Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ negative, but often do not see that positive emotions have to do with ‘I’ being safe, and negative emotions have to do with ‘I’ being in danger. When the world is the way we want it to be, we are happy. When there is something wrong with our world, we are unhappy. When our body or our self is in danger, we are frightened. Being happy comes in a range of intensities, from contentment to ecstasy. Being in danger can take many forms, which is why there are so many negative emotions. Being angry involves a degree of pride, ‘How dare that happen to me!’, while being jealous involves a certain perception of ownership. ‘That person has something which is rightly mine.’

      The interpretations we call emotions enable us to make decisions about what we should do. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown, if damage to our brain prevents us from feeling emotions, that is, assessing our situation in terms of the safety or danger of our sense of being a person, we cannot make the simplest decision about what we should do. Even rational men need their emotions!

      Psychologists who espouse Positive Psychology tell us that we can learn how to be happy through the use of our positive emotions. Barbara Frederickson, a Positive Psychologist, was quoted as suggesting that ‘positive emotions – such as joy or love or attraction or contentment – enhance our readiness to engage with people and things, making us more attentive and open to and able to integrate the things we experience. Negative emotions, on the other hand, are believed to “narrow” rather than “broaden” the individual’s reactions and openness to the world.’⁷ All this could have been put more simply. When we feel safe, we open ourselves to the world and other people: when we feel we are in danger, we close ourselves off and put a barrier between ourselves and the possible sources of that danger. This quotation shows how psychologists change what people do, for instance, creating the meanings, ‘I feel joyful’, ‘I love’, ‘I’m attracted to’ into abstract nouns, and then talk about these abstractions (that is, ideas in our head) as if they are real things that can have an effect on the world. Anger never starts a conflict. Conflicts are started by angry people.

      Our sense of being a person is always vigilant, always watching for a possible threat. However, just as a strong, well-equipped army views threats to its safety very differently from that of a weak, badly equipped army, so people who see themselves as being strong and skilled in their personal defences view threats to their safety very differently from the way people who see themselves as weak and ill-equipped do. The second group see threats everywhere, and are likely to interpret ordinary remarks by another person as a threat to the integrity of their sense of being a person. For instance, people who describe themselves as being ‘sensitive’ have an amazing ability to perceive an intended insult in someone’s ordinary remark. In contrast, the first group are less likely to interpret another person’s behaviour as a slight or a humiliation, or, if it is such, they believe that they have the means to deal effectively with such threats. People in the ‘strong’ group are less likely to feel the need to lie in order to preserve their sense of being a person, but they will lie in order to advance their own interests. If they believe, say, that they have the ability to become a successful captain of industry, they might lie in order to become the person they wish themselves to be. It seems from the research that a completely truthful CV is rare.

      The meanings, ideas, attitudes, beliefs that make up our sense of being a person form a system, and, like most systems, it has a means of defending its integrity and keeping it whole. Just as the white blood cells of our body will rush to our defence when we are invaded by noxious bacteria, so a force intrinsic to our sense of being a person will rush to our defence. For want of a better term, I call this force primitive pride, and distinguish it from personal pride. We learn from other people how to take personal pride in ourselves. For instance, most of us learn from our parents to take personal pride in being clean, or to be seen to be honest. Primitive pride seems to have its origins in those brain-based operations that lead to the development of consciousness and a sense of being a person.

      When we take personal pride in ourselves we can point to something outside ourselves as evidence of our achievement and worth. Just as a two-year-old can hold up her empty plate as evidence that she has eaten all her dinner, so adults can point to an examination they have passed, the old car they have rebuilt, the sporting medals they have won, the pictures they have painted, the family they have raised. Personal pride is our way of expressing our confidence in ourselves as we operate in the real world.

      Primitive pride takes no account of the real world. It always refers back to the person, and it needs no outside evidence to support it because it is a fantasy. Personal pride requires some thought, such as, ‘I think I can be proud of myself for getting that degree. Working full time and studying wasn’t easy.’ Primitive pride is immediate and unthinking.

      All of us have been in a situation where someone has insulted or humiliated us. We had to disregard our immediate impulse to strike the person down, but directly and unbidden comes the thought, ‘What else could you expect from a —’, and here we insert some pejorative word for the nationality, race, religion, gender, sexuality, age, or class of the person who has insulted us. We might have taken personal pride in our generous and impartial attitude to all our fellow human beings, but primitive pride can always dip into that drive to survive, no matter what, and draw from it some fantasy that proves to us if to no one else that we are superior to all other people. Primitive pride often masquerades as personal pride. When I was researching for my book What Should I Believe? I soon lost count of the number of religious groups I found who claimed to be God’s Chosen People. Beliefs reside in our heads. Simply believing that you have been chosen by God does not make you superior to others. Getting a first in maths does entitle you to feel that you are better at maths than most people.

      Primitive pride is indifferent to the truth, and very adept at producing lies that we are reluctant to see as lies. For instance, anyone who has been responsible for a young child has had the experience of the child suddenly doing something very dangerous, just at the moment when your attention was elsewhere. Perhaps the child suddenly rushed across a busy road, or fell over in his bath. You retrieved the child and no harm was done, but you were very frightened. Fear itself can be a threat to the sense of being a person, especially when the event that led to you being frightened has revealed that you are not the person you thought you were. You thought you were vigilant and careful, but you are not. Realizing this can be so destabilizing that primitive pride comes immediately to your aid. It was not your fault that the child was put in danger. It was the fault of the disobedient child. Your fear turns to anger, and you berate – or slap – the child.

      What you have done is to lie to yourself and to the child. The truth was that the child was too young and impulsive to understand the possible danger, and that you were not paying attention to the child. You cannot accept this unpalatable truth, and so you lied to protect yourself.

      The actual events in such a scenario are simple. The child was suddenly in danger but was saved. What created the complications that led to your lies were the discrepancies between what you thought yourself to be and what you were shown by the event to be.

      Within our sense of being a person are many ideas concerning what kind of person we are. I wish I could say that we all know who we are, but I cannot. We can all describe our likes and dislikes, and what improvements to our talents and circumstances we would like to see, but, while some people are very familiar with the person that they are, there are people who experience an emptiness inside them, a space where their sense of being a person could be. They describe themselves in terms of what they do, the roles they play, but they have limited or no sense of being anything more than these roles. When in an interview the actor Bill Nighy was asked, ‘Who do you think you are?’ he replied, ‘I have very little contact with myself. When people talk about knowing who they are or having access to their feelings, I never know what they’re talking about. I have this sort of commentary that natters on in my head, which I suppose is me, but apart from that I’m just this sort of slightly misarranged organism.’⁸

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