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?
This is a great article that I'm totally going to ignore to respond to this part:
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
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This is an amazing way to describe the feeling of an article that won't let you not write it. In "Inventing Anna", there was a scene when the very pregnant reporter was asked if she wanted to stop writing. She responded with something along the line of "I HAVE TO GET THIS STORY OUT OF MY HEAD!"
It was a very good article, though. I'm not sure if it was you or somebody else on here that said it, but real power is being able to know that even if you're caught, nothing will happen. That's where Fauci sits right now.
While I didn’t vote for Clinton or Biden, I gotta say at least we could make fun of Clinton without the FBI showing up with a SWAT team at 6am. The Clinton Presidency was the last Democrat administration that was made fun of on late night television. Remember Imus at the 1996 White House Correspondents Dinner?
GWB and Trump were rightly mocked but any jokes about Obama were racist and joking about Biden is not allowed by his CCP overlords.
As for your 30 year old Clinton joke, either I’ve never heard it or I forgot it. It was appreciated and will be updated and recycled by me in the near future.
Country gals know how difficult distinguishing fighting from fucking is in most mammals. The part of the stream of consciousness that got me was the “lying is worse than the cheating” claim of the girlfriend. First of all, cheating is lying in the sense it is breaking a vow of monogamy. Secondly, Norm MacDonald had a bit about people who said after Bill Cosby’s rufi-rape conviction: “The worst part is the hypocrisy” to which Norm would reply, “No, pretty sure the rape was the worst part. Nobody who woke up with Cosby raping them yelled ‘Help! Hypocrisy!’”
>> cheating is lying in the sense it is breaking a vow of monogamy
I'm going to argue this point because I think the difference is an important nuance to what I'm talking about in the context of lying.
A vow is a promise of future behavior. A declarative statement is a reporting of reality.
Now, vows can be made in bad faith. I can promise "I'll never cheat on you" and have every intention of doing so the moment you're not around. But I can also fail to live up to that promise at some point in the future- maybe even in the far future. That doesn't mean that I didn't make that vow in good faith at the time, or intend to keep it, or was mindful of that vow for most of the time before I broke it. Unless I make a promise I have no intention of keeping, I'm not "lying."
Promised behavior is complicated and nuanced- humans have a lot of good intentions that don't always reflect reality.
Knowingly stating something false is much more cut and dry: you know you're doing it when you're doing it (even- especially- if you outwardly dissemble with word play and legalistic language). Everyone knows when they're lying. Not everyone knows they will break a vow when they make a vow and break it later, and I'd argue most don't.
That’s a fair point. Let me amend my stated opinion; cheating is a dishonest endeavor, often preceded by a lie (I’m going bowling tonight) or followed by a lie (I had to give Joe a ride home after bowling). Cheating and lying are traveling companions but they are indeed different symptoms of a flawed character.
In keeping with the Bill Clinton example; masturbating on an intern’s face was unseemly and in conflict with the federal law that Clinton signed, forcing private companies to provide sexual harassment training on the federal statutes regarding the sexual treatment of subordinates in the work place. Although Clinton’s behavior was totally repulsive and boorish, it was not lying. The lying was his denial of forcing or attempting to force other subordinates into similar acts. And of course the most cut and dry lie was “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”.
To your point about Clinton, I was completely taken aback by his shamelessness and complete lack of decency. An honorable man would've 1) never found himself with his appendage attached to the lips of an intern and 2) resigned the presidency.
As for Hillary, an honorable woman would've kicked an unrepentant philanderer to the curb. The best you can say for them is that they found one another and spared two unsuspecting people the misery of marrying them.
I HAD kids in High School when the world was consumed with BJ Clinton’s abuse of self and subordinate females. Serious people were actually arguing what defined sex and if Oval Office sex with interns was a private affair and none of our business.
I told my kids that BJs were absolutely a sex act but engaging in autoerotic acts with an intern you didn’t even kiss, in a bathroom no less, didn’t qualify as an private affair. It was more like a sexual assault.
