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  THE TRUTH

  ABOUT LYING

  With Some Differences

  Between Men and Women

  Stephen J. Costello

  The Liffey Press

  I dedicate this book to Darren –

  the friend I don’t deserve to have.

  ‘Lying is a language game that needs to be learned like any other.’ – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian philosopher

  ‘There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie.’ – Jacques Lacan, French psychoanalyst

  ‘Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.’ – Plato, Greek philosopher

  ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave

  When first we practice to deceive.’

  – Sir Walter Scott, Scottish novelist and poet

  ‘When my love swears that she is made of truth,

  I do believe her, though I know she lies …

  Therefore I lie with her and she with me,

  And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.’

  – William Shakespeare, English playwright

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword, by Ivor Browne

  Preface

  What’s in a Name, Pinocchio?

  Definitions

  Such Sophistry: Philosophical Beginnings

  The Lies We Tell

  The Lies of Madmen

  Lies with Truth

  Does God Deceive Us?

  The Lies of Animals

  The Politics of Lying

  The Lies of Children

  Big Lies and Little Lies

  Lying With Woody Allen

  Self-Deception

  Love, Lies and Letters

  Lying Eyes

  Wilde Lies

  Eyes for Lies

  Leading Questions, Lying Answers

  Anxiety Doesn’t Lie

  Lying Cretans

  A Tale of Three

  Against Lying

  The Truth in the Lie

  The Right to Lie?

  The Successful Lie

  Needing Lies

  Enjoying Lying

  Lies, Drink and Guilt

  The Best Liar

  Lying in Bed

  Lying versus Deceiving

  Some Differences between Men and Women

  How Men and Women Lie in Different Ways

  Cultural Lies

  The Unconscious

  Postscript

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  I mention only those who have directly contributed to the writing of this book by way of reading earlier drafts, advising, suggesting titles or commenting constructively. To this end, I extend my heartfelt thanks to my very patient friends: Fionnuala MacAodha, Shay Ward, Oisín Breathnach, the Kearney brothers, Aedamar Kirrane, Cathal O’Keeffe, Michael Fitzpatrick, Bob Haugh, Helen Sheehan, William Corrigan, and John Rice, in memoriam. This list includes my parents too, so special thanks to Val and Johnny Costello, who have always been there for me.

  For providing such a gratifying paragraph of praise and for the equally ambrosial Foreword I extend my inestimable appreciation to Professors Richard Kearney and Ivor Browne, who have done me some service, merited or not. I am deeply honoured.

  Finally, a profuse and profound debt of gratitude goes to my closest friend, Darren Cleary, to whom I dedicate this book. You inspire and ennoble me, enhance and enrich my life in more ways than you will ever know, for which I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are a stalwart pillar of support and this book is all the better for your perusal.

  Foreword

  This is an absolutely fascinating book, and perhaps what is more important, a most enjoyable one to read. Stephen Costello is a serious philosopher and highly trained psychotherapist with enormous erudition. One would hardly need to refer to Google if you could call on his personal services. He has, at his fingertips, an extraordinary range of literary and philosophical sources and he can call on these apparently without effort.

  At the same time he draws the reader into a personal dialogue in a simple and intimate way, and there is a subtle thread of humour running through the whole book that makes reading it all the more attractive and makes some of the more difficult passages, like the section on the philosophical views of Sartre – that, in his opinion, truth is virtually impossible to discern – more accessible to the ordinary reader like myself.

  On first reading the title and opening the book, my feeling was, ‘Of course I know the difference between “truth” and “lies”,’ but as one reads on, you realise how wrong you are, and that it is virtually impossible to discern intellectually when one is being really truthful, or engaging, as we all do, in distortions and lies of many kinds.

  Then when I came to the section ‘Do animals lie?’ I thought, ‘At least here, it’s quite clear that animals are incapable of lying.’ But, once again, as you continue, you realise that nature is full of deceit, and that creatures of all kinds make themselves appear bigger, stronger and quite fierce looking in order to ward off predators, and so on.

  Central to the whole book is the section towards the end on ‘Some Differences between Men and Women’; and this leads on to the description of ‘How Men and Women Lie in Different Ways’. Here Stephen brings to bear on his subject a quite extraordinary range of information, and I can’t think, for the life of me, from where he derived all of these insights.

  As I said at the beginning, this is a truly fascinating book, which I feel should be mandatory reading for all of us. I can only encourage everyone to read it and thoroughly enjoy it as I did.

  Professor Ivor Browne

  Consultant Psychiatrist

  September 2013

  Preface

  A few years ago a friend phoned me to relate the following incident: ‘Stephen, you won’t believe what happened. It’s right down your street. I was lying in bed last night beside a girl, just after, you know… Anyway, the phone rang. It was my girlfriend! She asked me what I was doing. I said, “Just lying in bed.” Talk about a Freudian slip!’ Indeed. He was telling the truth while lying in bed…

  This book is on the philosophy and psychoanalysis of lying, and especially how men and women lie in different ways. It’s about lies, love, language and logic. It’s also about desire and deception, especially in our love relationships and in our loving-friendships.

