out deliberate lies (she says) but ruled in the necessity of being evasive (she would). Alexander Haig, former General and US Secretary of State, defended this thus: ‘That’s not a lie; it’s a terminological inexactitude. Also, a tactical misrepresentation.’ Wow! Spin doctors, politicians, estate agents and advertising executives spin webs of deceit and like flies to spiders’ webs we become entangled in their lies (mainly because we want to believe them ourselves). There is sham, sly evasions, artifice, cunning, chicanery, duplicity, dissimulation, disambiguation, bluff, guile, trickery, imposture, subterfuge, mystification and manipulativeness everywhere. Eve’s serpent continues to tempt. But lies can convey truth; a pinch of lies can make the truth more palatable.

  Freud took what his patients said with a pinch of salt realising that lies are sometimes more informative than the literal truth. There can also be a blurred line between fact and fantasy or fiction. Imagine that there are two doors with two guards standing outside. One door leads to Hell, the other to Paradise. One guard always lies and the other always tells the truth. (In some versions of this story, one door leads to the castle and the other door leads to certain death.) You have to find out which door leads to eternal happiness by asking one of the guards one question only. What question do you ask? In the 1986 fantasy film, Labyrinth, Sarah, the protagonist, asks: ‘Would the other guard tell me that this door leads to the castle?’ Clever. Unfortunately, in life we must contend with lying and truth-telling in the same person; and sometimes these two are uttered simultaneously. Sometimes, too, somebody is suffering from False Memory Syndrome. Here is the answer. Ask one guard: ‘If I were to ask the other guard which door I should take to go to Paradise, which one would he tell me?’ One then takes the other door from the one indicated.

  The Lies of Children

  So the question is: when does lying in the human animal first begin? Children used to chant ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’. Remember that one? Children lie from three years of age onwards and lying develops rapidly after that. At four and a half years they begin to lie convincingly. By age seven, children are pretty proficient at lying, showing a Machiavellian intelligence. Now, where do they get that from, Mummy or Daddy? But the question is: left to their own devices
would children lie at all or, rather, are their lies responses to the lies of adults? Frequently they are. All adults lie to children and all children want is the truth. Lucky for them they don’t get it. Goethe wryly observed, ‘Children are a real touchstone of what is falsehood and what is truth. They have far less need for self-deception than do old people.’ Indeed.

  In ‘Two Lies Told by Children’ (1913), Freud opines that children tell lies when they are imitating the lies told by adults. But children can tell lies under the influence of excessive feelings of love, and Freud gives two such examples. I warn you, they are a bit intricate – psychoanalysis always is.

  The first case concerns a girl of seven, in her second year at school, who asked her father for some money in order to buy colours to paint some Easter eggs. Her father refused, saying he had no money to spare. Later, she asked him for money for a wreath for the funeral of their reigning princess who had just died and to which each of the schoolchildren were contributing sixpence. Her father gave her ten marks (ten shillings, in the old money, we are helpfully told): she paid her contribution, put nine marks on her father’s writing-table and with the remaining money bought paints which she hid in her toy cupboard. At dinner her father asked her what she did with the missing money and whether she had, in fact, bought paints with it. She lied; she denied it altogether but her older brother, who was nine years old, betrayed her and the paints were found. The angry father gave her over to her mother who punished her severely, we are told.