Clinton, Bill and Hillary both, were used in a textbook on rethorics here right after the scandal broke: his way of slithering through semantics and literalisms, and her way of masterfully massaging the message and the public when she appeared in a TV-program.
It was included as an example of the power of rethorics and how to do it, with the author of that textbook putting in a caveat that he hoped the students would use their knowlefge for good, not for avoiding owning up to their actions.
1) It's the breach of trust and the betrayal, no dice about it.
2) Fauci isn't lying. He advised, opinionated, expressed options, and so on, but /he/ didn't lock anything down. He didn't turn the key, he didn't hang the tape, he didn't man any gates or post any stickers and so on. He just said things and if people then act, well that's on them. What he is using used to be called "The Speer Defence" if I recall correctly.
As for the economy of truth-telling, there is that annoying little thing called relative truth (translating on the fly here). Think of the monorail-salesman in that Simpsons episode. To all normal social interactions in any culture ever, he lies. But not literally. Everything he says is the truth, but it is his truth: if he promises to come help you as soon as he finishes what he is doing, he might mean he's currently breathing...
And that is what real psychopathic personalities that lack the otherwise typical impulse-driven compulsive violent behaviour do all the time: they constantly redfine parameters so that they never lie, and this redefining is also constantly redefined backwards and forwards in time, and so on in some kind of insane Mandelbrot-Twister.
As for how to handle this, consider the fate of Loke in Lokasenna and after the death of Balder: the only way to deal with people who manipulate and cause strife using literalist language as to not lie (according their own equation) is taking them out permanently.
Their lying and manipulation are their way to get ypou to play their game, by making it look like society's greater game of normal social interaction, which it isn't since the liar changes the rules on you all the time.
First, they put you on the back foot with a barrage of questions/claims, then they play up to an audience (real or imagined matters not, because their acting such will draw us into 'talking in public'-mode) to make us embarassed of the conflict as such - the shame factor you mention, and then they will go on the attack using your hestiancy, your attempts to be precise and fair and your initial backpedaling as arguments for why they in fact are right and a victim.
Does this sound like certain political movements? Well, it's no coincidence.
The only winning move is not to play.
Consider Oscar Wilde's trial. The prosecutor nailed Wilde because Wilde lied about his age and could use that lie to completly destroy Wilde's defence since it hinged on him being a fêted celebrity of wit and esprit: the prosecutor simply refused to play Wilde's game.
Don't know if you've seen this video, it's a very good primer on how questioning works but also the pitfalls of trying to "help authorities with their inquiries":
It's about 45 minutes, the man speaking is some Regent Law Professor James Duane, he's also witten a short paper on the topic, titled "The Right to Remain Silent: A New Answer to an Old Question", downloadable from here:
Is the "Speer Defense" that which was given by Albert Speer at Nuremburg? I actually read Albert Speer's book. Very insightful but I'm not familiar with the term "Speer Defense" TBH.
Maybe it's not a formal term as such? We used it frequently when I was a student and the course was on "morals & ethics for civil servants", the point being that it was unacceptable to play semantics, claim ignorance of the end result of you fulfilling your appointed legal task, and so on with Albert Speer as the reference point of someone defending themselves with what essentially boils down to "just followed orders".
Our professor was adamant that it was the duty of every civil servant to be firmly on the side of the people, all the people, and not just be organic machinery in the state's execution of its business. "See something - say something" so to speak, as a safeguard against things like the swedish Socialist Democrats' eugenics program which ran until the mid-1970s f.e.
Well to be clear, just because I haven't heard of it, doesn't mean it's not a thing! I was just asking but I think your explanation sounds correct, i.e., the just following orders. But, you know that, Albert Speers was one of few that were actually spared by the Nuremburg trials, right?
I think that Speers had substantially more in his defense than using following orders as an excuse. He was an architect after all. And not in the sense of Nazi plans or even of the war. He was the old fashioned, drafting board, design a building kind of architect. He played little part in the workings of the Wehrmacht.
But again, my recollection of the entire thing is a bit fuzzy. I had read his book many years ago.
