The Truth about Lying

by Stephen Costello

  It is the liar, with his tall tales, who is the real founder of social intercourse.

  Art is the breaking free from the ‘prison-house’ (Wilde ironically calls it) of realism. Art, indeed, will go forth to greet the liar, ‘and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life – poor, probable, uninteresting human life’ will meekly follow after him while miserably attempting to reproduce the marvels of which he speaks. Vivian goes on to say that undoubtedly there will be the critic who will contact the Saturday Review and censure the teller of fairy-tales (Wilde himself wrote some beautiful ones) and chide him for his defective knowledge of history; in their unimaginative way, they ‘will hold up their ink-stained hands in horror’. In fact, they may even cite Shakespeare’s aphorism that art holds the mirror up to nature but this particular epigram was put into the mouth of Hamlet to convince the bystanders of the insanity in matters of art. Art is a veil rather than a mirror, Vivian asserts, while Cyril asks for another cigarette. Far from art imitating life, life imitates art. Life is the mirror and art the reality. And Wilde was true to his philosophy. He made of his life a work of art:

  ‘For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilised society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate at the Incorporated Authors.’

  Vivian/Wilde makes the interesting point that to look at something is very different from seeing it and one doesn’t see anything until one sees its beauty. People see fogs, he says, because poets and painters have taught about them. No one really saw the fogs in London until they were painted, until art invented them. Art never tells us the truth and Wilde is on the side of art more than on the side of depressing truth. Vivian says, ‘art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth’.

  So, what to do? Vivian answers: to revive and restore the old art of lying. The light and graceful side of lying can be seen at literary lunches and at afternoon teas but there are many other forms. There is lying in order to gain some immediate personal advantage; there is lying with a moral purpose – in order to procure some good perhaps; there is lying for the sake of the improvement of the young, as the early books of Plato’s Republic attest; there is lying for the sake of a monthly salary, as in Fleet Street. Indeed, a short primer on lying – ‘When to Lie and How’ – if brought out in an attractive and not too expensive form would likely command a large sale and would be of real practical service to a lot of deep-thinking people. But the only form of lying that is ‘absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in Art’. It’s more important to love beauty than truth. And when that day dawns, Vivian will be joyous. Facts will be discredited, truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and the wonder of romance will return to a world full of realism. ‘Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan,’ as they said on the maps of old when books of geography were actually readable and dragons ‘will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air’, but before all this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of lying. Cyril, at the conclusion of this conversation, is convinced and says that we must cultivate it at once. The matter is pressing.

  Wilde here reveals the loveliness of lying and ends with the famous declaration and definition of lying as ‘the telling of beautiful untrue things’ – this being for him the proper end and aim of all art.

  Eyes for Lies

  Wilde lied in the courtroom and was himself lied to as he looked into the eyes of those rent boys whose bodies he purchased and coveted. Conversely, there are some people who have ‘eyes for lies’.

  In a research project called The Wizards Project, a ‘truth wizard’ is a person who has the ability to detect a lie with an 80 per cent or higher rate of accuracy. This would be an amazing accomplishment by any standards. Two scientists conducted the experiment and identified only 50 people as Truth Wizards (what about Lying Witches?) after testing 200,000 people from all walks of life, from students to the Secret Service, from salesmen to sheriffs, from attorneys to arbitrators, from farmers to the FBI. Psychiatrists and law enforcement officers showed no more aptitude than college students, though the Secret Service agents were the most skilled in detecting deceit. Truth Wizards are especially attuned to nuances of facial expression, body language, ways of talking and they spot these micro-expressions which give us away. The TV series Lie to Me is based on the work of these researchers. However, most of the time we are taken in by lying eyes as we are held hostage by the sometimes lethal even if lovely look, just as Wilde was. ‘If you love me, you’d lie to me.’ ‘I’ve eyes only for you.’ But love is blind, just as beauty besots – love wears blinders. Love’s a blinder. When do we lie with our eyes? When we blink excessively or not at all.

  ‘Love the way you lie’ (Eminem). ‘The tongue may hide the truth but the eyes – never!’ – Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

  Leading Questions, Lying Answers

  And what comes out of our mouths? Within any scenario or situation where dualistic answers such as ‘yes/no’, ‘black/white’, are always given, a person whom we know is consistently lying would paradoxically be a source of truth. This is the paradox of lying.

