Title: Politics, Advertising, and Excuses: Why Do We Lie?
Abstract: Deciding that a moral purpose justifies immoral acts can prove self- defeating. LIES OFTEN WORK by offering what seem attractively simple explanations of complicated situations or by satisfying our prejudices or hopes or fears, as in saying that some person or group causes all our problems. We may then jump to the conclusion that if we get rid of him or them, we will have solved everything; the lie becomes an implied directive. Hitler's minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels described such lies as really very easy to make convincing: keep them simple, keep repeating them, and keep your audience from hearing anything else. Of course everything we say proves approximate, and incomplete, but with lies, we deliberately misrepresent, to make someone's mental maps less accurate--a recipe for mistakes, confusion and distrust, and not just in politics. Mark Twain has Huck say in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that most of us tell at least a few lies. Huck knows that because he lies to save his friend Jim from slavery. But deciding that a moral purpose justifies immoral acts can prove self-defeating. If we lie, even to survive or to succeed in an immoral and threatening situation, we may help make that situation more dangerous. In such confusions, lies lead to mistakes which lead to more lies, as in what got called 'escalation' during the war in Vietnam. Consider these vicious circles as variations of the IFD disease (1): inaccurate Ideas lead to confusing Frustrations leading to Demoralization through even less accurate mental maps, more mistakes, and so on, until we escape by learning what not to think or do, or some mistake stops us or changes the situation. As George Orwell said in Politics and the English Language, we need to escape or avoid such circles; we can by using language in more easily understood and accurate ways. To do that, compare what we say with what actually happens. We may lie to protect ourselves or someone else or to harm someone; the more threatening a situation seems, the more we may want to lie. The lies may harm the person who tells them; he may come to believe them, misunderstand his situation, and make mistakes as a result. He may also alienate his audience, until few want to believe or help him even when he doesn't lie. In the old story about the shepherd boy who falsely cried Wolf too often, the boy eventually did see a wolf, but by then no one believed him, no one came, and the wolf ate him. We do make distinctions between lies. If we think the speaker honestly believes his misinformation or wants to protect someone else, we may judge him less harshly than we do someone we think deliberately lies to benefit himself. But if a mistake or a lie hurts someone we like, we may not care what the person responsible thinks or feels; we want to keep that mistake or lie from hurting us or other people, and especially if it seems apt to happen again: both the causes and the results matter. Who Tells Who What, About What, and Why? We tell lies in social situations, so we need to understand them in terms of those situations: 1) Why does the speaker (or writer) say what he does (what causes the lie)? 2) How does what the speaker says compare with the facts? 3) How might the lie affect the speaker, the speaker's audience, and the subject? We tell 'little white lies' when we tell people what they expect or want to hear, to protect their feelings or save time. We may lie to make our audiences happier, so that, liking us, they will do what we want. If we refuse to talk, our audience may feel insulted or threatened, because they understand such refusals as rejection in a social situation on which their lives depend. But the 'small talk' which signals 'I'm-willing-to-talk-and-hope-you-are' need not include lies. We can start with questions which indicate an interest in the audience, and the situation we share with them, and so give them a reason to want to keep that channel open. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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