  How many lies do we tell? Can animals lie? Is deception detectable? Can psychotics lie? When do children start to lie? Why do we lie to ourselves? Do we need to lie? What about the people who enjoy lying? Above all, how do men and women lie differently? These are some of the questions I hope to answer.

  Drawing on philosophical and Lacanian psychoanalytical insights, I am going to tell you the truth about lies.

  A lie distracts, detracts from the truth. You lie if you don’t want people to become aware of the truth. Total truth – who would want it? – is problematic. We are at home with lies. Lies can take place around the locus of the other person’s desire or one’s own ego. Some people like to be lied to; others need to be lied to. There is a difference between how men and women lie and to what end; this is centrally what the book is about, after certain other topics are also addressed.

  When do we lie? Why do we lie? How do we lie? These questions will guide our applied enquiry and will be the subject matter of this brief book. In The Magic Lantern, Ingmar Bergman, the famous Swedish film-director, observed: ‘Sometimes I have to console myself with the fact that he who
has lived a lie loves the truth.’ Achilles, the truth-sayer, and Odysseus, the liar, abide in us all.

  We lie best in front of potential partners or to close business deals. We show off with stories. Not quite a lie, then, just a slight embellishment … and so it begins. You can’t have a completely truthful conversation with friends, parents or lovers. Isn’t there always something that is kept secret, that isn’t shown, that can’t be said or spoken? Isn’t intimacy based not only on what we share with, but on what keep from, each other? We lie (or don’t tell the truth) for different reasons, to different people in different ways, for different reasons.

  If truth-telling is sometimes harmful, is it true that we harm ourselves when we lie? Michel de Montaigne, the French philosopher, thought so: ‘I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do to him of whom I tell a lie.’ And Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher, writes similarly: ‘Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.’ A private lie can have public consequences. But Graham Greene, the British novelist, was more realistic: ‘In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.’ Lies of kindness, so.

  If the truth is simple, it does not follow that it is easy to tell the truth. It may follow that it is difficult to lie well. Lying can be complicated. Samuel Butler, the English novelist, put it thus: ‘Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.’ Lying can be learnt. It is a language-game like any other after all. It takes practice.

  What follows are some observations on the act and art of lying – a breviary of sorts. This type of terse writing has been present in the history of ideas from philosophers such as Heraclitus in the fifth-century BC to Theodor Adorno in the twentieth-century AD, which doesn’t mean it works. Still, I’m optimistic.

  I hope, dear reader, that you will resonate with these reflections and remarks and that they succeed in shedding some light on the sometimes sad human scene. Lies are essential to humanity and perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure, profit or purpose. For we are liars, all. Some people, of course, are better at it than others.

  This book may be read as a companion volume to my 18 Reasons Why Mothers Hate Their Babies: A Philosophy of Childhood. This present work is a type of manual, a compendium of sorts, a pithy primer on lying; in it I try to develop and defend a certain thesis: that men lie in the guise of truth and that women tell the truth in the guise of a lie. This requires a lot of unpacking, and of course, I am speaking generally; there are exceptions to this ‘rule’. So let us begin the unravelling of this intriguing topic, for none of us is immune from lying (except perhaps the figure of the saint) and so it concerns us all. As Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, noted: lying is a condition of life. We lie to live.

  If to quote is to pray (‘the Bible says …’), to write is to die (the authorial absence). So I cite a quotation from the twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, which I am fond of, by way of concluding this preface:

  ‘I was sitting with a philosopher in the garden. He says again and again, “I know that’s a tree,” pointing to a tree that is near to us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.”’

  That’s all I’m doing too.

  What’s in a Name, Pinocchio?

  We usually associate the name of Pinocchio with lying. Pinocchio was the chief protagonist in Carlo Collodi’s 1883 children’s classic, The Adventures of Pinocchio. Carved by a woodcutter called Geppetto in a small Italian village, Pinocchio was created as a wooden puppet who dreamed of becoming a real boy, which is exactly what happens in the story. However, every time this now animated puppet lies his short nose becomes longer under stress. This is his punishment for fabricating stories – his nose continues to grow until it can scarcely fit through the door.

  Similarly, in real life, when a person lies they experience the ‘Pinocchio Effect’, which is an increase in the temperature around the nose and in the orbital muscle in the inner corner of the eye. According to a study conducted in the Department of Experimental Psychology in the University of Granada, face temperature changes when a mental effort is being made such as lying (thermography).

  The ‘Pinocchio Syndrome’ is related to ‘gelotophobia’, which is a fear of being laughed at. When such people who suffer from this malady think they are being ridiculed the pattern in their body movements changes to exhibit the awkward wooden movements resembling those of wooden puppets.