No sweat, different nations and even different universities all have their own internal jargon and terminology - it may be such an artefact. I'm kind of blunt so I always come across harsher than I really am.
t was probably a deal with the Devil-thing that caused him to be spared. Germany needed him and the tens of thousands of other bureaucrats which made the whole horror possible.
Made for a chilling lecture when we first were exposed for how pitifully few were actually convicted and handed real sentences.
Not to mention that zero Allied or Soviet servicemen et c were tried. If I recall this right, several US judges and law scholars protested the trials as "Victor's Justice" at the time, for that very reason.
Well, there's no one or twenty either/or answers, I think.
But in my unfortunate experience, a remarkable number of purportedly adult liars function in a universe where they've figuratively pulled the covers over their heads and keep repeating that the truth is not out there and think *you* can't see it.
And they'll hold to that until the blanket-eating shrews from beyond space have left them with nothing but their bloody broken fingernails and a freezing bed.
People who confess more easily may have a feeling--correct or otherwise--that someone you can't see has their back and they'll pay only a transient price that someone will reimburse them the expense of.
As for plea bargaining in the criminal justice system--very efficient extortion for the authorities.
A lie is a very valuable weapon in the hands of those who wield it with impunity. It keeps others off-balance and ignorant about what's going on. And our political class is quite adept at churning them out, knowing that corporate media will memory-hole or shield the Regime's useful servants from blowback when caught. We are lead by psychopaths completely comfortable in spewing lies. No pangs of conscience disturb their sleep. Even worse, people have become so jaded by lies and corruption that lying has become acceptable and expected.
Ultimately, truth is a moot point in a society whose most influential members proclaim that men can get pregnant and give birth. It's amusing to note that the Gospel writers have Pontius Pilate act completely baffled by the meaning of "truth." https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2018:37-38&version=NIV Satraps then, satraps now...some things never change.
I wrote about Pilate's line in a 9th grade paper. I actually posited that he was being critical of the pastoral (Hebrew) community government that had condemned Jesus to the Romans, putting Pilate in the position of doing a job he really didn't want to do (as evidenced by the earlier verses where he seems to seek every possible loophole to avoid his duty under provincial law to punish the criminals the local government sent him).
Counterpoint to that, Pilates also had to factor in the very real risk of yet another jewish uprising and internecine war, which would have had severe repercushinons not only for himself but the entire region.
And that's without taking the cost of letting the legions try to keep the warring jews apart or keeping them from trying to impose their laws on non-jews, or even having to employ pacification.
In that equation, one more haggard prophet rambling about the one true god and so on matters very little. It was almost two centuries later before the cult of Jesus as defined by Saul was a real power, something Pilate simply couldn't know when he made his decision. And sending to Rome for advice would have made Pilates look like a weak indecisive fool, putting him and his family/clan in jeopardy.
Which the jewish community leaders knew full well, which is why they handled the issue like they did, instead of simply stabbing Jesus to death in an anonymous assault.
A few weeks ago I came across a DVD of "A Man For All Seasons" in a used bookstore. I was blown away by how relevant it was to our covid crisis. Fashions change over the years; human nature remains the same.
One element of strategic lying/truth-telling that I don't think has been explored enough is probably exemplified by your example of the cheating husband/boyfriend. I have a theory that truth-telling in these circumstances is often actually a kind of egoic weapon wielded against the spouse. In the act of the cheater's "confession", he simultaneously wounds the person he (perhaps subconsciously) blames for the affair, while giving himself a pat moral escape route for his superego and getting the result he wants (i.e. out of the relationship). The "perfect crime", in some ways, but only with the correct measure of inner blindness.
I think that depends entirely on what the cheater's motivation is in confession. Sometimes cheaters are experiencing guilt, or are at least making a tactical choice because they do want to preserve the relationship.
Men and women tend to do this very differently, of course.
you are a charming writer and a very bright person. I also commented in today's earlier article that I think you look like Gisele Bundchen. I am known to be a good guesser.
