grahamg
Old codger
- Location
- South of Manchester, UK
"Lying has been in the news, but then it always has been.
'It's not my fault', the lie that is based on the lie that many people tell themselves, 'Because I am such a superior person I cannot be blamed for anything.' This lie is based on the very popular but exceedingly stupid lie, 'I can make reality do what I want it to do.' As if reality ever bent to some mere mortal's will!"
(Break)
"None of us likes being lied to. The only time we do is when we do not want to be told a particular truth that we already know, or at least suspect. We do not like to acknowledge that we lie, and do so frequently. We try to avoid using the words 'lie' and 'lying' in relation to ourselves. The only lies we willingly admit to are those we call 'white lies'. We see these as being virtuous. We want to spare another person's feelings, but the feelings we actually want to spare are our own. We do not want to be upset when another person becomes upset, or have that person reject us for being unkind.
Lies are words or actions that are intended to deceive other people or ourselves. We use a variety of words and phrases to hide the fact that someone is lying. If we want to seem to be very knowledgeable in matters psychological, we say about someone, 'He's in denial', when in fact the person in question may be lying to himself. We can strenuously deny that certain events have happened or are happening. We can claim to hold certain views that in fact we do not hold, and defy anyone to call us hypocrites.
Why do we lie?
In certain situations where your own or someone else's life is in danger, lying can be a sensible thing to do. However, this kind of situation arises very infrequently. Most of us never encounter one. Sometimes we lie almost without thinking, but sometimes we lie in response to feeling that we are in great danger, even though there is no threat to our life. We are frightened, and so we lie.
What we see as being in danger is something we value even more than our life. It is our sense of being a person. We take our sense of being a person for granted, but we refer to it often as 'I' or 'me' or 'myself'. It is our sense of being alive, our sense of existence. We might take it for granted but we know when it is under any threat. We move very quickly to protect it.
Each of us has experienced an extreme threat to our sense of being a person, yet we rarely talk about it. We might talk about the event itself, but not what we actually experienced. We might say, 'I was shattered', and our audience assume that we were using a cliche, but we were not. We might say, 'I was panicking', and our audience assume that we were exaggerating for effect.
Very likely our audience were resisting hearing what we were saying because they did not want to be reminded of something terrible in their own life.
We have all had the experience of discovering that we are wrong in our assessment of our situation. It might be that you are being denied by someone the respect you feel you deserve, and you are being humiliated. It might be that the person you depend on and love has disappeared from your life, or has harmed or betrayed you. It might be that you discover that your future will not be what you planned it to be, or that your past proves not to be what you thought it was. In all of these situations, you discover that you have made a serious error of judgement. There is a huge discrepancy between what you thought your life was and what it actually is. As soon as you discover your mistake, you feel shaky, very shaky. Something inside you is falling apart. As the implications of your mistake become increasingly clear, the shakiness intensifies. Anxiety turns to fear, and fear to terror as you feel that you are shattering, crumbling, even disappearing.
Of course, you do not actually crumble and disappear, but you do change. You might now be older and wiser, or perhaps not wiser, but you do see things differently. From then on, you try to make sure that you never have such an experience again. Whatever your circumstances, consciously or unconsciously, you are watching for the slightest hint that such a situation might occur again. You develop many different skills aimed at deflecting such a possibility, or, when it does threaten to recur, to protect yourself from its impact. The simplest and easiest skill to employ is lying. However, no matter how skilled you are as a liar, it is rarely sensible to lie.
This is not about the morality of lying. I am not concerned with comparing the vice of lying with the virtue of telling the truth, nor with examining what anyone said about lying. Nor do I want to discuss lying in the abstract, as many moralists do. I am concerned with why we lie, and the consequences of our lies. We are very foolish indeed if we lie and fail to think about what the consequences will be."
(Above taken from a book by Dorothy Rowe, first published in 2010, and below is an extract of a review on the same)
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/why-we-lie-20100816-12682.html
(Review by James Robertson)
Lies can have painful long-term consequences, warns a sharp observer of human nature.
"We all traffic in deception on a daily basis. “We're going to keep your résumé on file”; “What a beautiful baby you have”. Most of us, if we care to acknowledge it, tell white lies – and worse – casually and tend to think of them as the lubricant on which our social intercourse depends. But according to Dorothy Rowe, even the lies we tell to spare others' feelings place us on either side of an invidious dichotomy.
Liars, Rowe writes, even of this calibre, either desperately need to be liked or fear chaos and seek to avoid it by creating “personal islands of clarity, order and control”. And neither justification, in her book, is defensible.
Rowe, who is a columnist for The Guardian, grew up in Newcastle in the 1930s and moved to England in 1968 after studying to become a psychologist at the University of Sydney. She worked as an academic and practising clinical psychologist and made her name by radically challenging prevailing interpretations of depression. Rather than a chemical imbalance, Rowe suggested depression stemmed from personal crises; it was more mental distress than mental illness.
Her latest book, Why We Lie, is of much broader scope than her self-help classics.
The title is something of a misnomer and is more polemic than psychological inquiry. Which is a shame because, freed from the framework of clinical investigation, Rowe tends towards the meandering – and slightly curmudgeonly. But she is a sharp observer of human nature."
