We flatter ourselves into thinking we're honest people but often this is a bald-faced lie. We are not a species that's truthful by nature. We’re fabricators, storytellers, myth makers, tail spinners, inventors of alternate realities who rely on our ability to misrepresent ourselves as part of our survival repertoire.
We lie every day of our lives, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. We nip-and-tuck inconvenient truths into shapes that suit our purposes, facsimiles of reality that complement how we hope to be perceived in ways that help us to get what we want. We’ve evolved this penchant for lying being garrulous, hyper-socialized animals trained from the early age to hide things that might get us ostracized, and reframe things to make ourselves look good in the eyes of the people we love, need, and fear. As Alain de Botton writes in his latest book, The School of Life:
"We don't only have a lot to hide; we are liars of genius. It is part of the human tragedy that we are natural self-deceivers. Our techniques are multiple and close to invisible."
This habit of editing truth is so species-wide that we hardly know we're doing it. You're on the phone with your mother who is badgering you to tell her all about your Costa Rica vacation. Reflexively, you tell her about the zip-lining, yoga, and forest bathing, but leave out the purging and ayahuasca. You're talking to your mother, for God's sake. Why would she need to know that? Need to know is how we delineate the amount of truth we share with others. Since need is entirely subjective, the obfuscating line can be drawn wherever we see fit.
Roles are another excellent cop out for why it’s OK not to tell the truth. We dissemble more freely when playing roles which come with unique boundaries and definitions. Attorneys lie for a living, for example, they spend a good portion of their professional lives arguing for things they know to be false because it suits their clients' interests. Pilots assure you that nothing is wrong even as they've started dumping fuel from the plane to make an emergency landing. Lovers who've been around the block are discreet about their past indiscretions if they want the relationship to last. Even priests lie, a priest friend told me, giving absolution to parishioners using rituals they don't always believe in. Roles offer carte blanche to edit ourselves, shape-shift, collude, pretend, and slip ourselves into separate personas
As a memoirist who also teaches writing, I’m especially intrigued by this sliding scale of human authenticity. People recreate themselves when they recreate their stories on the page. Typically, they start with the authorized versions of myths they've chiseled all their lives, the official autobiography that has all the facts without revealing much of anything. When I point out inconsistencies in their narratives, or cover-ups that I can intuit, they will often defend themselves — at first — then their defenses tend to collapse very quickly. Seeing their stories they tell themselves, in black and white wakes them up, changes them, makes them curious to learn more about who they really are underneath their shifting masks.
It's scary to confront things about themselves they've spent lifetimes avoiding and equally alarming to identify the lies, and half-truths, they've used to cover them up. They see that emotional honesty is in short supply and that memory is a moving target of maybe's more than a reliable narrator. Homo narrans interprets experiences past and present through the region of the brain that makes up stories, fills in the blanks, and connects the dots. When you see this with your own eyes, you're forced to admit that you live by fiction; that mythomania is part of being human; and that stretching, omitting, and twisting the truth is part of how we survive. We construct the self using make-believe and realize that this was ever so.
As Americans, we don't like to admit this. We're obsessed with the idea of honesty regardless of the fact that within our borders it has never been in shorter supply. We have a black-or-white, right-or-wrong understanding of what it means to be an honest person. Compare us to the British, for example, who rarely make a muss or fuss over social candor and see our choirboy transparency ideal as naive and rather ridiculous. When asked if she always told the truth, an Englishwoman I used to know laughed out loud and covered her mouth. "You've got to be kidding," she said in horror. "I can't think of anything more awful!"
When a friend shows you their ugly baby, or your zaftig daughter asks how she looks in her prom dress, or your friend who just finished chemo asks you if you think he'll be around next Christmas, you say the natural thing if you've got a heart — or nothing at all, even better. You smile and hug them and tell them you love them because half-truths are sometimes also kindness. When they foster courage and do no harm, it's better to use a softer touch. That's why diplomacy exists and is generally a more effective solution than going to war. Language is the referee that enables two teams to lie to one another tactfully until the aggression passes.
In the end, limited honesty isn't the primary problem; it's not knowing we're doing it or why. It's not distinguishing between toxic lying and compassionate, boundaried, communication with others. When we understand the why behind what we're saying, and conceal as little as possible, we gain insight into our hidden motives and drop the pretense that we're lily-white when it comes to telling the naked truth. At the end of the day, we keep ourselves honest by knowing how often, and how subtly, we lie.
"We need to tell ourselves a little more of the truth because we pay too high a price for our concealments," writes Alain de Botton. He's right, course, and we try to do the best we can. But no one is an open book.
