Lies

February 25, 2007

Rev. Paul Beckel

First Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org

Once admit the idea that it is good to lie for religion’s sake, and the lie may grow to any dimensions. A little lie may serve a man, but it is hard to calculate how big an one may be wanted to serve God.  Frances B. Cobbe

One of the turning points from adolescence to adulthood is learning that openness often is cruelty and saying whatever is in one’s mind is an indulgence that no adult can afford.  A. Goldberg

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.  Bertrand Russell

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.  Friedrich Nietzsche

The following quotes are from Lies! Lies!! Lies !!!, by Charles V. Ford, M.D., which was a major source for this sermon.

“One politician...always made it a point to make only positive comments about anyone. If, however, he wanted the listener to think poorly of another person, he would provide subtle nonverbal hints of disgust while extolling the person’s virtues. The message being broadcast was: ‘I’m a really nice person who likes everybody, but this guy is a real sleazeball.’”

“Truth and deception are not in and of themselves moral or immoral; they are merely forms of communication. It is how they are applied in one’s relationships with others that determines their moral value.”

 “The mentally healthy person appears to have the enviable capacity to distort reality in a direction that enhances self-esteem, maintains beliefs in personal efficacy, and promotes an optimistic view of the future.”

“People who hear what they want to hear do not perceive that information as a lie.”

“We do not expect that our government will always tell the truth, but we do expect that it will protect us. Trust is not destroyed by deceit but rather by a loss of confidence that the offending party does not have our interests at heart.”

READINGS
Here are two scenarios involving lies that we've all seen played out over and over (also from Charles V. Ford):

"Can do! The shipment will be there next Thursday." Dan glibly promised the purchasing agent of another company that his firm would make delivery of the overdue computer programs. He then hung up the telephone and put his head on his desk. "Oh, my God, I've done it again." He looked around the office piled high with requisition requests and...unfiled correspondence. He was weeks behind in his work, and the telephone calls and complaints kept coming. Eager to please and unable to say no, he continued to make promises far beyond his ability to keep.

Dan spent the remainder of the afternoon fielding complaints from customers and providing glib outward charm. His apparent sincerity convinced most of these people that he was genuinely trying to help and would meet their needs. He intended to work late to reduce his backlog but at 5 o'clock decided that he needed a good night's sleep in order to get a jump the next day on his problems. On the way home, he stopped at his favorite bar, "to relax and have a drink." Three hours and six drinks later he arrived home to a chronically disappointed wife, ate a warmed-over dinner, and fell into bed. Her sexual advances were once again rejected with, "Honey, I'm just too tired and stressed out from work." He awoke the next morning to a day that proceeded and ended much as had the previous days.

This next story reflects the way we often deceive ourselves, and the way that two people can both get their needs met by playing into one another's deception:

David saw an advertisement for a sporty new convertible. It immediately appealed to him, as did the attractive woman in the photograph who was sitting in the passenger seat.... David went to the dealer "just to look" at the car...and was greeted by Sam, a salesman. (Sam had been working at the dealership for 1 week; previously he had sold a different make of automobile.) Sam immediately started telling David about how the car was catching everybody's eye and how the women love it. He claimed that all his customers (only one to date) had been tremendously satisfied with the car.

When David suggested that he was a "practical person"...Sam quickly changed tactics. He pointed out the car's safety features, its excellent mileage, and mechanical reliability. David pulled out an issue of Consumer Reports, and Sam quickly responded that...it's reliability had only appeared poor because the model appealed so much to the young and adventuresome. He explained that young people don't care for their cars the way they should and get into too many accidents -- "it's the drivers, not the car."

David then feigned disinterest and started to walk away, but Sam immediately offered a discount, emphasizing what a bargain it was: "almost like getting a year's depreciation for free.!" David then purchased the car, rationalizing that it was "too good a deal to turn down." Despite the car's poor repair record, he kept telling everyone how wonderful it was, self-deceptively believing it to protect himself from the painful knowledge of having made a poor decision.

SINGING TOGETHER        Tis a Gift to be Simple  #16

REFLECTIONS, Part I

The inclination to deceive is buried deep within our evolutionary heritage. Deception is one of the most ancient and pervasive means of staying alive. Deception occurs in the defensive mode and the aggressive. Methods of deception range from simple to highly sophisticated. At what point passive deception becomes active lying is impossible to pinpoint.

