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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 cliché, 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 a book 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 God or Allah 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.

      While many thousands of people are struggling with the consequences of the terrible lies told by George Bush, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair, Bush is being paid handsomely to give lectures to his supporters, Cheney is on the talk-show circuit, warning of the terrorist threat that is even greater now, something, he says, that Obama fails to recognize. Like Bush, Blair is enjoying some very lucrative directorships and lecturing engagements. He has established his Faith Foundation, and been appointed Envoy to the Middle East to establish peace and reconciliation there. This appointment is the equivalent of the appointment of Sir Fred Goodwin, who played a major part in setting in train the economic crisis in Britain, to be in charge of a new body to regulate British banks. However, his experiences of the last few years have changed Blair. The journalist Decca Aitkenhead spent a day with Peter Mandelson, and, in the course of that day, they visited Blair. She wrote,

      When we arrive I’m completely taken aback at the former PM’s appearance, for he resembles a bad actor playing Blair in the grip of some awful psychiatric meltdown. He really does look quite mad, with his face all over the place – a grotesque dance of eyebrows and teeth, manically gurning away, every feature in permanent motion – beside which Mandelson looks like a vision of poised sophistication. There are warm greetings, and as I’m introduced Mandelson pretends I’m there to shadow Blair, provoking another great jerky grimace.¹

      Blair, Bush and Cheney made the grave mistake of forgetting that everything we do has a whole network of consequences, most of which we never anticipated. Even when we get what we wished for, it is never quite what we wanted. The lies we tell might protect us in the short term, but, in the long term, the consequences can be disastrous. When we lie to ourselves, we multiply a thousandfold the inherent difficulties we have in trying to determine what is actually going on inside us and around us. Good relationships are based on trust. When we lie to others, sooner or later, our lies will become apparent, and trust is destroyed.

      On his twenty-third birthday in 1978, Timothy Garton Ash drove to West Berlin and some time later went to live for a while in East Berlin where he soon attracted the attention of the Stasi, the secret police. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 the Stasi files were opened, and those who had been spied upon could apply to see their own file. Garton Ash read his own file, and from that the files on those who had spied on him. All of those who had spied on him were ordinary Germans whom he had met, sometimes socially, sometimes in connection with his research for his doctoral thesis on Berlin under Hitler. One of the spies was code-named Michaela. She had been director of the Weimar Arts Galleries. After studying his and Michaela’s files, he went to see her. During their conversation it became clear that the Stasi had tempted her with promises of trips to art galleries outside East Germany, places where few East Germans were allowed to go. She let herself be seduced, and pretended to herself that what she was doing was harmless. She must also have told herself that no one would ever know. She had not learnt from history that all tyrannies eventually come to an end. Amongst those she spied on were her daughter and her step-daughter, and the men with whom they were associated. When the Wall came down her step-daughter read her own file, and severed her ties with her step-mother. Garton Ash did not record what Michaela’s daughter did when she discovered that her own mother had spied on her, but we can surmise.²

      Relationships can be very complicated, and consequently many people limit the number and kind of people to whom they will pay attention. Some people decide that, ‘Anyone who isn’t family doesn’t count’, or, ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with anyone who isn’t the same nationality as me.’ People who decide to treat as important only those who are family, or those who share their nationality, religion, race, class live in what Gillian Tett calls ‘silos’, those huge, windowless cylinders that stand, often in complete isolation, perhaps full of wheat, perhaps empty, beside a single rail track in the Australian Outback.

      Gillian Tett is Capital Markets Editor of the Financial Times and winner of the British Press Award 2008 for the business journalist of the year. She was one of the few people who predicted two years ago the collapse of the world’s financial system. Five years ago when all the talk in the City was about mergers and acquisitions, and the equity markets, she became interested in collateral debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs), the products that proved to be the bad debts acquired by banks and building societies. Tett had trained as an anthropologist. In an interview, she explained how anthropologists are trained to think holistically.

      You look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialized, so busy, they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into this mess we are in is because they were so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society. Bankers like to imagine that money and the profit motive is as universal as gravity. They think it’s basically a given and they think it’s completely apersonal. And it’s not. What they do in finance is all about culture and interaction.³

      Everything in the world is connected to everything else. In early 2009 the car industry was in trouble. The demand for new cars had dropped to its lowest levels, as people faced their own individual financial crisis. News СКАЧАТЬ