  Some questions are more likely to elicit the truth than others. ‘When was the last time you smoked some hash?’ (a leading question) is more likely to get a truthful answer than, ‘Do you smoke hash?’ There is no such thing, thank God, as a truth serum. That doesn’t mean we don’t get anxious when we lie and give ourselves away. ‘One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth’ (Nietzsche). We want to get caught out, unconsciously. In relation to biology, the brain may be a perjurer but the body gives the brain away. Think of the technology of the lie detector test, of the polygraph and galvanic skin response. The polygraph shows up the lie in the outpourings of the neuro-hormones. To lie well requires that we don’t care too much about getting caught out.

  In conversations there is a widespread belief that we can catch people out by closely observing which direction they tilt their heads and look with their eyes. However, according to the most recent scientific experiments, there is no validity to the assertion made by many proponents of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that certain eye movements (facial clues or ‘tells’) are reliable indicators of lying, according to which, a person who looks up to their right is lying, while someone looking up to their left is telling the truth. Studies seem not to support this claim. Liars do not exhibit a particular pattern of eye movement. There is no correlation between eye movement and modality of thought. It is true, though, that liars use fewer and more tentative words, such as ‘if’, ‘perhaps’, and ‘maybe’, and blink more.

  The four most common lies you will hear: ‘I’m fine’, ‘I love you’, ‘We will be together forever’ and ‘You will use Algebra in real life’. If it’s true that the average person (whoever that may be) tells four lies a day (according to one account) then we tell 1,460 lies a year, which amounts to a total of 67,600 by the time we reach the age of 60 (doesn’t that depend on when we start?).

  Moreover, our use of electronic forms of communication facilitates the lie and issues in an increasingly dishonest future. It’s much easier to lie in emails, Facebook posts, Twitter comments and mobile texts, etc. because it’s quicker, takes less thought and is intended for the public (even if ‘friends’, which we’ve never even met, are ‘poked’) about whom we care very little.

  The ‘Science of Honesty’ study established a link between lying less and improved mental health, as well as more positive results in participants’ personal relationships. And according to the Radical Honesty Movement, everyone would be happier if we told the truth more of the time. Lying,
they contend, is the primary source of stress, depression and anxiety.

  Anxiety Doesn’t Lie

  The question is: does anxiety lie? Anxiety is the price we pay for the absence of guilt. Anxiety doesn’t lie, according to the philosophers and psychoanalysts who have written on this subject. It’s the only affect that doesn’t deceive. All other emotions, from sorrow to love, are based ultimately on deceit. You can trust your anxiety, however, even if you don’t like it. That’s the good news.

  We certainly get anxious attempting to recall our lies; that’s why Algernon Sydney, the seventeenth-century English political theorist, famously said, ‘Liars need to have good memories’. Conversely, as Mark Twain recognised:

  ‘If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.’

  Just so. But who can tell the truth? We have answered that earlier: the psychotic, but at the price of his sanity.

  Men spend most of their time lying to themselves while women spend their time lying to the Other – with the hope of being caught out. But women have the better memory.

  And both sexes lie on their Curriculum Vitaes. CVs read like the fairytales of the world – does anyone really not lie on their résumés?

  When given an unwelcome gift, I think both men and women find it particularly difficult to lie. One can say, though, and mean it: ‘I can’t begin to tell you what I think of it!’ Women are more likely to ‘self-gift’ than men.

  Lying Cretans

  There is paradox at the heart of love too, for in love, as Jacques Lacan, Freud’s French follower, tells us, we give what we don’t have (our whole self) to someone who doesn’t want it (they want part-objects such as eyes, lips etc.). But there is also paradox at the heart of logic (for example, a perfectly logically valid syllogism is: ‘The Statue of Liberty is in Madrid. Madrid is in Spain. Therefore, the Statue of Liberty is in Spain.’ But it just so happens, in reality, that the Statue of Liberty is in New York) and paradox at the heart of our lies/truth-telling too. Logic lies.

  There is what is known as the Liar’s Paradox (originally devised in the fourth century BC by Eubulides who said: ‘A man says that he’s lying. Is what he says true or false?’). Epimenides, a Cretan, reportedly said: ‘The Cretans are always liars.’ Is he lying when he says this? The statement is false as long as there exists at least one Cretan who has told the truth at least once. Another example of a ‘Liar’s Paradox’ in logic is the statement, ‘This statement is false’. If ‘This sentence is false’ is true, then it is false, which would in turn mean that it’s actually true but this would mean that it’s false, etc. Epimenides, a Cretan, asserts that, ‘All Cretans are liars’, as we said above. If he is telling the truth, then he is lying. This is like when I say the following: ‘What I am now saying is false’ – here the intention to deceive is set aside. I will spare you any detailed discussion about principles of bivalence, laws of the excluded middle, paraconsistent logic, situational semantics, dialetheism, and Tarski’s and Gödel’s mathematical theorems, mainly because I don’t know any of them myself, and just tell you that, aside from these logical non-Cretans, I personally know many lying, non-logical cretins.