  And, finally, the ‘Pinocchio Paradox’ is a version of the liar paradox, which we will meet with later and arises when Pinocchio says: ‘My nose grows now.’ I won’t saddle with you with the torturous logic involved but present you with the conclusion: his nose is growing if and only if it is not growing. Get it? No, me neither.

  Definitions

  Philosophers love beginning with definitions so let’s define a lie in terms of the proverbial dictionary definition: 1) A lie is a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement, especially with the intention of deceiving others. 2) A lie is a false statement made with deliberate attempt to deceive. However, St. Thomas Aquinas, the mediaeval philosopher-theologian, defines lying as a statement that is at variance with the mind. This is phrased differently to the usual definitions on the subject. It is not a false statement made with the intention of deceiving because it is possible to lie without making a false statement and without any intention of deceiving. For if a person makes a statement which he or she thinks is false, but which in reality is true, he certainly lies in as much as he intends to say what is false, and although a well-known liar may have no intention of deceiving others (for he knows that no one believes a word he says), yet if he speaks at variance with his mind he does not cease to lie. ‘Sophistry’ may be defined as the deliberate desire to deceive. Let’s explore this subject more thoroughly.

  Such Sophistry:

  Philosophical Beginnings

  For Aristotle, ‘all men by nature desire to know’, but the world seems intent on hiding itself from prying, philosophical eyes. Likewise, in the epic poems of Homer there is the view expressed that the world resists attempts to penetrate its secret mysteries. It is obdurate to every effort to understand it. Homer’s poems depict a world that is replete with ruses and semblance, swindles and sham, fictions and fallacies, artifice and allure, so much so that it seems that cheating rather than plain dealing (or Freemasonic square-dealing) is the only way to advance. Odysseus hid his true identity from Athene while Athene herself was renowned for her plots and disguises and acts of dissimulation and deviousness. Hermes, the trickster god, is likewise linked to cunning communication; he uses words to veil and inveigle. Do any of us say what we really mean? Language conceals as much as it reveals.

  The Sophists (those Peripatetics or travelling teachers) of Socrates’ time knew this and taught rhetoric; they earned a living by making falsehoods seem plausible and convincing in their erroneous but effective logic. With them the practise of philosophy became playful; it lost its seriousness and commitment to ultimate truth. The lie became nuanced and textured.

  The Sophists taught that truth was a nuisance and showed young men, through the powers of persuasion, how a weak argument could defeat a strong argument, how falsehood could win out against fact by employing various rhetorical tricks and devises much as one would do when debating or defending in court. In his dialogue Euthydemus, Plato shows up the subtleties of such strategies. In it, two mischievous professors attempt to demonstrate to an impressionable and good-looking young man how some spurious so-called proofs can be presented as seemingly true through a series of verbal contortions. Plato wants to show up their specious fictions and to set out a sound logic that will safeguard truth. There were many men like Euthydemus and Dionysodorus in the Athenian Assembly who were famous for truth-twisting. Socrates, posing as a slow-witted simpleton who was baffled by such clev
er rhetorical devices, showed up such verbal word-play for what it was – sophistry and illusion. Protagoras, the Greek philosopher and mathematician, had gone so far as to say that it is not possible to think what is false since a person can only think what he experiences and this can never be false. With the Sophists, fantasy and fiction became fused. Xenophon, another Greek philosopher and admirer of Socrates, called them prostitutes; they were paid chasers after the young and wealthy, as Plato called them in The Sophist. Rhetoric replaced Wisdom. Little has changed since those far-off Greek days. Gossip has not gone away. We still prefer rumour to reality. Aristotelian logic is still taught in philosophy departments; rhetoric is still practised in courtrooms and in university debating chambers, and people still lie, cheerfully and convincingly, poorly or proficiently.

  ‘Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonorably is pardonable.’ – Sophocles (496 BC–406 BC)

  The Lies We Tell

  There are countless different lies: we lie through our teeth, to use one expression (lying really well, or perhaps just forcibly); misleading; dissembling (here one presents the facts in a way that is literally true but intentionally misleading); big lies; bad faith; barefaced or bald-faced lies; brazen lies; white lies; scarlet lies; noble lies; bluffing; bullshitting; Butler lies (small lies usually sent electronically, which are used to terminate conversations or to save face); poker faces; contextual lies; being economical with the truth; strategic or emergency lies; irony; teasing; exaggerating; embellishing; sarcasm; tall tales; jocose lies (meant just in jest); stretching the truth; fabrication (for example, giving directions to a tourist when the person doesn’t actually know the directions); fibbing; false compliments and reassurances (‘That looks very nice on you’ or ‘Everything’s going to be alright’); perjury; puffery; a pack of lies, porky pies, and so on.