I'm Sorry You're An Asshole, Part 4: Why Should I?

The same person who first told you it's always better to tell the truth told you that you could be whatever you wanted to be. How'd THAT turn out for you?

Pictured: Women’s restrooms in Western societies are surprisingly important dispensers of incredibly accurate and informed opinions.

This is a little more high concept than other things I’ve felt were important to discuss lately, but it’s an analysis that I can’t get out of my head lately. It has taken on a life of its own that I can best describe as two rats noisily fighting or fucking behind the walls while I’m trying to sleep, so I feel like if I can get it out in the open, shoot a few minutes of it for OnlyFans (that’s what goes on there, right?), and then bludgeon it to death with a bat and throw it outside to rot, I can focus on other stuff, like how the UN owns science and how the last two and a half years are nothing more than figments of the diseased imaginations of racist homophobic white supremacists.

I originally titled this something along the lines of “Lying and the something-something of the Prisoners Dilemma” but it was so dull I punched myself in the stomach and stole my own lunch money.

This obsession of my analytic mind lately is actually pretty closely related to almost everything in our current media landscape, which probably explains why it’s become so all-consuming as a back-of-the-brain ongoing thinkie.

We know people lie. A lot. Specifically, we know people lie about things they’ve done wrong. And very often, even in the face of proof they’ve done wrong, they just keep lying about having done it- over and over and over. Pfizer probably spent most of 2019 doing blind testing of Doubledownizol on their PR department and the entire White House, they’ve gotten so consistent. (This is why they were too busy to do blind testing on anything else.)

The question I’ve found myself stuck on isn’t, “why are these fucking fucks doing this?” but “why doesn’t everyone, literally all the time?”

What is the INCENTIVE to “confess”?

Let me paint a few vignettes to prime your brain for the kind of thing I’m talking about:

1. A stereotypical wife/girlfriend catches her husband cheating, one way or another, and says as they break up, “it’s that you lied to me.” Does this mean that it would have gone differently if the cheater HAD confessed of his own volition? Is there any evidence of this- or, indeed, any way to prove it?

It feels a little bit like “if I hadn’t been vaccinated or boosted, it would have been way worse.”

2. An anchor asks Tony “Literal Human Feces” Fauci if he regrets locking down society, especially schools. Dr. “Bag of Decomposing Severed Penises and Dogshit” Fauci replies in a smooth, confident baritone, with just a touch of mirth in his voice at the silly peasant he’s addressing, “I never locked anything down.” A deluge of archived direct quotes of Fauci saying that all public places should be locked down and that school should remain closed after a year already follows. He shrugs.

In my regrettably brief study of interviewing and interrogation, my main text was Criminal Interrogation and Confessions, which is a companion to training the Reid Technique, which is what I was studying. The Reid Technique- and, I think, most systemized theories of confession- hinge upon the concept that withholding the truth of things the subject knows are “wrong”- whether due to an internal moral compass or because it is explicitly illegal or outlawed- creates internal stress, and this stress is only released by confession. The role of the interviewer, therefore, is to increase the stress of “holding in the truth” until it becomes unbearable for the subject, but not so quickly that it creates a panicked, mental fight-or-flight response where the subject flees the interaction either literally or by shutting down, after which a confession is very unlikely to occur because the tension has become encapsulated by a self-preservation narrative.

People who don’t care about being caught aren’t going to be very difficult to get a confession from. For everyone else, the “caughtness” is a source of self-aggravating stress that is never relieved until one is self-convinced that they are completely “home free” (which is not as easy as it sounds) or when one has confessed.

This is all fascinating stuff, but the first principle it hinges on is pretty specific. And what about psychopaths (or the various and sundry things we like to call psychopaths in the post pop psychology world where no one takes you seriously unless you use the phrase “Dark Triad” to criticize your opposition)? Criminal justice spends a lot of time dealing with those, so you’d think the first principle of an interrogation technique would be compatible with such a population. In that instance, Reid and others say that while psychopaths don’t feel REMORSE or GUILT for what they did, the fear of being CAUGHT or PUNISHED creates this internal tension, and that this tension can be skillfully ratcheted far higher than the actual stress (which all humans and other animals, including psychopaths, experience) of apprehension or punishment such that confession is still a relief.

