Читать книгу Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 10

‘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 three-dimensional world we see, or the future we prepare for, or the past we remember. It is a tool tuned, in varying degrees, to the reality of brain and world.’⁵

However, the three-dimensional world we see is composed of guesses that can be shown to be wrong. Our sense of being a person is composed of guesses about who we are, what our world is like, what our past was and what our future will be. All of these guesses are interconnected. Our reason for telling a white lie is connected directly to how we experience our sense of being a person. If our decision to tell a white lie is shown to be a mistake, the ideas that are an essential part of our sense of being a person tumble down like a row of dominoes.

For instance, you might decide to say to a friend who is showing off a new dress, ‘You look lovely in that dress.’ You predict that your friend will respond with a happy smile and a thank you, but she does not. She senses that you do not like the dress, and says, ‘You’re lying. You don’t like it at all.’

You might protest and try to reassure her, but inside you feel the dangerous instability of mounting anxiety. If your existence as person depends on good relationships, the fear of rejection begins to loom large. If your existence depends on clarity, order and control, the fear of chaos comes upon you. To save yourself, you might resort to further lies, and perhaps with these you manage to extricate yourself from a difficult situation. Your anxiety subsides. You are safe – provided, of course, you remember what were the lies you told. Successful lying requires a good memory.

All this from a simple social interaction. What happens when you discover that you have made a serious error of judgement?

Suppose, for instance, that you have mapped out your future, which will be with one special person. Then you discover that you had got it all wrong. Your loved one had tragically died, or run off with someone else, or simply had a change of heart. In this situation we all feel that we are literally falling apart. It is a very strange experience. Our body is not falling apart but inside where ‘I’ resides crumbles like a wooden house caught in a hurricane. What is actually falling apart is some of the ideas which make up your sense of ‘I’. These are the guesses that you created about your life, your loved one and your future. If you understand that, you know that these terrible feelings will pass, and that after a period of uncertainty you will become whole again. If you do not understand this, you are overwhelmed by the greatest terror.

The original cover of Bob Dylan’s perhaps most famous album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan shows twenty-three-year-old Dylan and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend Suze Rotolo walking down a snow-covered street in New York. It was nearly fifty years before Suze could bring herself to write her account of her three-year romance with Dylan and her breakdown that followed. She told her interviewer Richard Williams that, ‘It was the hardest thing to write about. I was young and vulnerable and insecure. There were pressures from all around and I couldn’t find my place any more. I didn’t feel I had anybody I could turn to. That makes you really fall apart. And that’s how I felt.’⁶

Describing the events that led to their break-up was difficult, but what she put into that six-word sentence ‘That makes you really fall apart’ can go beyond the capacity of language to describe. What Suze said sounds like a cliché but it is not. It refers to a life-changing and self-changing experience. Her sense of being a person fell apart, and then had to rebuild itself in a way different from what it had been before.

Had she been older, better defended and secure in herself, a romance, or rather an affair with Dylan would not have been such a profound experience. Ending it might have been unpleasant and sad, but she would have been able to tell herself that she had survived similar events in the past, and she would survive this one. However, she was very young and inexperienced. The ‘pressures from all around’ included the attitudes of Dylan’s friends who condemned her for trying to maintain her career as an artist instead of devoting herself fully to Dylan. If her career was floundering and she was no longer loved by Dylan, she no longer fitted into any part of society and belonged there. ‘Home’, said Robert Frost, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Suze had no home. Her mother and her sister disliked Dylan (imagine the ‘I told you so’s) and so there was no one she could turn to. In similar circumstances each of us would find ourselves falling apart. Most of us would not know what was happening to us, and we would be terrified.

The fear of being annihilated as a person is far worse than the fear of death. We can tell ourselves that when we die we shall go to heaven, or become a spirit, or return as another person. People will erect memorials to us, they will talk about us, remember us. But, if we are annihilated as a person, there will be nothing, no heaven, no spirit, no return, and no one will remember us because it will be as if we have never existed. We have disappeared like a wisp of smoke in the wind. We will do anything to stop this happening. This is why we lie. Every lie we tell, no matter how small and unimportant, is a defence of our sense of being a person.

We will lie over the most stupid things; tell lies that are patently, outrageously lies; build lie upon lie until they form a great, sticky web of lies. We will lie when telling the truth would lead to a better outcome; we will lie when we do not know why we are lying; we will lie to people who do not matter to us, and to people who do; we will lie to people who know that we are lying; persistently, unthinkingly, we will lie to ourselves. And all for one reason. To preserve our sense of being a person.

So much do they fear the destruction of their sense of being a person that many psychologists have avoided trying to understand just what it is that they fear. They deal with the problem of understanding what the sense of self is by hiding it in a mist of romantic fantasies, as happens in transpersonal psychology; or they talk about it in such obscure ways that no humble inquirer after the truth would dare to ask a question (ask a Freudian analyst a question and the reply is likely to be, ‘Why do you want to know?’); or they believe that the sense of being a person is not something that a proper psychologist would study because proper psychology is objective and scientific. This last position is based on the popular principle that, if you don’t talk about something, it doesn’t exist.

Psychologists might pretend that the sense of being a person does not exist, but they cannot pretend that emotions do not exist. It is not possible to understand what emotions are without understanding what the sense of being a person is. Since this understanding is missing from much of psychology, an enormous amount of rubbish is written about emotions. Theories about emotions seem to fall into two categories. There are the ‘emotions are like the climate’ theories, and the pseudo-scientific theories that talk about ‘the emotional brain’. Both kinds of theories make us helpless. According to the climate theories, emotions roll over us like unstoppable summer storms. According to the emotional brain theories, we are mere puppets at the mercy of the most ancient parts of our brain. Lurking in our amygdala are the emotions of fear and anger, ready to burst forth at any time. More complex emotions require a functioning cortex, but, even in that part of the brain where reason is considered to reside, emotions can override the intellect. These theories do not give us a means of understanding why, say, we are able to deal calmly with a situation involving our brother, and yet fly into a rage in another very similar situation which involves our sister. Nor do these theories help us understand why, say, we feel guilty over something that was clearly not our fault, but are untroubled by another situation where we have failed to fulfil our obligations. To understand these differences we need to know why we interpreted two of these situations as threats to the integrity of our sense of being a person, and the other two situations as being unthreatening.

If all psychologists recognized that every moment of their life they are creating meanings, and that out of these meanings come their sense of self, they would readily see that emotions are meanings, and that all these meanings relate to their sense of being a person. Emotions are rarely expressed initially in words, though they can later be put into sentences. All these sentences have just one subject – ‘I’. ‘I am angry’, ‘I am happy’, ‘I am envious’, ‘I feel guilty’ and so on. Psychologists label emotions as positive and 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

Even 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.