Lying

by Sam Harris

  Telling the truth in such a circumstance need not amount to acquiescence. The truth in this case could well be, “I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew. And if you take another step, I’ll put a bullet in your brain.” But if lying seems the only option, given your fear or physical limitations, it clearly shifts the burden of combating evil onto others. Granted, your neighbors might be better able to assume this burden than you are. But someone must assume it. If nothing else, the police must tell murderers the truth: Their behavior will not be tolerated.

  In any case, it is far more common to find ourselves in situations in which, though we are tempted to lie, honesty will lead us to form connections with people who might otherwise have been adversaries. In this vein, I recall an encounter I had with a U.S. Customs officer upon returning from my first trip to Asia, nearly twenty-five years ago.

  The year was 1987, but it might as well have been the Summer of Love: I was twenty, had hair down to my shoulders, and was dressed like an Indian rickshaw driver. For those charged with enforcing our nation’s drug laws, it would have been only prudent to subject my luggage to special scrutiny. Happily, I had nothing to hide.

  “Where are you coming from?” the officer asked, glancing skeptically at my backpack.

  “India, Nepal, Thailand…” I said.

  “Did you take any drugs while you were over there?”

  As it happens, I had. The temptation to lie was obvious—why speak to a customs officer about my recent drug use? But there was no real reason not to tell the truth, apart from the risk that it would lead to an even more thorough search of my luggage (and perhaps of my person) than had already commenced.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The officer stopped searching my bag and looked up. “Which drugs did you take?

  “I smoked pot a few times… And I tried opium in India.”

  “Opium?”

  “Yes.”

  “Opium or heroin?

  “It was opium.”

  “You don’t hear much about opium these days.”

  “I know. It was the first time I’d ever tried it.”

  “Are you carrying any drugs with you now?”

  “No.”

  The officer eyed me warily for a moment and then returned to searching my bag. Given the nature of our conversation, I reconciled myself to being there for a very long time. I was, therefore, as patient as a tree. Which was a good thing, because the officer was now examining my belongings as though any one item—a toothbrush, a book, a flashlight, a bit of nylon cord—might reveal the deepest secrets of the universe.

  “What is opium like?” he asked after a time.

  And I told him. In fact, over the next ten minutes, I told this lawman almost everything I knew about the use of mind-altering substances.

  Eventually he completed his search and closed my luggage. One thing was perfectly obvious at the end of our encounter: We both felt very good about it.

  A more quixotic self stands revealed. I’m not sure that I would have precisely the same conversation today. I would not lie, but I probably wouldn’t work quite so hard to open such a novel channel of communication. Nevertheless, I continue to find that a willingness to be honest—especially about truths that one might be expected to conceal—often leads to much more gratifying exchanges with other human beings.

  Of course, if I had been carrying illegal drugs, my situation would have been very different. One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.

  Mental Accounting

  One of the greatest problems for the liar is that he must keep track of his lies. Some people are better at this than others. Psychopaths can assume this burden of mental accounting without any obvious distress. That is no accident: They are psychopaths. They do not care about others and are quite happy to sever relationships whenever the need arises. Some people are monsters of egocentricity. But there is no question that lying comes at a psychological cost for the rest of us.

  Lies beget other lies. Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it. You can even reconsider certain facts and honestly change your views. And you can openly discuss your confusion, conflicts, and doubts with all comers. In this way, a commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.

  But the liar must remember what he said, and to whom, and must take care to maintain his falsehoods in the future. This can require an extraordinary amount of work—all of which comes at the expense of authentic communication and free attention. The liar must weigh each new disclosure, whatever the source, to see whether it might damage the facade that he has built. And all these stresses accrue, whether or not anyone discovers that he has been lying.

  Tell enough lies, however, and the effort required to keep your audience in the dark quickly becomes unsustainable. While you might be spared a direct accusation of dishonesty, many people will conclude, for reasons that they might be unable to pinpoint, that they cannot trust you. You will begin to seem like someone who is always dancing around the facts—because you most certainly are. Many of us have known people like this. No one ever quite confronts them, but everyone begins to treat them like creatures of fiction. Such people are often quietly shunned, for reasons they probably never understand.

  In fact, suspicion often grows on both sides of a lie: Research indicates that liars trust those they deceive less than they otherwise might—and the more damaging their lies, the less they trust, or even like, their victims. It seems that in protecting their egos, and interpreting their own behavior as justified, liars tend to deprecate the people they lie to.[10]

  Integrity

  What does it mean to have integrity? It means many things, of course, but one criterion is to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse. The ethical terrain here extends well beyond the question of honesty—but to truly have integrity, we must not feel the need to lie about our personal lives.

  To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us. The temptation to do this is often born of an understanding that others will disapprove of our behavior. Often, there are good reasons why they would.

  Pick up any newspaper and look at the problems people create for themselves by lying—problems that seem to require more lies to mitigate. It is simply astonishing how people destroy their marriages, careers, and reputations by saying one thing and doing another. Tiger Woods, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Wiener—these are men whose names now conjure images of the most public self-destruction. Of course, their transgressions weren’t merely a matter of lying. But deception was what prepared the ground for their humiliation. One can get divorced without having to issue a public apology. It is even possible to live a frank and utterly unconventional life of sexual promiscuity, or exhibitionism, without paying the penalties these men paid. Many lives are almost scandal-proof. Vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you are not.

  Big Lies

  Most of us are now painfully aware that our trust in government, corporations, and other public institutions has been undermined by lies.