The caterpillar who looks like a leaf is just born that way. He’s not consciously misleading the hungry bird, but it’s deception all the same. The mother bird who distracts the coyote to lure the predator away from her chicks may be acting on instinct, but on some level she knows what she is doing.

Our dog daisy sometimes uses her loud threatening bark to warn off strangers at our door -- while hiding under the bed. She’s not ferocious! She’s lying. Like the cheetah and the zebras dodging and faking, and like the anglerfish with the worm-like lure dangling in front of its great jaws, waiting.

It’s clear that being able to deceive provides animals (and even plants) with a selective advantage for survival and reproduction. It’s equally clear that being able to detect deception provides another selective advantage.

Deceit has evolved to strikingly sophisticated levels, and not just in humans. Monkeys have been observed to engage in elaborate dramas of mutual self-deception. For example, when a dominant monkey begins to threaten a subordinate, the subordinate may pretend not to notice, or become very interested in its fingernails. The dominant monkey may then go along with the pretense, and let the challenge go.

In humans, the stages of child development show clear steps toward knowing how to lie, when and where to lie, and how to detect lies. During the elementary school years we actively teach our children deception with games and sports. We teach them how to fake with their bodies and their eyes. In card games we teach them to mask facial expressions and practice emotional control. We teach them to conceal their true intentions, and to send false signals.

Prior to elementary school, kids can say some really embarrassing things. But eventually they get to the point where we can train them to keep family secrets, suppress their feelings out of consideration for others, and follow cultural norms like expressing pleasure upon receiving a gift they do not want. These skills and values help them to preserve their self-esteem as valued members of society, and even preserve their safety -- as honest expression can lead to vulnerability.

In adolescence comes a turning point. Adolescents become increasingly conscious of the deceit all around them and the disconnect between what people say and what they do (in particular around the issue of lying). Adolescents then begin to see adults and their parents no longer as omniscient and omnipotent, but hypocritical. In response, adolescents learn to lie to us -- or at least they learn about selective telling of the truth. In fact this process may be a necessary part of separating from their parents.

The challenges for parents are immense. If we are punitive our children may develop exceptionally good lying skills in order to avoid punishment. If we are protective (that is, if we lie to keep them from knowing painful truths) then they learn that “it’s ok to lie.”  And if we are dour, carefully shielding them from fantasy and fiction altogether, we can crush their imaginations.

==

Why am I so interested in lying? One reason is that I meet regularly with individuals who are undergoing addiction treatment at the Health Care Center. I help them through what is known as the 5^th step of the 12-step recovery program. Because self-deception is often a part of addiction, the 5^th step presents the addict with an opportunity to be honest -- primarily about the ways she has harmed herself and harmed other people. Addicts are usually good at deceiving themselves, especially deceiving themselves about their ability to deceive other people, who they think don’t know about their addiction.

Sometimes it is true that people very close to an addict will “not know.” But only in the sense that they too are participants in the cycle of mutual deception.

Many addicts recognize that they are skilled manipulators. They just haven’t discovered positive ways to put their manipulative skills to use. When they do, they will find that the ability to read another person’s need for self-deception – and then to satisfy those needs, is not always a bad thing. In fact, effective trade in lies can lead to real success in business and politics, theater, education, religion, and just about everything else. That is, deception is an essential aspect of just about every meaningful relationship.

SHARING OUR GIFTS       You’ll Never Walk Alone / Smile

REFLECTIONS, Part II

Everyone knows that it is a lie when we intentionally deceive someone. But is it a lie to be vague or imprecise? Is it dishonest to supply partial truths? Like not telling your sexual partners about every detail of your sexual past, or your sexually transmitted disease?

Can non-verbal communications be lies – such as using body language or inflection to imply or minimize or exaggerate or neutralize what comes out of our mouths? Consider the surgeon whose facial expression displays concern -- to mask what is really a disaster. Or the child who cries when he gets a small scratch. Or the student masking boredom in the classroom, or the teacher pretending to be patient.

We can say nice words in a threatening way. Is that a lie? Social propriety often demands that we cover our true feelings.[1]

• How are you? I’m fine.
• Son, can you come visit me this weekend? No Mom, sorry, I can’t.
• I enjoyed your party, thanks for inviting me.

==

There are also compassionate lies, told for the benefit of another person. (Do these pants make my butt look fat?) Or maybe we kid ourselves – and we avoid hurting others’ feelings in order to prevent our own discomfort.