Thanks for a sagacious article. (My internal Butt-head thought, "She said chocolate football! heh heh heh heh heh")
In all seriousness, I spend significant time ruminating on and writing about the virtue of honesty and the vices of dissembling and concealing wrongdoing. I like your plea bargain analogy. I could never consider it in a universal context to apply to all humans everywhere and eternally, but it sure seems to apply broadly in a dishonest, Pragmatist culture. I also consider whether any of those grand scale villains are anywhere close to fully conscious of what they're doing and why or whether they all constantly evade and convince themselves they're not villains. I'm still not sure if any of those "more conscious" ones exist, but I doubt any of Fauci and company are sophisticated enough to be among them if they do.
And Senator Guttermouth? It would take quite a lot to get me to return to a voting booth. You might be on the short list.
Actually, JEFFREY, I do have the audacity to state that this model probably applies to all humans everywhere.
You can have a "dishonest, Pragmatist culture," but you can have humans that are wired to be able to lie in every culture at every time in history.
I realize I'm making a bold, possibly arrogant statement by this thesis, but I believe it's an illustration of the way human minds work, not societies per se. I think human brains are pragmatic by their very nature, and societies (usually) attempt to shape behavior around transcending that or at least sublimating it- but the most effective such social mechanisms rely on this truth rather than attempting to defy it with morality-myth.
As for Fauci and other "villains," while I'm happy to throw the word around as a useful descriptor, I'm also aware it's neither groundbreaking nor revelatory to observe that villains don't see themselves as villains. When I see pieces of shit like Fauci lying, and "getting away with" lying in ways that "regular people" don't, I want to know, "what's his (Y) that this situation doesn't matter?"
2. The ability to lie in every age is certainly not in dispute. The question is why it is so widespread today. You think it is "wiring". I think it is cultural influence while acknowledging (I thought it went without saying) it happens on an individual level (only individuals exist as metaphysical entities anyway). "Societies" certainly don't choose to lie.
3. It's certainly true it's not groundbreaking or revelatory to observe that (most or all) villains don't see themselves as villains. Musing on whether it is most or all who don't implies that it isn't. Did I insinuate it wasn't prosaic? Did I insinuate you weren't aware it is? I think I understand the rest of your comment. (And yes, I'm interested in "his (Y)" as well, of course. There's not much else interesting about him.)
As to your second question, the reason why it is so widespread is because older times used permanent methods to ostracise or otherwise get rid of liars, to use that term for a very broad category of undesireable behavioural modes.
Since we, meaning general white western culture, stopped doing that from aproximatively the interwar-period, lying your way to stature, status and success became a viable means of climbing the hierarchy, and as more and more liars congregated at the tops of these mountains of madness, every single liar has a stronger and stronger vested interest in keeping lying, deceitfulness, literalism, semantics and so on being a succesful strategy.
I can hazard a guess that there would be very few congress-critters and other career-politicians in the US interest in serving if all they got during the job was minimum wage and 60 square feet one-room apatment, and nothing more.
A person wanting to serve the people and its nation wouldn't mind doing living like that, since the service to the community takes precedence as a duty: an egotistical, egocentrist, narcissistic liar wouldn't even consider it - they'd go into law school or the clergy or selling meteor strike-insurance or some other grift.
I would say this has a lot to do with the transition away from- as very explicitly stated as intentional by liberal philosophers- "honor culture," which we as modern creatures are supposed to find backwards and reprehensible.
It's interesting to remind myself that, barring very context specific cases like perjury and fraud, lying isn't in itself a "crime" any more than "adultery" is anymore in most jurisdictions.
There are a lot of "little" things we have decided are no big deal anymore. Except.
I'm pretty sure I'm using all the quotes appropriately!
Also, I'm not trying to pick a fight about villains. My only point was that it doesn't especially matter, for the purpose of discussing lying, whether the villain in question is self-conscious or not. The distinction only means their perceived Y and Z are different.
It's fine to say propensity for lying is culturally influenced. I argue that there's a base mechanism it is acting on, and that's what I describe.
If people are behaving more dishonestly, it's because the cultural influences you're talking about are acting on these mechanisms.
My position is a cognitive model. I'm not trying to defend a philosophical position on lying. This just seems like HOW lying works, based on what I know about the building blocks of how we think in general.
