Liar, liar, Pants on Fire
People are such liars.
Not you, of course; always truthful, always honest, never wavering from the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
As for me, I remember my first whopper. I stood at the garden path, watching the paddock beyond the fence dance with flames, black smoke rising like mushrooms, hawks dashing and darting for escaping fauna.
My mother approached.
“How did that happen?” She asked
“I have no idea, “ I lied.
She said nothing. I knew I had lied. She knew I had as well. I knew she knew I knew I’d lied.
She took my hand and led me to the house.
“We need to talk, Tommy”, and there transpired my first lesson in the immorality of lying.
I was about four years old. I realised that my skills at lying needed improving. I had already grasped two very important concepts necessary for lying.
There are rules, and with rules there are consequences, Not all the consequences were favourable and I could avoid those distasteful outcomes by being loose with the truth; like telling fairy tales.
The other was knowing what other people were thinking. I knew that if I told my mother a meteorite had struck the paddock and set it on fire it’s likely she wouldn’t believe considering my past history with matches.
By the time I was in my early 20’s I had accomplished a more skilful approach to lying.
Denying the facts was a good start. “No way did I hit my sister (the dobbing bitch)!”
Omitting information came quick and easy. “I only hit he once (or thrice) ”.
Restructuring the circumstances. “Actually she ran into me!”
Lessening the impact. “It was only a tap.”
Exaggeration. “She’s always hitting me”
My favourite is to invent a story. I’m especially good at that. “ WelI, I was practicing my yoga and was completely unaware of her presence. I was just entering the virabhadrasana position, number 2 of course, when I sensed the presence of another human being at the extension on my arm”.
As life progressed, all seemed well enough but for two things: I discovered that other people lie as well, and my local psychiatrist suggested strongly that I might be even lying to myself.
“Perish the thought,” I told her. “Why would I do that?”
As it turns out, there are many reasons why I might lie to myself.
Denying to myself that I’ve put on weight in spite of the shrink fairy entering my wardrobe while I sleep for starters. Remaining oblivious to the dangers of riding a motorbike when I was young and stupid comes to mind. Believing I could give up smoking ‘just like that’ if I chose to. So glad I got some help on that issue. Locking myself into the self-perpetuating and cyclic state of not exercising because it hurt. Then there’s the life long lie that I was an independent agent with no responsibilities, to discover later that everyone saw me as quite the opposite. Bugger!
There are a couple I avoided, thankfully. Like, Cherry Picking for example. You know what I mean. Picking out the facts you like and ignoring the ones you don’t like. A science education helped with that one.
Fortunately for all of us there’s an up side, except you, of course. You don’t actually lie; right? It turns out that lying is an instinctive process and is best carried out by the more intelligent of us. That’s my interpretation and I’m sticking to it. The facts are that lying produces a great deal of activity in the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. That’s where all the planning and logic takes place. Good on me!
Lying is also a rather complex process, more so than just telling the plain old truth. See, I told you I was smart.
Along with the upside there’s a down side. The older we get the worse at lying we become. That’s not to say we lie more. It’s that we lie poorly. People begin to see though our deceit. Shame, really. Just when I thought I was getting away with so much.
I might consider relying on just telling White Lies, whatever that means. A lie is a lie, is it not? Or I could deny that I even tell lies, although it’s a bit late for that, don’t you think?
:) And then there's the rather delicious, highly entertaining and transparently ridiculous lies.
In regard to Hurricane Dorian, US President Donald Trump made a baseless claim that Alabama could be affected.
Then came Sharpiegate. In the Oval Office at lunchtime on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump held a briefing on Hurricane Dorian. At one point, the president held up a National Hurricane Centre map from August 29, displaying the hurricane’s track and intensity.
Bizarrely, someone had apparently used a Sharpie, a kind of marker pen, to add a black loop falsely extending the hurricane’s path from Florida to Alabama. It was apparently a belated effort to justify Trump’s previous baseless claim that the latter state could be affected.
So funny.
:) Reminds me of the time a neighbourhood friend of my son's used a marker pen to put "racing stripes" and a "badge" on his less than prestigious little second-hand car.
