Truth or Consequences

Would you take a drug if it helped you attain an immediate goal, but it also made you lose track of the frontier between reality and your imagination?

1. Reality impairment.As a lawyer, I encounter the (ahem) reality-impaired. I know a lawyer who described to a judge the contents of a document. But what he described was nowhere in the document. And I know that because he had given both the judge and me a copy of it.

He said that the document, a transcript of a meeting, showed my brother (my law partner) refusing to address the issues of the case, instead talking of nothing but the attorney’s fees he hoped to gain if we won. The lawyer meant to convince the judge that we were uninterested in justice and instead were motivated by greed and greed alone. But in reality, Peter discussed at length the issues of the case, and the subject of attorney’s fees never arose, not once. I know this because I read the transcript.

Another example. A lawyer described under oath his phone conversation with my brother. My brother hadn’t trusted him, so he had recorded his own side of the conversation. (You legally can do that without telling someone; but in California, you can’t secretly record both sides of a conversation). This lawyer made embarrassing accusations against my brother. But since Peter had recorded everything that he himself had said, he could supply to the judge, verbatim, his side of the conversation to refute the other lawyer.

I have known both of the lawyers from these examples for a while. One especially (he-who-said-that-my-brother-spoke-of-nothing-but-money) is a strategic liar. He says whatever wins. He’s untethered to the truth.

As years go by, more lawyers are like this.

2. The mind bent.I used to be amazed when someone stated facts that easily could be refuted. I used to believe that this showed audacity of deception.

But then I encountered the same phenomenon with a relative. In all sincerity, with nothing to gain by fooling me, this relative discussed fervently the contents of a document that simply were not there.

Like the two lawyers whom I have talked about, this relative uses falsehoods. If he is angry, he will lie to hurt someone. If someone has made a mistake, he might claim that apocalyptic consequences will flow from that mistake. ("Because of you, I’m going to lose $50,000!") He does this to burden his victim. His lies correctively.

Have lies dimmed the ability of my relative and these lawyers to know when they are telling the truth, and when their words only express what they wish were the truth? Does this happen when you use lies? When you use lies, do they make you blind?

3. The malleable mind.This conforms to what most people know about the mind.

For example, most people don’t remember their dreams. But if you want to remember your dreams, you should keep a pen and paper by your bed. When you wake up, immediately write down what you remember from your dreams. In time, you’ll remember your dreams without writing them down.

The act of writing down your dreams tells your mind that it’s important to remember them. Then your subconscious mind starts automatically to store them in a place that your conscious mind can reach.

Names are another example. If remembering names is important to you, you tend to remember names. I want to remember names. So over time I’ve taught myself to do so. I’m not great at it, but I’m better than I was. I’m better than most people who don’t care to remember the name of somebody they’ve just met.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is a book about memory. In one chapter, it talks about a memory experiment. For weeks, a test subject was tasked to remember random numbers. For weeks, his memory for randon numbers was ordinary. But then, he started to be really good at it. He became really good at it without training, just by constantly doing it.

The mind responds to demands put on it. It becomes stronger or weaker based on what it’s called to do over time.

Scrupulous truth-telling is like that. If you’re scrupulous about the truth, your mind responds by vividly delimiting reality. But when you wilfully choose falsehood, that tends to dilute the reality-delimiting power of the mind.

I hypothesize that scrupulousness about truth trains the mind to know reality. In contrast, a habit of lying instructs the mind that truth is unimportant. And it compromises the mind’s ability to know reality from imagination.

4. Proposed experiments.I wish psychologists or sociologists would put this to scientific proof. They could make test subjects do an exercise, success at which will earn the test subjects something that they value. Then the test subjects can be asked to self-report the outcome, not knowing that they had been watched. Then, they could be given a test to determine their ability to distinguish reality for un-reality. I’m supposing that the scrupulously honest ones will do better at this test than the others.

Or neurologists could study the brains of truthful persons, and compare them to those of known liars. ("Well, ladies and gentlemen, in 87% of liars, there was a 34%-or-more increase in the size of the mendacious-deludus portion of the brain.")

                    5. Doesn’t everybody?

Maybe a liar knows the line between truth and imagination, but not the difference between himself and someone who values truth. He himself little-values truth, so he assumes that everybody little-values truth.

So when he transparently lies, he knows that everyone will see through him. But he doesn’t care, because, in his mind, nobody cares about the truth. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth. It’s just the opposite: he can’t be bothered with it.

6. Truth or consequences.My personal observations drive these conjectures, and these conjectures have no better origin than that. But if I’m right, one day our society might not share the common ground of reality. Because as time passes, people become more and more untethered to the truth.

The habit of lying is like a potent drug that gives an immediate benefit, but it has terrible side-effects.

And over time, even the short-term gains will subside. Because in our time, people still tend to believe what they hear. A judge, for example, usually is slow to assume that the lawyer before him is lying. Because society is presently based, in large part, on trust. (Not too long ago, the term "liar" was a fighting word.)

But as liars multiply, trust diminishes. In time, credulity will wither. It will wither in law, in business, in journalism, in politics; then in teaching, then in church, then in family. And then we’re hammered. Truly, truly hammered.

Because a society that cannot share reality as common ground is a society of atomized reality. Atomized reality is chaos. A highly cooperative, integrated society such as ours cannot function in chaos.

                      7. A house divided.

 Lincoln knew that the nation could not survive half-slave and half-free. He sorrowfully but resolutely waged war that the nation would be all one or all the other.

So with truth-telling and lying. Truth-telling and lying don’t rule discourse and men’s minds and women’s minds equally like co-regents. One rises while the other falls. Society will move toward one or the other. There will be no stasis, no equilibrium. And to become a society of liars is dreadful to contemplate

                     8. Back from the brink.

 Most of us are limited in our influence. We have great control over ourselves; some influence over our loved ones and friends; and little influence beyond our immediate circle.

That doesn’t make us helpless. Our solution to the encroachment of falsehood lies in furrowing our souls in straight lines. Our solution is to be zealous in truth - fanatical, even. If we are zealous, we can often influences our circle of acquaintances by our example. If heaven blesses the effort, then the virtue of truth will ripple outward in circles of verity that spread wherever someone commits himself to truth.

It will take a movement like this to rescue ourselves from what we are becoming, because now all the expansion is in the other direction. Liars plant lies. They arrogate to themselves a God-like authority to invent a world to their liking with nothing more than will and words.

We must not as a nation swallow that poison.