You know we often look at lies in a moral way, and I understand that. Nobody likes being a liar, nor being lied to. We often aspire to be better than that, however what about examining lies functionally? What precisely makes a lie so effective? How do we craft one that works as intended?
Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a tutorial on how to manipulate people. Although I am lying when I say that, it is not intended as a tutorial on how to manipulate people. The information is a two way street, obviously the means to disarm a lie is the means to engineer one as well.
I used to do some work in marketing, so I have lied for money. I did not believe the slightest in the product I was shilling, and I felt genuinely cynical having to make a living this way. Writing and translating adverts for something I genuinely believed nobody really wanted nor needed.
So how do I justify this: It’s simple, I don’t.
Because that’s the worst lies of them all, the ones we tell ourselves. In fact, it is the most efficient kind of lie, the kind that we say in some effort to define ourselves. The most successful deceptions are those which permits us to define ourselves. Wherein we invite some notion to ourselves that become part of our own justification.
Rather I accept it. I told fibs for money, and it was not a good thing. Was it the worst crime in the world? Am I beyond redemption? Probably not, I made adverts on the internet, and I’m in my late 20s, I can probably do something in my life to offset this transgression and do some good. Who knows? I like to think so.
We are brought up in a very nasty system, where lies are often good coping mechanisms. Nobody wants to admit to themselves that they are doing something wrong, because in social Darwinism, doing something wrong means you should be punished with a lifetime of destitution and misery.
You do everything right, or you’re some sort of failure, or loser, or dreg. Everything has to be perfect, all actions must be justified, the just world theory of modern life is rigid and extreme, it demands the temperance of prestige and performance above all else.
I’m not sure exactly when I realised just how much nonsense it all is. But I think it was during a police raid back when I was a murder suspect.
Thankfully it turns out the person I allegedly murdered was alive, and explained to the police how I had in fact not murdered them, nor done anything wrong. So I was vindicated, which is nice.
There was a moment during this event, when I was staring right into the threaded barrel of a Sig Sauer P226, a moment that felt like an eternity, which really shattered many of my preconceptions about life.
I was a complete stranger to this person who had me at their crosshairs. I was no one, I was merely a target, a presumed killer, and I am only alive today on a whim. These were low light conditions, their view of me was little more than a silhouette, they could’ve decided I was a threat and pulled the trigger. The bullet would’ve gone right into my head, and I’d be dead.
On top of that I lived in a building noted by the police for its gangs and thieves and immigrants, as far as they were concerned, I stood in a gallery of rogues, a place in which people were supposed to die if anything. As a person I was absolutely no one of importance.
And it is precisely in those situations where we enjoy lying to ourselves. I could tell myself I was rich in spirit, that on some level, in some Platonic sense, I did matter. That my life had value, and that things would be okay.
But on what basis? There was none, had I been shot I would hardly be the first person to die in that building. I wasn’t exempt from this reality. To tell myself that I was would be, at the very most, a coping mechanism.
And it made me think, I recalled a statistic from UNICEF, about how some twenty million people die each year from manmade causes like famine or disease, preventable deaths. I realised I am by no means an exception to this.
It’s easy to think we are, that we all have an angel with their hand on our shoulders, but we don’t. No more so than anyone else at least. And ever since I accepted this. How past, future and present are all very fleeting circumstances, how we are ultimately in a curious and deeply chaotic spiral wherein normality is a presumption more than a fact, that I began to examine the strange lies that truly affect us.
Jean Paul Sartre once said that we do not truly know who we are until everything has been taken away from us, and the only thing that remains is ourselves. So who was I in this? What stepped out of this brutal ontology?
If I am honest, I don’t know. A stranger I would say. A terrified, confused, miserable and scorned stranger. I was furious at these people who had invaded my home and made vulgar accusations, who had committed violence against me. Who had dragged me out of my home and assaulted me, and treated me like a monster, in spite of how I was innocent.
They really thought I did it too, they were properly mean, and felt very embarrassed upon realising their mistake. Especially the bald one. I don’t know why bald policemen are always the worst.
And of course they were also products of their own lies. They think of themselves as heroes, as agents of justice, as the upholders of civilisation. Can anyone expect anything but hubris from this? Could I expect anything but the cruelest of treatment by such a lie? If they are the heroes, then I must be scum, otherwise the narrative doesn’t check out.
It is these narratives that produce the most mortal lies, when we become part of a story we tell ourselves, when we seek consistence and authorial intent in a world that contorts itself into strange things.
The most dangerous lies are the ones we say when we are being completely honest, that are spoken with conviction, the falsehoods that we are not aware of, that become this essence to our narrative. This perpetual correctness, to quote Peter Coffin.
The most bitter lies are the medals that Oliver North wears on his chest, the monument to Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, the pledge of allegiance, the smiling lady on the billboard, the Adidas stripes on your jacket, all these things which affirm us, which makes us certain. But certain of what? That we are just? What we will live to see tomorrow? That good conquers evil?
Many people who have thought to conquer evil will frequently look at life through cigarette smoke at midnight, and contemplate precisely what their nature is. What carnage and misery such memories may produce. If they fought under the Union Flag, or the Butcher’s Apron. It is in these moments that I believe we find the truth, that we find the opportunity to become ourselves.
That’s how James Connolly went from eviscerator to emancipator, when he examined his role. Typified by the anthems he would inspire:
Come tell us how you slew
Them old Arabs two by two
Like Zulus they had spears and bows and arrows
How bravely you faced each one
With your sixteen pounder gun
And you frightened them damn natives to their marrow
He went from a lobsterback to a liberator, serving seven years for the crown during the land wars in Ireland, he saw the cruelty and brutality of his military and understood that his true calling was to fight for the poor and the downtrodden, for the people who he was sent to dispossess and demean.
That he was little more than a rifle for the landlords, and that such a pathetic existence was not one of dignity. That the fanfares and the revels was precisely this lie, this coping mechanism.
Suddenly he had joined the wobblies, and inspired a great rebellion in Dublin. At the end of his life, he faced the same rifles he had once carried himself, as he was shot dead by a firing squad. Killed by the same empire he had once fought for.
A lot of people see James Connolly’s death as a tragedy, but I don’t. I think the real tragedy would’ve been if he had lived a long life, if he never went down this avenue, if he was just another veteran in Edinburgh, looking at faded old photographs of his time fighting for the British Raj, marching behind a piper during the Jubilee, living and dying as a rook and a traitor to his own people. Wasting his life to a lie that would bring nothing but widows and orphans and wealth to the crown.
The most dangerous lies are the ones that sustain us, that we may not only live for, but that keeps us living. It is always better to die for the truth, than to live in such a lie.
