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

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СКАЧАТЬ if we start our life with a sense of who we are, the adults around us soon make it clear to us that as we are we are not satisfactory. The word ‘ought’ enters our life. We ought to do as we are told, eat our dinner, wash our face, not hit other children, not be greedy. In short, we ought to be good. If we have not formed a satisfactory bond with a mothering figure in the first months of our life, we might not see any reason to become what the adults around us want us to be, but, if we have formed a bond, we want to maintain that bond because then we shall be looked after. We do not want the bond to be broken, and so we try to please the person with whom we have formed the bond. We set our feet on the path of becoming good in the way the people looking after us want us to be good. Thus, most of us have a collection of meanings that we can lump together as ‘the person I ought to be’. Some of us make every effort to live up to these ‘oughts’, while others make more of a show than a real effort, and often resort to lies to maintain the appearance of being good. The most popular lies in this situation are, ‘I’m sorry’, and, ‘I feel so guilty.’ Whether we are actually good, or pretend to be good, most of us can distinguish clearly between ‘the person I am’ and ‘the person I ought to be’.

      However, some children are so frightened by their mentors over not being what they ought to be that they lose sight of who they are. If they happen to catch a glimpse of the person they are, they condemn this person for not being good. They never feel that they are entitled to what they achieve, and, if successful, they see themselves as an imposter whose base character will soon be revealed.

      When we grow up being familiar with the person that we are, we are usually aware that there is something within ourselves that needs to come into being in order for us to be fully the person we can be. Becoming the person that you are brings the greatest of all satisfactions because you no longer have to pretend that you are someone else. Failing to become the person that you are is to many people their greatest loss. Many adults who, to the outside observer, lead secure and comfortable lives, experience a kind of heartache or angst to which they cannot put a name. Often they know the cause of the heartache, but they dare not say it aloud because the family and friends would not understand. Perhaps they became a civil servant instead of spending their life experiencing the danger and exultation of climbing mountains; or they may have had just one child instead of the six they intended to have. People like these have settled for less than what they might have been. One of the most poignant scenes in the history of the cinema is in On the Waterfront where Marlon Brando, playing Terry Malloy, a failed boxer, says to his brother, played by Rod Steiger, ‘I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve had class and been somebody. Real class. Instead of a bum, let’s face it, which is what I am.’ Terry had been persuaded by his brother to throw a fight so that his brother’s criminal boss would win a bet. In real life, Terry would have remained a bum, but in true Hollywood style, he found redemption, that is, became the person he knew he had it within him to be, not just by being courageous but by telling the truth.

      In real life, some people find themselves by lying.

      Tobias Wolff is world renowned for telling the truth through fiction – his great short stories and novels – but he also wrote two volumes of autobiography which are a truthful account of lies and liars. His mother’s lies were fantasies of about-to-happen happiness. In the next town, when she gets her next job, when she meets the right man, she and Tobias will be happy, while all the time she moved from place to place without a clear plan or aim, working at whatever she could get, and unerringly finding the wrong kind of man. Tobias’s father lied to impress others, and to avoid paying any bills. Children learn from what their parents do, and so Tobias learned how to lie. In his youth and early adulthood he lived a formless, chaotic existence, acting out his emotions and not understanding what he was doing. He knew that he was disobedient, lazy, aggressive and careless, responding without thought to whatever he encountered. He was a poor student, but in his early teens he decided to become a writer, and never wished to do anything else. Within the chaos of his life he had some misty awareness of the person he could be. He saw that if he stayed at Concrete High in Chinook near Seattle, oppressed and used by his stepfather, he did not have a future that would be worth living. So he created a plan made up entirely of lies, yet these lies contained a truth.

      He set out to win a place in one or other of the best private schools in America, even though there was nothing in his school record that would recommend him to any of these schools. He wrote to each school, requested application forms, and filled them in. He wrote letters of support supposedly from his teachers. ‘The words came as easily as if someone were breathing them into my ear. I felt full of things that had to be said, full of stifled truth. That was what I thought I was writing – the truth. But it was truth known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed the facts arrayed against it. I believed that in some sense not factually verifiable I was a straight-A student. In the same sense I believed I was an Eagle Scout, and a powerful swimmer, and a boy of integrity. These were ideas about myself that I had held on to for dear life. Now I gave them voice.’⁹

      Tobias was given a scholarship to Hill School and off he went. Were this a story told by some Hollywood film, Hill School would have been the making of him, but it was real life. Eventually he was expelled from the school, and soon after he joined the army, just in time to spend four years in Vietnam. His account of this war, In Pharaoh’s Army, is one of the best books written about the ugliness and pointlessness of war. When he was discharged he drifted, then went to England to visit friends. There, after four and a half months’ study, he passed the entrance exams for Oxford and took a degree in English Language and Literature. One night he was in the Bodleian library working on a translation from the West Saxon Gospels for his Old English class. The passage to translate concerned the story of the man who built his house upon a rock and the man who built his house on sand. ‘And the rain descended, and the flood came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell; and great was the fall of it.’ He later wrote, ‘The winds that had blown me here could have blown me anywhere, even from the face of the earth. But I was here, in this moment, which all the other moments in my life had conspired to bring me to. And with this moment came these words, served on me like a writ. I copied out my translation in plain English, and thought that, yes, I could do well to build my house upon a rock, whatever that meant.’¹⁰ He returned to America and became a great teacher and writer. He became the person he knew himself to be.

       Chapter Five How We Learn to Lie

      Fragile though it might be, our sense of being a person is the most important part of our life. Newborn babies show very clearly that they are determined to survive physically. If a light tissue is placed over the baby’s mouth and nose, the baby will struggle to remove it. Babies also arrive in the world determined to survive as a person. They search for the one thing they need for survival – the attentive face of another person. Babies arrive in the world ready to feed, and able to single out a face from their surroundings. While it has always been known that babies need sustenance, it was not until the end of World War Two that the importance of a relationship with another mothering person was recognized. Midst the turmoil of the aftermath of the war in Europe there were children who had survived without being in the care of adults. Some were the survivors of places like the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps, some had been separated from their parents as they fled from the enemy, and some were the blond, blue-eyed children conceived as part of Hitler’s plan for the master race and brought up in Nazi institutions, and abandoned as the Russian army advanced on Berlin. Amongst these children were those who had survived physically but, in the absence of anyone to take a personal interest in them, they had not become what we would regard as someone like ourselves. Some of these children distrusted all adults and related only to other children, while some were unable to create a relationship with any human being. To become ourselves we need other people.

      Our physical makeup СКАЧАТЬ