  Lying has precipitated or prolonged wars: The Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam and false reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were both instances in which lying (at some level) led to armed conflict that might otherwise not have occurred. When the truth finally emerged, vast numbers of people grew more cynical about U.S. foreign policy—and many have come to doubt the legitimacy of any military intervention, whatever the stated motive.

  Big lies have led many people to reflexively distrust tho
se in positions of authority. As a consequence, it is now impossible to say anything of substance on climate change, environmental pollution, human nutrition, economic policy, foreign conflicts, pharmaceuticals, and dozens of other subjects without a significant percentage of one’s audience expressing paralyzing doubts about even the most reputable sources of information. Our public discourse appears permanently riven by conspiracy theories.

  Of course, certain controversies arise because expert opinion has come down on both sides of an important issue. Some questions are genuinely unsettled. But confusion spreads unnecessarily whenever people in positions of power are caught lying or concealing their conflicts of interest.

  Consider the widespread fear of childhood vaccinations. In 1998, the physician Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. This study has since been judged to be an “elaborate fraud,” and Wakefield’s medical license has been revoked.[11]

  The consequences of Wakefield’s dishonesty would have been bad enough. But the legacy effect of other big lies has thus far made it impossible to remedy the damage he has caused. Given the fact that corporations and governments sometimes lie, whether to avoid legal liability or to avert public panic, it has become very difficult to spread the truth about the MMR vaccine. Vaccination rates have plummeted—especially in prosperous, well-educated communities—and children have become sick and even died as a result.

  An unhappy truth of human psychology is probably also at work here, which makes it hard to abolish lies once they have escaped into the world: We seem to be predisposed to remember statements as true even after they have been disconfirmed. For instance, if a rumor spreads that a famous politician once fainted during a campaign speech, and the story is later revealed to be false, some significant percentage of people will recall it as a fact—even if they were first exposed to it in the very context of its debunking. In psychology, this is known as the “illusory truth effect.” Familiarity breeds credence.

  One can imagine circumstances, perhaps in time of war, in which lying to one’s enemies might be necessary—especially if spreading misinformation was likely to reduce the loss of innocent life. Granted, the boundary between these conditions and the cases of gratuitous or malignant deception cited above might be difficult to spot—especially if lying to one’s enemies also entails lying to one’s friends. In such circumstances, we might recognize a good lie only in retrospect. But war and espionage are conditions in which human relationships have broken down or were never established in the first place; thus the usual rules of cooperation no longer apply. The moment one begins dropping bombs, or destroying a country’s infrastructure with cyber attacks, lying has become just another weapon in the arsenal.

  The need for state secrets is obvious. However, the need for governments to deceive their own people seems to me to be exiguous to the point of nonexistence—an ethical mirage. Just when you think you’ve reached it, the facts tend to suggest otherwise. And the harm occasioned whenever lies of this kind are uncovered seems all but irreparable.

  I suspect that the telling of necessary lies will be rare for anyone but a spy—that is, if we grant that espionage is necessary in today’s world. It is rumored that spies must lie even to their own friends and family. I am quite sure that I could not live this way myself, however good the cause. The role of a spy strikes me as a near total sacrifice of personal ethics for a larger good—whether real or imagined. It is a kind of moral self-immolation.

  In any case, we can draw no more daily instruction from the lives of spies than we can from the adventures of astronauts in space. Just as most of us need not worry about our bone density in the absence of gravity, we need not consider whether our every utterance could compromise national security. The ethics of war and espionage are the ethics of emergency—and are, therefore, necessarily limited in scope.

  Conclusion

  As it was in Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Othello, so it is in life. Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption—even murder and genocide—generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie.

  Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.

  By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make—and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.

  And by lying to one person, we potentially spread falsehoods to many others—even to whole societies. We also force upon ourselves subsequent choices—to maintain the deception or not—that can complicate our lives. In this way, every lie haunts our future. There is no telling when or how it might collide with reality, requiring further maintenance. The truth never needs to be tended in this way. It can simply be reiterated.

  The lies of the powerful lead us to distrust governments and corporations. The lies of the weak make us callous toward the suffering of others. The lies of conspiracy theorists raise doubts about the honesty of whistleblowers, even when they are telling the truth. Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste—everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.

  How would your relationships change if you resolved never to lie again? What truths might suddenly come into view in your life? What kind of person would you become? And how might you change the people around you?

  It is worth finding out.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful for the editorial work of my wife and collaborator, Annaka Harris. The editor’s job is always crucial, but with this essay my debt to Annaka is especially great, because the topic itself was her idea. I was, in fact, writing on assignment. In all my work, Annaka improves the content, structure, tone, and syntax—true love takes no greater form than this...

  I am also indebted to my mother, whose comments improved the essay throughout, and to my friends Emily Elson, Tim Ferriss, and Seth Godin for their very helpful notes. LYING also benefitted from the expert copy editing of Martha Spaulding.

  Other Books by Sam Harris

  The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003V1WT72/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwsamharri02-20

  Letter to a Christian Nation

  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000JMKTNM/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwsamharri02-20

  The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VUCIZE/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwsamharri02-20

  About the Author

  Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.

  Mr. Harris's writing has been published in over fifteen languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

  Mr. Harris is a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. Visit his blog at www.samharris.org .

  Notes

  * * *

  [1] Howard has put much of his material in book form: R.A. Howard and C.D. Korver, Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2008). While I do not entirely agree with how the au
thors separate ethics from the rest of human values, I believe readers will find this a very useful book.