Is it OK to lie to preserve our privacy? Is it OK to lie in self-defense? To plead the 5^th? Is it OK -- even necessary -- to lie to protect others? Our families? Our neighbors? Our corrupt boss?

And of course there are also lies that are told for no apparent reason. People tell lies sometimes when the truth would serve them better. People tell lies because they fail to see (or refuse to see) truths that are staring them in the face. We live in a world in which truth and fiction intermingle, where the objective and the subjective are whirled together like a Dairy Queen Blizzard, where partial truths can make sense and where even the incredible is impossible to discredit. But you know what? We do pretty well in the midst of all this.

==

Because we know how it works.

We lie to others in order to lie to ourselves. We even encourage others to lie to us in order to reinforce our self-deception.

In order to organize information in our brains we simplify it; we generalize. In order to protect our self-esteem, we hold on to perceptions that are unthreatening -- by discounting contradictory information. To maintain our goals we latch on to positive feedback so that we can stay the course. Denial is not inherently good or bad; it depends upon how we use it. Temporarily denying information that would be emotionally devastating can be a useful coping mechanism.[2]

Denial is one of several ego defense mechanisms that we use to protect ourselves against painful truths. Some of these mechanisms are helpful; some are not. Distorting our perceptions of reality to fit our own needs is generally recognized as mental illness, as is the projection of our inner anxieties onto another person. These lies are not helpful to anyone. Dissociation is a way to separate ourselves from trauma that we have experienced or witnessed -- memories that are too painful to leave in our consciousness. Intellectualization or rationalization can be a good thing. For example it can enable a medical student to cut up a human body, even though she’s been taught that this is taboo. On the other hand, intellectualization is what enabled Nazi doctors to conduct experiments on prisoners -- they simply told themselves that the prisoners were not human beings. The same kind of intellectualization makes it seem perfectly moral to torture a prisoner who is understood to be a terrorist.

The ego-defense mechanisms I’ve mentioned so far have been at least potentially pathological. But there are other mechanisms that we all practice, methods of denying reality or deceiving ourselves that are generally considered healthy. When we anticipate the future with high hopes we often minimize the pains we are currently suffering. When we suppress our anger at work and take it out later with our therapist, this can be a very good thing. Altruism can be a form of self-deception -- when we sacrifice because we think it will benefit someone else. And surely the best method of denial is humor: the ability to laugh at embarrassing situations and misunderstandings, and laugh at ourselves rather than to feel the sting of life’s absurdities. These deceptions are all methods of self-defense against the onslaught of stress and contradiction in our lives. They are often indicators of good mental health.

==

But some lies are clearly harmful and we know it. So why would we tell such lies? Behaviors with short-term payoffs become habitual patterns that are hard to escape because the immediate reward can suck us in even when we know that the long-term effects will be bad.

Why else do we lie? It’s just delightful to pull one over on someone. We may do this purely in fun or we may do it sadistically. We also lie as a form of wish fulfillment. By lying we hope to make something become true. And we also lie because other people want to be deceived. And that’s alright if you are a magician and you have a willing and jocular audience. But not in an abusive relationship. And not for politicians and their constituents. For example, when one promises that lower taxes will balance the budget, and the other desperately wants to believe it. This pattern is also not ok for military advisors telling the boss what he wants to hear.[3]

But self-deception also has a bright side. Experimental evidence shows that “nondepressed people, in contrast to depressed people, delude themselves about the amount of control that they have over situations. …Investigators used an experiment in which the actual control of a series of games was secretly manipulated by investigators. If the result of the games was favorable, nondepressed subjects overestimated their responsibility for the result. If the results were not favorable, nondepressed subjects assessed their degree of control as much less than it actually was. In contrast, depressed patients were much more consistently accurate in their assessment of their degree of control.”[4]

That is, people who are not depressed misled themselves to believe that they were responsible for good results and not responsible for bad results. The same results were found when depressed and nondepressed subjects were asked to assess their ability to control random events. The depressed subjects more accurately judged their degree of control over outcomes. [Maybe I wouldn’t emphasize this point if I weren’t biased toward depressive thinking. But I’m actively trying to overcome that bias.]

And another study found that depressed subjects more accurately judged how other people viewed them. In other words, having high self-esteem may be a function of judging ourselves more kindly than others are judging us. So remember: Jesus loves you; even though everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.

