The Dangers of Lying
Last night I had a dream. A weird dream. A dream about lying.
In the dream I was a public relations executive tasked with taking two wine samples from two different wineries to a journalist for a review. Originally, both clients were supposed to accompany me to be interviewed. However, for whatever reason, I decided only one person could go. I chose the client I liked best. Then, I lied telling the other that as he hadn’t been tested yet for Covid 19 it might endanger the journalist. In my dream, I recalled struggling with devising a suitable explanation that would be credible, palatable, as well as hard to argue against. Having gotten away with my deceit, as least in my dream, I woke up feeling ashamed.
The preference of lying in America
Is it any wonder that I would dream about lying? Over the past four years, America has been subjected to a torrent of alternative realities, conspiracy theories, and baseless claims. Or, as my father would call them, “lies.” This atmosphere has permeated our daily lives and affected the mental health of many.
By coincidence, the night of my dream I had just watched the mystery comedy, “Knives Out,” in which Harlan Tromby—a prominent novelist played by Christopher Plummer— is murdered by a member of his dysfunctional family each one vying for his fortune. His protective nurse, Marta Cabero, brilliantly played by Ana de Armas, had a most unfortunate habit of throwing up every time she lied. In fact, it was a critical leitmotif throughout the film.
The blond coverup
Most of us, however, are not as physically encumbered as Marta was when we lie. Some of us can even get away with it. Wine marketer Ellen Negrin was born with naturally curly hair which she began straightening at an early age. One day she decided to try out being a blond. So, at age 12 she reached for a bottle of peroxide. “My mother said I had to wait till I was older. When she saw me with this brassy hair color, I explained the Curl Free was left on too long. I didn’t want to get in trouble by telling the truth.” Her mother believed her.
While I rarely lied as a child, whenever I did my face and nervous demeanor invariably betrayed me. Here’s a perfect example. When I was eleven, I was fully grown. At 5 feet 7 inches I towered over my entire class of sixth graders including the teacher. My growth spurt matched my development in other areas too. Given my father’s Mediterranean heritage, I inherited Hirsutism, a normal but unwanted excess of body hair.
One day, I furtively crept into the bathroom, took my father’s razor out of the medicine cabinet, and lathered up my legs using his canister of Gillette shaving cream. My ambitiously daring plan was to shave my legs to get rid of all that unsightly, dark hair. Just as I had finished the first leg, there was a loud knock at the door. “Marsha, what are doing in there that’s taking so long? I need to use the bathroom!” my mother anxiously called out.
Never ever lie to Mama
Horrified, I didn’t answer. As I had forgotten to lock the bathroom door, my mother barged in and saw the mess and my red face. “Are you shaving your legs without my permission, young lady?” she shrieked at a deafening pitch. I denied it, ever so sheepishly, even though I had been caught in the act. My mother pointed to my legs and said with a mix of maternal righteousness and indignation, “Wash off that shaving cream right now and go to your room.”
Because I had lied to her, I was sent to school for a period of two weeks before she relented and allowed me to shave my other leg. In the meantime, I wore the same long, straight skirt and pulled up my bobby socks to their maximum height to avoid embarrassment. Now whenever I shave my legs, I laugh and wonder what my mother would have done had I told her the truth.
People aren’t ready for the truth
When I asked my gardener if she ever lied as a child, she responded emphatically. “No, but I’m doing a lot of lying now.” When I questioned her about the reason, she replied that given the country’s high level of anxiety due to the pandemic and recent Capitol riots, “ Most people don’t want to hear the truth. They definitely don’t want to hear anything negative.” Subsequently, she has started mirroring back to her friends what she knows they want to hear. Being frank and honest by nature, this tack is as hard for her as she sincerely believes her truthful advice would be better in the long run for her friends. However, nowadays telling white lies is a less resistant path to take.
Wine writer Eunice Fried told me she wouldn’t dare tell a lie as a child. “Growing up my mother entrenched in me the notion that lying was the worst possible thing a person could do. Afterall, it is one of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” Eunice’s mother never stopped reminding her of this lest she forget its importance.
Other than putting the fear of God, literally and figurately, into their children, how do parents teach their offspring how not to lie? How do the little ones learn to differentiate between fantasy and reality especially when their imaginations are so vivid at a young age? Given lying is also a form of self-preservation, how do you teach a child to overcome this instinct?
The precarious task of teaching children not to lie
Candace Jones, a clinical social worker, found teaching her two young sons to always tell the truth carried with it an enormous responsibility. “Being a pretty serious sort, ‘lying' was one of those things that terrified me as a parent. The thought that my kids would lie to me was horrifying. Having said that, it is very normal for kids to lie, in fact, it is a survival tactic and built into our brains. I decided that I would NOT lie to my children and got myself into difficult territory when it came to things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. I didn't want to say they actually were real, but nor did I want to take away the ‘magic’....it was challenging, and they were onto me pretty quickly.”
Joan Brower, also a mother of boys, agreed with how difficult the parenting task was. “Of all the many values and skill sets that my husband and I tried to ingrain in our kids, it was the lesson of honesty that was particularly challenging. That's because human interaction is not always black or white; life is filled with gray. While raising our two sons over the years during different stages of their lives, the truth became more nuanced and the explanations to the boys became more existential.
