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

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       Chapter Four Why Lying Is Necessary

      ‘Of course you don’t mean white lies, do you?’

      This was often the response when I mentioned that I was working on a book called Why We Lie. But I did mean white lies, and black lies, and all the shades of grey in between. I had a simple definition of a lie – words or actions intended to deceive.

      The key word was ‘intended’. We lie because we have reason to lie.

      White lies trip easily off our tongue – ‘Good to see you’, ‘That colour suits you’, ‘No, I’m not busy’, and that all-purpose lie, a single word and the most common of lies, ‘Fine’, in response to the question, ‘How are you?’

      Bud Goodall, whose father worked in the CIA, grew up in a family that was full of secrets and lies. He wrote,

      If I was asked a direct question, such as, ‘How are things at home?’ my answer was always, ‘Fine’. ‘Fine’ was a code word for keeping secret how I really felt. It was at the very least a cover-up of something that could not otherwise be fashioned into a good story, or even a pleasant one… Fine usually means not fine at all. ‘Fine’ is the easy answer for those of us who have settled for something less, or have given up any hope of getting anything better.¹

      Those of us who have a chronic illness have settled for less. We lie almost every time we are asked, ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine’ we say, knowing that it is not true. If we were asked why we lied, or if those who hide an unhappy marriage behind ‘fine’, or those who lie when they tell a friend, ‘You look lovely in that dress’ were asked why they lie, all of us would give the same answer. We don’t want to upset people.

      That is our surface reason. If our questioner went deeper and asked, ‘Why is it important to you not to upset people?’ our answers would fall into two groups.

      Many people would reply, ‘Because people wouldn’t like me if I told them the truth.’ If then asked, ‘Why is it important to you to be liked by other people?’ some people resist answering and parry the question with, ‘No one wants to be disliked’, or, ‘That’s me, I guess. I don’t know why.’ Others would try to put into words what they know is their own profound truth. They say, ‘That’s what my life is about, being with other people and being liked by them. Without them I wouldn’t exist.’

      Those people who do not answer, ‘Because people wouldn’t like me’, might find it hard to describe precisely how another person’s upset feelings disturbs them most profoundly. For these people any disturbance can threaten chaos, and chaos is what they fear the most. They know that the world is a chaotic place, and for them to survive in it they are impelled to create their own personal island of clarity, order and control.

      All of us belong to one or other of these groups. For some of us, having relationships with other people is our most important need, and our greatest fear is being abandoned and rejected. If we are in the second group, maintaining clarity, order and control is our most important need, and our greatest fear is being overwhelmed by chaos. What scientific evidence there is points to this difference in how we experience our sense of existence being genetic, but how each of us expresses our most important need and fear depends on how we interpret the environment in which we find ourselves. Most of us know which group we belong to and do not need a psychologist to tell us, but, if you do not, you will be creating a great many problems for yourself.²

      When we talk of surviving in this way, either by keeping people around us or by maintaining clarity, order and control, we are not talking about physical survival but surviving as a person, what we call ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’. What is this sense of being a person? The more neuroscience can tell us, the stranger it all becomes. Yet, if we accept this strangeness and know it to be our very self, we are able to live our life much more wisely and creatively.

      ‘I’ and ‘my mind’ seem to be aspects of the same thing. We talk about our mind as something we can change, make up and lose. Yet, according to Antonio Damasio, the mind is a process. He wrote, ‘What we know as mind, with the help of consciousness, is a continuous flow of mental patterns, many of which turn out to be logically interrelated.’³ We all like to think that ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’, my sense of being a person, is solid and real, but it is not. As Chris Frith wrote, ‘Another of the illusions that my brain creates is my sense of self. I experience myself as an island of stability in an ever-changing world.’⁴

      Our active brain creates a torrent of thoughts, ideas, images, feelings, and out of this torrent comes a sense of there being this island of stability surrounded by the great universe of movement – ‘me’ and the world. However, ‘me’ is not the equivalent of an island, something solid and real, but the equivalent of a whirlpool in a flowing stream. A whirlpool is a pattern in a torrent, but part of the torrent, and not something that can exist separately from the torrent. The philosopher Patricia Churchland wrote, ‘The brain constructs a range of make-sense-of-the-world neurotools; one is the future, one is the past and one is self. Does this mean that my self is not real? On the contrary. It is every bit as real as the СКАЧАТЬ