Which leaves us with a bit of a dilemma. Good mental health seems to require that we lie to ourselves, at least a little. So unless we fool ourselves, we’re not going to be effective at some pretty important things: like taking care of ourselves and others, being happy or content, and being able to engage in productive or creative work.

MUSICAL MEDITATION    What a Wonderful World

REFLECTIONS, Part III

So, to be mentally healthy you may need to delude yourself a bit. The tricky question is, “how much?” If we lie too much about our prospects and our abilities, we may fail to prepare for challenges, or we may engage in risky endeavors that will eventually catch up with us.

There is a moral to this story, then: act a little bit better than you are. Not so much that you overextend and collapse, but a little bit of stretching (even though yes, this is stretching the truth) can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Let me say it straight out: Lying can be a good thing. But lest anyone mistake it for USUALLY a good thing, I’d best quickly run through the negatives as well.

Experiments have shown that strangers tended to like one another less when one is lying -- even if the other person doesn’t know it.

Lies can damage relationships -- even lies told to preserve the relationship. And the discovery of a lie, of course, is often the cause of the end of a relationship. Even more than the content of the lie, the act of lying -- the cover-up -- is worse.

Denial, which in the short term may help us to cope with overwhelming stress, often doesn’t help in the long term. Overestimating our competence can lead to serious mistakes that put ourselves and others at risk.

==

Each of us walks through life with an evolving sense of self that we could call our “personal myth.” But even if it is evolving, we generally don’t like our personal myth to change too much. Perhaps we see ourselves in relation to the world as heroically overcoming adversity. Perhaps we see ourselves as perpetual victims of other people’s lies.

These myths can become self-fulfilling prophecy, because they influence how we respond to situations and opportunities. To create and sustain our personal myths we select memories and interpretations of memories and events. Out of all the possible truths that are flying around us, we tend to select those truths that fit our prevailing self-concept.

So our personal myth is self-perpetuating. Which makes it hard, but not impossible, to change.

It is hard, but not impossible, to reframe experiences of failure and victimization so that we can recognize ourselves as strong, capable, resilient, accepting, and even happy.

==

To wrap up: deceit has both a biological and a sociological basis. Maturing involves learning to lie and to detect lies, and learning to avoid the worst consequences of our own deceit and that of others. In order to survive it all, we need a strong sense of skepticism, and a rich sense of humor.

Some people grow up to become really good performers. This isn’t necessarily bad. They can inspire us, comfort us, lead us to do hard work that we need to do. But some great performers are not great people. They lie well and will deceive others into playing out their sick psychopathic personal dramas. They can do catastrophic harm and on a global scale.

Our gravest and ever-present danger is the potential of “group think” -- when society as a whole, which at its best serves to check itself, instead serves to mutually reinforce its self-deception on a grand scale. When hundreds or thousands or millions of people engage in practices not only of collective rationalization but self-censorship, when they lie to themselves and to one another by putting up walls against dissenting voices and spiral themselves into a frenzy of moral omniscience, turning off their personal responsibility so the group can do things that the individuals would never do.

But let’s not just focus on the worst-case liars. Let’s not get too caught up with those with whom we are angry, those who have harmed us, those who are obvious or high profile. To think only about these situations is to lie to ourselves about the pervasiveness of deceit all around us, all the time. By focusing on our pet peeves we mask our own participation in deceit, and we fail to notice our power to move through the blizzard without serious difficulty. Really, we do pretty well.

We will never stop all lying. Structural barriers are helpful (like truth in advertising laws, strong investigative journalism and critics like Consumer Reports, and honesty codes at universities) but the people who are best at detecting lies are friends. Friends detect lies better than strangers or spouses, perhaps because spouses want to hear lies or think they can’t afford the consequences of knowing the truth. This points to the enormous value of friendship and the value of community relationships such as we have here.

We do especially well moving through life’s pervasive swirl of deceit when we have a community of accountability that tests us, helps us to test outside information, and helps us to accept painful truths. I believe that this congregation is such a community of accountability. This is a trustworthy congregation. Not because we’ll only hear the truth spoken here. Trust is not just the expectation we will be told the truth. Trust is the expectation that we will not hurt each other, not even with the truth. Not unless it is true, kind, and necessary. Or at least 2 out of those three.