LYING, PART V. . .

By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. –Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’

I have offered my ‘current’ definition of ‘Lying’ and (there is almost always an ‘AND’) at the same time I see nothing wrong with either a narrower or a broader definition of lying.  There is a caveat: Each retains the prerogative of morally evaluating the intentionally misleading statements, whether they fall within the definition of lying or outside of it.  Here is an example.

Consider that all faith and humanist traditions and all ‘Cultures’ espouse the following: Thou shalt not kill!  A simple, clear, concise, unambiguous statement.  YET, all faith and humanist traditions and all ‘Cultures’ amend this statement; they espouse one idea and live by another.  Oddly, there is no agreement as to when it really is wrong to ‘kill.’

Consider that, like ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ all definitions of lying smuggle in terms – moral or amoral, generally not immoral – that also require an evaluation.  To say, for example that it is not lying to speak falsely to those with no right to your information often glides over the vast question of what it means to have such a right to information.  This leads us back to my more neutral definition of lying: an intentionally deceptive message in the form of a statement.

Consider this, gentle reader.  All deceptive messages, whether or not they are lies, are often affected by one or more of three factors: self-deception, error, and by variations in the actual intention to deceive.   These act as filters that distort, color and/or alter the ways in which a message is experienced by both deceived and deceivers.

In order to complicate matters even more, a person who intends to deceive can work with these filters and manipulate them.  The deceiver can play on the biases, the imaginations, the prejudices, the fears, and etc. of the other(s).  Watch any number of ‘attack ads’ during an election year and you can see this clearly play out.  It has become so common that ‘We the People’ have become immune to the deception – to put it bluntly, ‘We the People’ just don’t care – if the ‘attack ad’ supports our prejudices we will agree with it if it does not we will dismiss it as ‘fake news.’

All of this involves great complexity and each year we learn more and more about the complexity of communication and about the role my-your-our brain plays in sending and receiving messages. We are learning more and more about the intricate capacities of each person for denial, deflection, distortion, and ‘selective loss of memory.’  Add to this the fact that communication often takes place over a period of time – sometimes over a ‘long time’ – and often includes a number of people and the complexity increases, often exponentially.

I am thinking of the ‘Telephone Game.’  I have played this game with forty adults – all ‘leaders.’  A simple one sentence message was whispered into the ear of the first person.  Then, he or she would whisper the ‘same identical message’ into the ear of the person sitting next to him/her.  This continued until the last person receiving the message would repeat it out loud to the entire group.  In every instance, the final message was not even close to the original message.  ‘Distortion’ at its best.  No one person intentionally set out to deceive and yet deception occurred.

Next time we will begin to focus on ‘Two Perspectives: The Deceived and The Deceiver.’

Never have I lied in my own interest; but often I have lied through shame in order to draw myself from embarrassment in different matters.–Jean-Jacques Rousseau