So, if we apply this to Fauci, Brandon, or just a plain old cheating partner, we can say that they are never compelled to confess to their actions because they a) don’t experience enough stress to do so; they’re b) already in a state of emotionally shutting down, or

c) they don’t truly have any fear of being caught- the imagined consequences don’t worry them, or they have convinced themselves, rightly or wrongly, that they are invincible- but then, why not confess? Why not say “yep, I said it and I meant it, fuck you, peasant?”

The answer to this question lies in the rest of this essay. Well, part of it. Near the end, after we cover some other ground. No, I won’t give you a heading or a skip-to link, you fucking millennial.

A story: I knew someone who was an alcoholic. A bad one; they’d get themselves very sick and occasionally act very badly, sometimes both at the same time. They seriously fucked up their life with their drinking.

On one occasion, I found this person at home acting extremely ill and was under the impression they had, at that time, been sober for several months. (I know.) They weren’t acting exactly drunk, and I had no reason to believe they were lying when they said they were sober, so when I was extremely alarmed at their inability to raise their head, see clearly, or orient themselves, I began hypothesizing things like a concussion, a stroke, poisoning, and a few other things, because if they WEREN’T drunk, the only explanations for their condition were really serious but not at all impossible.

I asked them, “are you drunk?” a few times. Actually, a lot of times. Because I became increasingly alarmed at how badly they were, and after asking “are you sure?” a few million more times, got my phone and had gotten as far as “9-1” before they stopped me and confessed that they were, in fact, simply falling-down drunk.

Technically, I had done the perfect job of extracting a confession (even though I didn’t know that’s exactly what I was doing at the time). I presented the subject with an undeniable reality test of their statement (the paramedics or ER would, presumably, be able to tell me conclusively what had happened in short order), so they relented.

This didn’t feel like victory. What I felt was the stinging observation that being embarrassed by the paramedics was a stronger leverage point than lying to a close, loyal, loving friend of over a decade over a dozen times in the span of a half hour.

Whether or not it tells the whole story, the first principle of the Reid Technique- concealment tension- gets at something that I think is pretty ironclad: there is an internal, psychic economy to telling the truth about things we’d rather not disclose.

The more interesting question remains, why do we tell the truth at all? And even after we’re caught in a lie, what’s the transactional logic between confessing vs. doubling (or tripling or quadrupling) down?

In addition to the internal variables that we can boil down to an aggregate “retention stress” ala Reid, we also- from a very early age- factor externalities. What are the consequences of the behavior we’re lying about? If there aren’t any, or they’re minor, we’re not going to bother lying.

A long time ago I observed a household where two young siblings were more or less allowed to fight as much as they liked. As I was chatting with their mom, one wandered through and whined that his brother had hit him. When the brother wandered through next, mom asked, “did you hit your brother just now?” and without even slowing his stride, the kid said “yup” and continued on into the back yard, presumably to start a charity for war orphans.

If we’re very wealthy and we know that a certain crime carries a cash penalty of, say, $50 (or even $5000), we probably won’t go to any effort to lie about doing it if we’re confronted.

BUT, if we’re going to get a trivial (for us) fine of $500 AND the New York Times is going to publish a half-page article entitled “Senator Guttermouth Uses City Street As Personal Toilet,” complete with maybe an unflattering photo of me squatting on St. Marks with my drawers around my ankles, I’m going to take notice. I’m going to lawyer up and maybe even countersue someone for Photoshopping that COMPLETELY FAKE picture of me dropping a deuce and god damn if I’m going to pay the utterly trivial $500 because that would be admitting fault.

(Also: Senator Guttermouth. Can you imagine? We would all be doomed.)

The interesting flip side is, if I’m a homeless person who doesn’t even have $500 to take, for whom jail is a warm bed and a meal, and for whom an embarassing NYT article (assuming they bothered to write one about me) would invoke shame that I lost years ago, I have nothing to lose by throwing that chocolate football on a short pass and shrugging when confronted. The truth has zero stakes.

Most of the time, for most of us, the internal economics of that shameful New York Times article are a lot more salient than the $500 fine (even if we aren’t rich and a $500 fine would hurt at least a little). Humans are bad at numerical abstraction and our assigned dollar values for pleasure and pain are extremely fluid and easily manipulated. Our sense of shame, social censure, and gain or loss of status are, on the other hand, extremely sensitive and finely tuned (because they’ve been more important currency for MUCH longer in our evolutionary history), and when they ARE successfully manipulated can lead to way bigger, more “uncharacteristic” behavioral swings than “$100 vs. $500 to walk up to that woman and tell her she smells like an open can of tuna in curry sauce.”