The Pinocchio factor
“I recall that during the toddler years it was about hiding each other's toys and lying about it. ‘Unacceptable,’ we said. Later on, when the kids were of school age and beginning to read, my husband and I often used examples from fables about the importance of telling the truth -- Pinocchio and George Washington chopping down the cherry tree come to mind.
“During pre-teen years, the ‘chats’ with my sons became more complex about what constitutes an occasionally acceptable "little white lie," such as not hurting someone's feelings (examples: not wanting to eat one of Grandma's vegetable dishes, or hating a particular birthday gift from Aunt Harriet). Although lying was terrible, I reminded them, still some bit of harmless dishonesty would be okay to avoid brutality and to spare another person's feelings.”
Why do politicians lie?
As grownups, some people discard their parents’ valuable lessons of honesty. With lying being pervasive in our society today, sometimes it is hard to distinguish fact from fiction, or truth from a lie. Politicians are particularly adept at the skill of lying and have been for centuries! They claim people don’t really want the truth, just my gardener rationalized earlier. Politicians routinely take advantage of people’s ignorance to disguise, or lie about, positions which might otherwise be at odds with majority opinion. Lenin once said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” That, to me, is a blatant encouragement to be dishonest.
Covering up the truth
There was a recent article in the NYTimes about Texas’ system wide power outage causing devastating blackouts due to its extremely cold weather. Naturally, local Texans wanted to know the cause. Instead of telling the truth, Governor Greg Abbott elected to use wind power and renewable energy as the culprit. His goal was to build an argument in support of the necessity for fossil fuel, something that Texas has a lot of in their vast back yard. Turns out the real cause was that the unusually frigid temperatures stalled natural gas production which accounts for the bulk of the state’s power supply. In fact, wind power makes up only seven percent of it. Furthermore, the situation could have been avoided had local power companies, supported by their politicians, heeded the warnings from the 2011 cold snap to better winterize their plants.
This makes me think about the proliferation of adults spreading conspiracy theories. My favorite one surfaced during Hilary Clinton’s campaign for presidency. Do you recall the PizzaGate? Right before the 2016 elections, someone promoted on social media that Democrats, including Hillary, were behind a child sex-trafficking ring run out of a Washington pizzeria. What could be more ridiculous? And yet because it was promoted through social media as a fact, a man showed up at the restaurant with an assault rifle and opened fire believing he was doing something honorable. Luckily, he fired into a closet and not at a guest of the pizza parlor! Ultimately this bizarre conspiracy theory was attributed to an American alt right fringe group who use the Internet to perpetuate their baseless views. By the way, this tactic is not exclusively ours. Russia, in particular, has used conspiracies as an effectively diplomatic tool in the Post-Soviet world.
The long history of propaganda
Influencing public opinion, through whatever means you choose, honest or dishonest, has been with us since the time of ancient Greeks. The term is propaganda. While it can be based on hard facts and positive arguments, propaganda more frequently incorporates half-truths, rumors, and lies. While the Greeks lacked the speed and efficiency of modern-day social media, they effectively used their widely attended games, religious festivals, and theatre performances to lavishly promote their leaders’ ideas and points of view often disseminating falsehoods along the way.
Ironically, the word “propaganda” started out as an honorable term used for religious activities associated with helping mankind. It was only later in history that the terms took on overtones of selfishness, dishonesty, and subversiveness. From Middle Ages to the French and American Revolutions to the World Wars, fascists, communists as well as leaders of democracy, have all exploited the powerful mechanism of propaganda.
Motives for lying
Few people can claim they’ve never lied. Most of us at least tell white lies
to protect others' feelings. There are other reasons, too, why we may choose to lie. People tell full out lies to protect themselves or for some personal gain. Sometimes we lie for the benefit of others. Sometimes we are forced to lie to get something which is important to us where we have an ulterior motive.
Event planner, Eleanor Sigona, was forced to lie as a teenager to get what she wanted. As she explained it, “My Italo-American mother was so old fashioned and strict that she wouldn’t let me bring any boys into the house. Mom never approved of my choice of male friends. So whenever one of my boyfriends walked me home from school, he had to veer off one block from where I lived and take a different path so my mother wouldn’t see me with him.”
So, you might wonder how am I going to end this mini essay on lying? Naturally, by talking about the truth.
Truth triumphs
Circling back to an earlier “interviewee,” Joan Brower told me one of those “you-won’t-believe-this” stories. She wrapped up her account of teaching the value of truth over lying with this: “By the teenage years, my boys' solid ethics were pretty well established. But there was a case when my elder son went to school without a completed assignment. for which he apologized. When the teacher asked the reason, Barry stated simply: ‘My dog ate my homework, so I'll have to do it again.’ The teacher responded, ‘That's a silly lie,’ but Barry insisted, ‘No, really, the dog ate my homework!’ It was the truth. Our family Shar-Pei Buddy had chewed up Barry's book report left on his bedroom floor the night before. I seem to remember writing a teacher's note testifying to Barry's honesty!”