  1: The sentence printed below is false.

  2: The sentence written above is true.

  If the second sentence is true, then the first is true; but if the first is true, the second is false. I feel I’m going round in circles. You too?

  The Liar’s Paradox is best summed up by Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself a logician, thus:

  ‘If a man says “I am lying” we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you are black in the face.’

  Or blue in the face, for that matter.

  Wittgenstein elaborated the notion of ‘language games’, each with its own set of rules; so the ‘truth’ is determined by those rules. Lying would be equivalent to a soccer player picking up the ball and running with it. However, if that game were rugby that would be ‘truthful’ behaviour. Wittgenstein marvelled at the fact that lying comes so easily to us and recalls how at the age of eight he was struck by the question: why speak the truth if there is something to be gained by telling a lie? He still felt lying to have a harmful effect on one. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein writes:

  ‘Often, it is only very slightly more disagreeable to tell the truth than to lie; about as difficult as drinking bitter rather than sweet coffee; and yet I still have a strong inclination to lie.’

  Furthermore, not all true propositions can be proved. When someone says to you, ‘I always lie’, you can trust them! It was a lie that I always lie. So I don’t always lie. ‘No, it’s all lies.’ But the true liar may be bluffing when he says this. In this way, I am deceiving you. By so doing, I am telling the truth. Freud’s Jewish joke comes to mind (earlier I gave another version of it):

  ‘Two Jews met in a railway carriage in Galicia. “Where are you going?” asked one. “To Cracow,” was the answer. “What a liar you are!” broke out the other. “If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?”.’

  Since, according to Freud, there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, we cannot distinguish between truth and fiction.

  Freud spent a lot of his time analysing ‘hysterics’. In 1866, Jules Falret, the French doctor, wrote: ‘The life of the hysteric is one perpetual lie.’ However, in October 1910 at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud intervened when Alfred Adler, the psychologist, spoke on hysterical lying. The Minutes tell us Freud said the following: ‘The mendacity of hysterics calls to mind the old paradox of the Cretan: if a hysterical woman asserts that she has lied, it may be precisely this assertion that is a lie.’

  But lies can be analysed. Freud analysed little Hans’ lies (the five-year-old phobic); they were anything but meaningless. However, analysis is not for everyone. For one thing it costs a lot and requires a lot of investment – financial, emotional, etc. It is a psychoanalytic dictum/truism that money never lies.

  Truth is cheerless; lying is creative. There is the liar and then there is the bullshitter. ‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.’ His speech is empty; it is idle. But the Freudian lesson here is that we need to take lies seriously; they are an indication of powerful passions, of deep desires. So much goes on in our unconscious; lies that dare not speak their name. Freud had this to say about that:

  ‘There are countless civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest but who do not deny themselves the satisfaction of their avarice, their aggressive urges or their sexual lusts, and who do not hesitate to injure other people by lies, fraud and calumny.’

  Our lying dreams give us away. Also, protestations: ‘I’m telling you the truth’ (said in a slightly shrill voice); this means, if we follow Freud’s logic in his article, ‘Negation’, that the person is lying. Such is the language of lies. Which one of us when stopped by the police behaves as if we were not guilty? We are all guilty of something. Isn’t the person who doesn’t lie the ultimate moral monster? All speech is destined to deceive and that’s why we enjoy talking so much. The French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Reveries, asserts:

  ‘I have often made up stories, but very rarely told lies.’

  A Tale of Three

  Here’s another brain teaser: three goddesses were sitting in an old Indian temple. Their names are Truth (who always tells the truth), Lie (who always lies) and Wisdom (who sometimes lies). A visitor asks the one on the left, ‘Who is sitting next to you?’ ‘Truth,’ she answered. Then he asks the one in the middle, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Wisdom,’ is the response. Lastly, he asks the one on the right, ‘Who is your neighbour?’ ‘Lie,’ she replies. And then it became clear who is who. Can you work it out? Write down all the combinations of orientation and rule them out one by one. Let T = Truth, W = Wisdom and L = Lie. Thus:

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