Semi-famously, President Clinton’s strategists did some internal polling and found that people were angrier about LYING about Lewinsky than actually DOING Lewinsky. Certainly (as history proved), perjury will get you impeached a lot quicker than adultery.

Doesn’t this sound a lot like Example #1 from the beginning? “I’m angrier that you lied about cheating than I am that you cheated?”

When I think about human motivation, and the way power is used and abused, I’m very interested in instances where people- especially in large numbers- profess that one thing is true but very visibly and obviously (from the outside) behave in another manner. It doesn’t even matter if the way they actually behave is the “opposite” of the thing they say; it’s interesting and, I feel, important, to note the things that [the proverbial] “we” DO that are totally distinct from the things we SAY.

In this vein, “we”- almost identically across cultures- don’t actually seem to BELIEVE that the consequence of wrongdoing is less than the consequence of lying. We don’t actually behave on a societal level as though honesty is the best policy. I’d go so far as to say that if we actually sat down and tried to precisely measure the ratio of concealment vs. confession, we’d find that confessing wrongdoing without duress is exceedingly rare. I’d bet money on it.

This makes me think about plea bargaining. For those of you who don’t have a legal system where this exists, plea bargaining (in the United States) is a common practice in which a criminal prosecutor (an attorney representing the federal, state, or local government seeking to punish someone for a crime) will negotiate a lower sentence than that normally proscribed for a given crime if the suspect will plead guilty at the outset of a trial and “spare the taxpayers” the length and expense of a criminal proceeding. Plea bargaining includes things like commuting a death sentence (where applicable) to a life sentence without parole, reducing a felony conviction to a misdemeanor (to give someone a less-tarnished criminal record when seeking employment), or changing the charges to things less embarrassing to go with the lighter sentence (like “public nudity” becoming “loitering” or “indecent relations with livestock” becoming “trespassing”).

Divorced from any other considerations, one might say that plea bargaining is an unadorned good, because it rewards (and therefore, presumably, motivates) telling the truth, and that we should look at the “blue book” sentences for crimes as actually the penalties for committing a crime and attempting to escape responsibility for it.

But it actually creates a pretty unpleasant incentive that anyone with real familiarity with the U.S. criminal justice system knows: if you think the deck is stacked against you, if your lawyer sucks, if you believe (accurately or inaccurately) that you won’t be judged fairly or that you’re going to be railroaded, you’ll confess to a crime you didn’t commit to get the lighter of the two sentences since you believe you’re definitely going to be found guilty.

This actually happens, more often than many people would like to admit. I don’t have to be a “soft on crime” bleeding heart to say that our justice system is fucked up. And I don’t give this caveat, or the earlier example, to talk specifically about criminal justice.

I bring these up to suggest my thesis:

The human relationship to the truth is fundamentally am internal plea bargain negotiation.

When a lawyer (actually, most likely, the prosecutor AND the defendant’s lawyer negotiating) sits down with someone to discuss a plea bargain, the conversation in its most basic terms looks a lot like this:

A) If you are found guilty of doing X, the most likely sentence- based on known variables like the judge’s sentencing patterns, precedent in this jurisdiction, public opinion, and the degree of latitude of written law- will be Y.

B) If you, on the other hand, plead guilty to doing X before trial, we will ask for the sentence to be Z, where Z is clearly and explicitly <Y (and enough to make #3, below, true).

C) You should plead guilty because:

1. We have <this much> evidence against you.

2. A judge/jury is <this likely> to convict you.

3. The delta between Y and Z is great enough that the risks imposed by #1 and #2 aren’t worth it.

In most situations in life, we have absolutely no idea of what Z is, or if Z even exists (which it may not), and all else being equal, human imagination of unknown risks slants very strongly towards the pessimistic.

The cheating boyfriend won’t know if his girlfriend will (Z) forgive him for cheating on her if he tells the truth; he has no evidence that this is the case. The default consequence is that she will (Y) break up with him. If he cheats AND lies, and she breaks up with him, he’ll never have any way of knowing which of the two actually caused the consequence to be breaking up- and, in reality, NEITHER WILL SHE, even if she says “the lying is worse than the cheating.”

