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

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СКАЧАТЬ to learn how to do this. In adult life we occasionally wonder, ‘Did that really happen or did I imagine it?’ We also have those moments of confusion when we see something fairly clearly and then, on further inspection, what we thought we saw proves to be something else altogether. When we make these kinds of mistakes, we often mutter to ourselves, ‘I must be going crazy.’ If we are confident in ourselves, we can dismiss these mistakes as matters of no importance, but, if we doubt our ability to operate in this world, mistakes like these further diminish our self-confidence and increase our confusion.

      There was no one I could talk to about what was happening to me. Sometimes my doubts became so great that I lost all confidence in the solidity of the world around me. Just putting one foot in front of the other became a matter of defying my doubts. I knew that I could easily have lost my grip on reality and plummeted into the unknown.

      Now I know that what I was experiencing was not unusual. Most people have this experience at least once in their lives because few people live lives devoid of disasters. A disaster can be something that everyone would agree was a disaster, or it can be a very private matter, a loss of hope or a grave disappointment, but, whichever it is, in the chaos of the disaster, our trust in reality can fail. We can find that the world around us ceases to be real: or that which we call ‘I’ vanishes, leaving a hole the size of the universe inside us. If we can manage to survive this state of complete uncertainty, sooner or later our world becomes real again: our ‘I’ becomes safely lodged inside us again.

      Two things saved me. My mother was physically lazy. She did not follow me on my excursions to the bush or the beach. She never came to my school to talk to the teachers or to attend a function there. Away from her, my confidence would revive. But it was books that developed my confidence by showing me how differently different individuals saw themselves and their world. If I did not see things the way my mother did, then that was to be expected. Literature demonstrates that each of us sees everything in our own individual way. For instance, two people look at a tree. They agree that what they are looking at is a tree. However, one person sees a beautiful, warm, friendly tree and the other an ugly, strange and possibly dangerous tree. Thus the tree itself is true for both these people but that which each person has imposed on the tree is an individual truth. There are truths which we share and truths which are our own. Shared truths make relationships and society possible: individual truths are the essence of who we are as a person.

      Whenever my mother told me I was lying she was attacking both my confidence in my ability to understand what was going on around me and my sense of being a person. We are not born knowing how to understand our environment and knowing who we are as a person. We spend our childhood learning this. In calling me a liar my mother was being as destructive to me as she would have been had she attempted to murder me. In my childhood I became aware of the two forms of attack. She would not only hit me but occasionally be so beside herself with rage that she would threaten to kill me and then kill herself. As I grew into a strong, solidly built child my fear of what my mother could do to me physically diminished. However, her attacks on me as a person continued until, in my mid-thirties, I left Australia and put half the world between my mother and myself. By then I had regained my confidence in the truth of my perceptions. I had no doubt about the importance of a meticulous search for truth, both our shared truths and our individual truths.

      We search for truth, both shared and individual truths, in many different ways. All of our arts are concerned with the exploration of shared and individual truths. If we lack the ability to create art, we can explore shared and individual truths in the living of our life, conforming to society’s expectations when it suits us to do so and at other times exploring the possibilities of our individual truths by creating alternative interpretations of our experiences. When we act on our alternative interpretations, we create different outcomes. However, there are many people who refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary and marvellous uncertainty of existence. They turn away from the wonder of being alive and construct instead something that is mundane, repetitive and deadening. Those people who are frightened by uncertainty and try to deal with their fear do this by controlling others, be they individuals like my mother or organizations like the State and the Church.

      Whatever the form of government, the State has always used repression and social sanctions to produce conformity in its subjects. The recognition of individual truths has always been very limited, even in those places where people pride themselves on freedom of speech. The religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have always used their sacred texts as the means of enforcing conformity of thought and deed among their followers. Within each of these religions, individuals who came to believe that their individual truths were truer than the shared truths of that particular religion formed break-away groups, where the original individual truths then become shared truths which must be believed by all the members of that group. In the twentieth century, increased military efficiency and the invention of cameras, radio, film and television made possible the creation of large totalitarian states – the USSR, Communist China, North Korea – where all citizens were required to give up who they were and become what the State wanted them to be. Increasingly, computers are being used to bring together all the technologies of indoctrination and surveillance in order to ensure that all citizens live the terrible lie of denying their own individual truths. Naomi Klein, describing the vast social experiment that is taking place in the city of Shenzhen, China’s first ‘special economic zone’, told how, ‘Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city… The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range.’ The aim is to install about two million CCTVs in Shenzhen. This is just part of a much bigger programme called ‘Golden Shield’. Meanwhile, in countries that pride themselves on their freedom both government agencies and private businesses install surveillance cameras. In 1949 George Orwell saw all this and worse in his novel of what was then the future, 1984. Orwell saw how easily we could lose our freedom and not realize that it had gone.¹

      Many people will say that surveillance is not a problem for law-abiding people. In saying this, they are assuming that the laws are just and wise because the people who make the laws are just and wise, and know what is best for their people. Heaven forfend that political leaders would ever lie to their people!

      People who hold these views want certainty and security. They do not want to be told that there is nothing about which we can be absolutely certain, or that security and freedom always come in inverse proportion, but it can be difficult to predict just what these proportions will prove to be. Many a woman has married in the belief that her husband will give her the security she needs, only to find that he gives her the security of a prison. Most dictators come to power on a wave of popular acclaim, but the populace soon discover that their cheers have turned to tears.

      I did not come upon an understanding of how we exist and make sense of our existence in one extraordinary revelation. Rather I stumbled towards it. By great good fortune, when I became a clinical psychologist, I was able to spend virtually unlimited time talking with troubled people about their experience of living. We talked in ordinary, everyday language about ordinary, everyday things, and about the kinds of painful, disturbing experiences which throw into doubt everything that we believed was true. Abstract concepts like traits, or personality types, or mental illnesses could not account for my clients’ experiences. But, if we looked at these experiences in terms of how each person interpreted the events in their lives, everything became clear. What determines our behaviour is not what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us.

      My fellow psychologists did not regard what I did as proper psychology. Asking people how they saw themselves and their world was ‘subjective’ and ‘anecdotal’. Apart from a few neuropsychologists, most of my colleagues were oblivious of the extraordinary progress there had been in the understanding of how the brain functioned. It was now clear that the traditional division of brain and mind was not just erroneous but a great impediment to our understanding of ourselves. СКАЧАТЬ