"There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -- which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -- what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."
These are words written by Joseph Conrad in 1902. They appear in The Heart of Darkness, a work that has been acclaimed as perhaps the greatest short novel in the English language. Anyone who has had to depend upon or regularly interact with a liar can grasp the truth of these observations by Conrad.
As flawed as our society is, we function day to day by trusting that other people are truthful. We assume in commonplace and even extraordinary situations that we can place our trust in others. When we ask a person for directions, we trust he is doing his best to assist us. When we go to the doctor, we trust both his competence and sincerity in providing an evaluation and treatment. When we buy meat at the grocery store, we trust that it is fresh and untainted.
Civilization is based largely on trusting in others' honesty. When that trust is breached repeatedly, we find our world turned upside down. Consider parent-child relationships. We want to believe our child when he relates where he has been, with whom he has spent time, whether he has finished his homework, and so on. If our youngster violates that trust by lying again and again, we become frustrated, angry, finally despairing. We find ourselves behaving like a detective, checking up on our offspring and interrogating him. We impose restrictions on him and, in doing so, we restrict our own lives. Every time the phone rings, we worry whether it is a neighbor, the school, the police, or even a hospital informing us that our child has been injured or is dead. We fear the worst and start abandoning hope for his future. The parent-child relationship has totally changed. Even though we want to believe what he says, we dare not because of the repeated lying. We find ourselves even starting to dislike our child and hate ourselves for feeling that way. The parent-child relationship we always thought we would have, that we still yearn for, is gone -- an example of Conrad's "taint of death."
Or consider the "taint of death" inflicted upon thousands of trusting investors by financial crooks. Bernie Madoff was a man who gradually and calculatingly became a trusted and revered financial titan. Insinuating himself into the lives of trusting men and women, he fleeced them of the funds for which they had labored, some being left with nothing after his big lie, his giant ponzzi scheme, came unraveled.
Relying upon a liar, especially if it happens to be someone with whom we must have contact repeatedly (a spouse, employer, or colleague) is like trying to extricate ourselves from quicksand. We get sucked down further and further.
Conrad spoke of the impact of lies as "biting into something rotten." His words, penned 107 years ago, still speak eloquently of the impact of the criminal's lies upon his victims.
