Lies are only possible because they are—by necessity—a co operative act1.
Statement of Fact: A lie has no power of its own.
A lie only has power when someone else agrees to believe the lie. So if you have been lied too lately, then in there somewhere you set it up to be lied too. That is sometimes a difficult pill to swallow.
Not all lies are hostile acts ... Don’t I sing well? ... Does this make my butt look too big ??? ... etc ... What would you say? ... Maintaining social niceties are excuses we use to lie. Once agreed to as a social norm then, consciously or unconsciously we are in agreement and we can both agree to pretend. The problem is, now we are both liars ... in a nice, kinda of way.
Two Basic types of lies: Willing participants in the lie: That is, I’ll believe you are who it is that you say and think you are... if you believe I am who it is that I say and think I am. There are several thousand other extrapolations on this theme but this is the basic premise. I’ll look after you ... if... you look after me. Some call this sharing ... some form relationships based on this but essentially, it’s lying, and that’s the truth.
On the other hand there are times when we are unwilling participants. You get to see this particularly in business; Bernie Madoff is one of the better known worst examples. Statistics noted that in the business year 2008/2009 nearly ¾ of a trillion + dollars or nearly 7% of the GNP of the USA was scammed by deceivers like Madoff. Another infamous example is President Bill Clinton and there are literally thousands of examples where these few people get their greed needs met at the cost of the many.
The underlying premise is that the conman is working from a place that was stated very clearly by Henry Overlander, a Brit, who was said to be able to bring down any (if not all) of the world’s banks single handedly. In the one and only interview he ever gave in his life he stated: “I’ve got one rule. Everyone is willing to give you something. They’re ready to give you something for whatever it is they’re hungry for.”
What you are hungry for does not have to be real; it just needs to appear to be real for you and your portion of the deal. The dupe is positioned by the con to give first and then forced to wait for the fantasy return (shortly). If it is too good to be true ... etc. The nature of what we are hungry for is buried deeply in our unmet needs ... and by the time we hit adolescents or early adulthood the need has been masked over by so many false fronts and wishes it is hard to tell what the real need is.
But it is still the deeper needs fulfilment drives that causes “the hungry” Overlander is talking about.
If you don’t want to be deceived then you have to know what you are hungry for ... that much is simple.
Basic Primary Needs are:
1. Food Shelter Clothing,
2. A Sense of Power,
3. A Sense of Fun,
4. A Sense of Belonging ... Love and Acceptance, A
5. Sense of Freedom...
We all have our fantasy wish list ... and the lie is the bridge between the Reality of My Reality (my painful world) and the Fantasy of My Reality (my painless world).
No one wants to be hurt ... But the truth of the matter is life is painful and the lie is a vain attempt to bypass that pain. By accepting that life is painful, by accepting that as a fact, it makes the pain of life a little less difficult to handle and life a little more tolerable.
Statistics say that strangers will lie 3 times in the first 10 minutes of meeting. It is also stated that we are normally lied to 10 to 200 times during the course of a normal day. It seems to be the way of things.
When this information hits us it is hard to imagine that this is really the way of things in the day to day world of our life. Now the truth of the matter is that we lie more to strangers then we do to co workers ... extraverts lie more than introverts ... men lie 8 times more about themselves then they do about other people ... Women lie more to protect other people from the pain of the perceived truth ... if you are in an average marriage then you are going to lie to your spouse one out of every ten interactions ... now if you are unmarried, and that number drops to one in every three interactions ...
Rule one: The truth of the matter is that we are deep ambivalent about the truth and pass it out only as necessary...
Rule two: we are overtly against lying but covertly for it. We are for it in the ways that our society has sanctioned ... sometime the history of the sanctioning drifts far back into antiquity.
Rule Three: we are hard wired to lye ... the larger the neo cortex in the species the bigger and better the liar.
• There is the well-known story of Koko the gorilla who had a baby kitten name ‘All Ball’... Koko was taught to sign and could communicate readily with her keepers ... she once blamed All Ball for tearing a sink off the wall ...
• Babies will fake a cry stop and see if anyone is coming then go right back to crying
• One year olds learn concealment ...
• Two year olds bluff
• Five year olds lie out right ... they manipulate via flattery
• Nine year olds are masters of the cover up
• By the time an average person gets to be college age they will normally lie to their mom one out of every five interactions
• So by the time we enter the work world we enter a world that is full of spam and fake digital friends ... people who would rather lie then tell us the truth if in fact they even know what it is ... it is a world that is full of schemers ... referred to in the literature as the Post Truth Society.
[1] Adapted from Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting
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