Quantcast

Berger’s Burg: Accept the fact that no one can escape from telling a lie

By Alex Berger

You’ve gained a lot of weight.” “That dress is hideous.” “You’re a mediocre student.” “To be perfectly honest with you, you’re a nerd.” But telling a person the truth is not necessarily the best approach for dispensing truthful comments. So you prevaricate, equivocate, exaggerate and fib to soften a true comment, but it is still lying and lying, as everyone knows, is bad.

A half-truth is a whole lie. — Yiddish proverb

Telling people like it is is often not easy to do, so you resort to all of the above listed verbs guiltless and without malice aforethought. You know life without lies would not work and the liar in your life is you and everyone else you know, despite the fact liars are promised everything evil up to cruel and eternal punishment as in Dante’s “Inferno.”

“Have you seen one of those contraptions that detect falsehoods?” “Seen one? I married one!”

Falsifiers are placed one moral step below violent offenders and worse than spontaneous crimes of passion. We teach our children that it is wrong to lie, yet we lie every day in the name of civility. We routinely expect marketers and politicians to fabricate and we spare them no end of moral outrage when they do. Since a lie is a lie and basically a sin, should we not be outraged with ourselves?

The only time he tells the truth is when he admits he is lying.

With so much corruption in the air and many scoundrels being smoked out, there is a tendency to lather it on. Many carefully nurtured but bogus myths are presently used to spot liars. Shifty eyes do not give away a liar and gaze aversion may be irritating, but it has more to do with shyness than with lying. In reality, there are no physical tics that universally signal a person is lying.

A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. — Mark Twain

Beginning a lie with the single word “honestly” is not strong enough to carry the full burden of our integrity, so liars have adopted a backup using “frankly” instead, which is honesty’s conversational cousin. If someone makes a point of telling me he is being perfectly honest or frank, I instinctively suspect he is being dishonest or disfrank. It is enough to make you wistful for a time when people lied without all the window dressing.

A notorious liar died. As his friends passed by his open casket, one said, “I still don’t believe him!”

Honesty has always been part of the public discourse. George Washington supposedly said, “I cannot tell a lie.” And John Lennon sang, “All I want is the truth.” In court, you swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Scouts take a loyalty oath. The military has an honor code, but business people do not, at least not in the formal sense. Lying is such a highly evolved, even essential human skill that pros such as law enforcement types prove no more effective than a coin toss at detecting a whopper.

A few weeks ago, an American Eagle pilot was grounded after telling multiple lies about his background. At the age of 24, he was a National Guard fighter pilot, an aviation-school grad, an FDNY firefighter and a paramedic. To be perfectly frank, he was a “frequent liar.”

Fibbing is embedded in our DNA. One researcher believes infants fake crying and laughing to win our attention. And job interviews and blind dates are to lying what Gloria is to me. Lying is such an important function that adolescents who are good liars turn out to be more popular than their peers.

She found the secret of youth: She lies about her age.

Remember, the person who agrees with you will lie about other things, too.

There is no known creature that maintains absolute fidelity, so always believe first and verify last. Be aware that everything you are told could be a lie because you lack the cognitive capacity to fact-check everything you hear. Still, find space for truth with phrases like, “I won’t be offended if you don’t like this.” After all, renewed trust is the result of choice as opposed to impulse, which can be stronger than the mindless.

Truth is the safest lie. — Jewish proverb

But integrity is not a conversational tool, or at least it is not supposed to be. No one can yet read our minds or hearts. For now, there is no technology that will make lying obsolete. To be or not to be honest? I am not sure anymore. Suffice to say, this whole discussion is, frankly, giving me an honest headache.

Contact Alex Berger at timesledgernews@cnglocal.com.