'It's not my fault', the lie that is based on the lie that many people tell themselves, 'Because I am such a superior person I cannot be blamed for anything.' This lie is based on the very popular but exceedingly stupid lie, 'I can make reality do what I want it to do.' As if reality ever bent to some mere mortal's will!"
(Break)
"None of us likes being lied to. The only time we do is when we do not want to be told a particular truth that we already know, or at least suspect. We do not like to acknowledge that we lie, and do so frequently. We try to avoid using the words 'lie' and 'lying' in relation to ourselves. The only lies we willingly admit to are those we call 'white lies'. We see these as being virtuous. We want to spare another person's feelings, but the feelings we actually want to spare are our own. We do not want to be upset when another person becomes upset, or have that person reject us for being unkind.
Lies are words or actions that are intended to deceive other people or ourselves. We use a variety of words and phrases to hide the fact that someone is lying. If we want to seem to be very knowledgeable in matters psychological, we say about someone, 'He's in denial', when in fact the person in question may be lying to himself. We can strenuously deny that certain events have happened or are happening. We can claim to hold certain views that in fact we do not hold, and defy anyone to call us hypocrites.
Why do we lie?
In certain situations where your own or someone else's life is in danger, lying can be a sensible thing to do. However, this kind of situation arises very infrequently. Most of us never encounter one. Sometimes we lie almost without thinking, but sometimes we lie in response to feeling that we are in great danger, even though there is no threat to our life. We are frightened, and so we lie.
What we see as being in danger is something we value even more than our life. It is our sense of being a person. We take our sense of being a person for granted, but we refer to it often as 'I' or 'me' or 'myself'. It is our sense of being alive, our sense of existence. We might take it for granted but we know when it is under any threat. We move very quickly to protect it.
Each of us has experienced an extreme threat to our sense of being a person, yet we rarely talk about it. We might talk about the event itself, but not what we actually experienced. We might say, 'I was shattered', and our audience assume that we were using a cliche, but we were not. We might say, 'I was panicking', and our audience assume that we were exaggerating for effect.
Very likely our audience were resisting hearing what we were saying because they did not want to be reminded of something terrible in their own life.
We have all had the experience of discovering that we are wrong in our assessment of our situation. It might be that you are being denied by someone the respect you feel you deserve, and you are being humiliated. It might be that the person you depend on and love has disappeared from your life, or has harmed or betrayed you. It might be that you discover that your future will not be what you planned it to be, or that your past proves not to be what you thought it was. In all of these situations, you discover that you have made a serious error of judgement. There is a huge discrepancy between what you thought your life was and what it actually is. As soon as you discover your mistake, you feel shaky, very shaky. Something inside you is falling apart. As the implications of your mistake become increasingly clear, the shakiness intensifies. Anxiety turns to fear, and fear to terror as you feel that you are shattering, crumbling, even disappearing.
Of course, you do not actually crumble and disappear, but you do change. You might now be older and wiser, or perhaps not wiser, but you do see things differently. From then on, you try to make sure that you never have such an experience again. Whatever your circumstances, consciously or unconsciously, you are watching for the slightest hint that such a situation might occur again. You develop many different skills aimed at deflecting such a possibility, or, when it does threaten to recur, to protect yourself from its impact. The simplest and easiest skill to employ is lying. However, no matter how skilled you are as a liar, it is rarely sensible to lie.
This is not about the morality of lying. I am not concerned with comparing the vice of lying with the virtue of telling the truth, nor with examining what anyone said about lying. Nor do I want to discuss lying in the abstract, as many moralists do. I am concerned with why we lie, and the consequences of our lies. We are very foolish indeed if we lie and fail to think about what the consequences will be."
(Above taken from a book by Dorothy Rowe, first published in 2010, and below is an extract of a review on the same)
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/why-we-lie-20100816-12682.html
(Review by James Robertson)
Lies can have painful long-term consequences, warns a sharp observer of human nature.
"We all traffic in deception on a daily basis. “We're going to keep your résumé on file”; “What a beautiful baby you have”. Most of us, if we care to acknowledge it, tell white lies – and worse – casually and tend to think of them as the lubricant on which our social intercourse depends. But according to Dorothy Rowe, even the lies we tell to spare others' feelings place us on either side of an invidious dichotomy.
Liars, Rowe writes, even of this calibre, either desperately need to be liked or fear chaos and seek to avoid it by creating “personal islands of clarity, order and control”. And neither justification, in her book, is defensible.
Rowe, who is a columnist for The Guardian, grew up in Newcastle in the 1930s and moved to England in 1968 after studying to become a psychologist at the University of Sydney. She worked as an academic and practising clinical psychologist and made her name by radically challenging prevailing interpretations of depression. Rather than a chemical imbalance, Rowe suggested depression stemmed from personal crises; it was more mental distress than mental illness.
Her latest book, Why We Lie, is of much broader scope than her self-help classics.
The title is something of a misnomer and is more polemic than psychological inquiry. Which is a shame because, freed from the framework of clinical investigation, Rowe tends towards the meandering – and slightly curmudgeonly. But she is a sharp observer of human nature."