Bubba got convicted of perjury, but really, he was convicted of Lewinsky AND perjury, because in that instance, neither one could exist in a vacuum.

Furthermore, he was acquitted after his impeachment (just like Trump was which goes to show, um that Trump’s lack of punishment for impeachment was A COMPLETE REJECTION OF DEMOCRATIC NORMS AND HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE AND WAS BASICALLY ALSO INSURRECTION YOU GUYS), and this concluded his second and final permitted term of office, so there were no practical consequences. I think he temporarily lost his law license or something, which probably had no impact on book deals or speaking tours or board memberships, which is what ex-Presidents do with themselves instead of getting real jobs.

We’d only be able to draw a meaningful conclusion if he had confessed to adultery [which he eventually did but] WITHOUT previously lying about it. Either way, Hillary didn’t leave him. Still hasn’t. But that’s a whole other conversation.

Quick gut check: in an alternate universe, Lewinsky happened in Clinton’s first term instead. He acknowledges the adultery during the investigation, and doesn’t commit perjury, and Jones’ lawsuit still gets thrown out. No impeachment, no nothing.

Do you think he’d be re-elected? What percentage of women do you think would vote for him? How about in a primary where party tribalism wouldn’t carry him?

Would Z definitely be < Y? Would you bet a painful amount of money on it?

“But Guttermouth,” you might- among a certain subset of people- say, “I, on the other hand, believe the following or something analogous-”

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

“- and therefore tell the truth because It Is The Right Thing To Do.”

That’s very noble. What are the consequences if you break it?

“Sin.”

And what’s the punishment for sin?

“If I confess and ask forgiveness, (Z). If I don’t, (Y).”

Simply that you MAY have a belief system deferring jurisdiction over your actions to a (much) higher court, your mind uses the same analytic process. Your personal degree of religiosity or faith in such a system determines your predicted values of (Y) and (Z). If you’re quite, QUITE certain that (Y) is “eternal hell and damnation without parole” and Z is DEFINITELY < Y (including potentially nothing at all!), well, you have an easier time doing that math, and if every single human on Earth was on board with the exact same godly legal system, you wouldn’t need secular law at all.

Whether you’re Judeo-Christian or not is immaterial in terms of how you will assess the value of telling the truth. You will have different determinants of Y and Z, but you will be getting those values from somewhere.

So, that’s the thesis. We’re almost done. I promised I’d get back to the Fauci thing. I figured I’d put him AFTER the brief aside about Judeo-Christian values, because Fauci is about as far from them as you can get.

When you see Fauci lie, dissemble, and double and triple down when confronted with proof that his actions or statements contradict his prior testimony, and seem to do this with the fluidity of a fish breathing in water, understand what you are seeing is the actions of someone with a completely different set of values for Z-(Y*C) than you have. Fauci lies in ways that appall you because his Y and Z are nothing like yours. You probably wouldn’t even want them.

The more valuable thing to do is to figure out WHAT they are and WHERE they’re coming from rather than beat your head against the frustration that they’re different.

(This is also how you effectively hurt people that seem more powerful than you. Or at least how you understand how.)

But first, what was the point of breaking this all down (besides the thing I just said)? As I mentioned early on, when we encounter consistent examples of society saying one thing and people doing another thing, and society chugging along more or less intact despite this contradiction, it’s extremely valuable to understand what’s REALLY going on.

There is a vague cultural myth, largely but not perfectly pan-human, that there is a non-transactional value to telling the truth and confessing fault, and that people who are more “moral” than others will consistently do this more than less “moral” people, even to their detriment. Classical liberal society is underpinned by a great many cultural myths, including this one, and cultural myths aren’t inherently bad- we can have great fun encouraging children to believe in Santa Claus, but if the adults also believe Odin is going to park Sleipnir on the roof and yeet the kids’ presents through the window, there’s going to be some very disappointed kids tomorrow morning.

Furthermore, if we understand that the mechanics of this game govern how people REALLY behave (including “good people” with faith or a moral code), and don’t calibrate our expectations based on the cultural myth, we’ll better be able to understand what’s going on when people like Fauci, Birx, Brandon, and all the other pathological liars seem to… well, pathologically lie.