Also, voting for me would be a bad idea. Don't get me wrong, I'd love it, but it would be a nihilistic move. I really would be a total warlord and do like Rikard was joking, giving out tanks and settling national grievances with viking raids. But I wouldn't be a giant liar or hypocrite.
To me the most unbelievable aspect of the un-fucking-believable pack of lies known as the covid hoax, is not the lies themselves but the morons that support the lies. Anyone with half a brain knows that for the entirety of human history government has lied continually about many things that are of major consequence.
Not just that but for quite some time, our government and its PR branch (aka MSM), have done NOTHING BUT lie. That's all they do. They know they're lying. They know we know they're lying. We know they know we know they're lying but they keep lying anyway.
It's one thing to ponder if perhaps they're not lying THIS TIME. OK, fine. But the default position is absolutely known. The burden for any supporter of their bullshit is to first give a case as to why THIS TIME they might have decided to stop lying for a change. Public health is too big of a deal to lie about?! BULLSHIT!
Every single person that didn't just believe the covid hysteria lies but took the ball and ran, got shitty with friends, family, significant others, coworkers or employees... they have abandoned their integrity worse than the known liars. They have lost all respect forever and have nothing valid to offer in terms of opinion any further.
In my mind such people are equivalent to a crack head trying to convince people to wash their car windows for money, i.e., human trash. The destruction in their wake is incalculable. Their complicity can never be forgotten and probably never forgiven.
>> Their complicity can never be forgotten and probably never forgiven.
Agree 1000%, but we have to figure out what to do next at some point. If it has to look very different from what we're doing now, that's fine, but what?
I'm in favor of there being a whole lot LESS of it, whatever it is. I don't think humanity would collapse if there ceased being any such thing as public health mandates managed by threat of state force.
Thanks for prodding the brain to think more strategically when speaking and negotiating with the burgeoning population of pathological liars.
Which brings me to the (two rats doing stuff in the wall) thought that won't stop; So speaking of prodding minds with a stick, what has to happen for that annoying lab rat/gnome to end up on a pike in front of some castle, so other evil doers will be dissuaded?
I'll throw in a possibility I've been thinking about: we don't know what the Y is for these guys (sic). I'm waiting to get Whitney Webb's books in the mail, One Nation Under Blackmail. I really like your premise that our relationship to the truth is all an internal plea bargain. But what if Monica was already a plea bargain and Y was a film clip with a Very Underage girl, possibly while rufied?
The level of centralized control is so insidious that I don't think it can be explained with just greed. I feel like there's dirt so shameful that a dump on the front page of the NY Times is nothing. Look what Hunter's laptop exposed, and it's not even making a p.12 byline.
<i>9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
“- and therefore tell the truth because It Is The Right Thing To Do.”</i>
Close but no cigar.
I tell the truth ( or rather, struggle with speaking comintern at work) for the same reason you don't screw around on your husband, or spread nasty gossip about your brother. It would break your heart.
Also, practically speaking, when you are handed the cheat codes to the game of life, why not use them. The iterated prisoners dilemma gives the value of honesty to non-enemies/people who want to destroy you.
Good essay. That point about confessing about a lie being essentially plea bargaining is right on I think. That leaves us with maybe four or five classifications of behavior:
1: Lies, then confesses for fear of being caught in the lie: Plea bargaining
2: Lies, then confesses to mitigate internal guilt: Avoiding additional crimes before ones' internal judge ("I robbed the store, but that doesn't mean I have to shoot the clerk; I'm not a murderer.")
3: Lies, then lies over and over mixed with confessions: The Clinton Mix Tape approach, of managing lies to avoid the truth coming out at an inconvenient time, but not fully plea bargaining.
4: Just lie, fuck it: Faucci etc. My thought here is that they believe the chance of getting caught and punished is very low so long as they keep lying.
As to number 4, I think the key here is that people learn to just never admit fault or culpability once they believe their is no way to catch them lying; that is, they are being interrogated but they know the police have no evidence, bluffing with no cards in hand. The only way to get caught is to confess.
I have seen that play out in corporations, where people are effectively trained to just lie forever because there either is no objective proof one way or the other, or they know that those in charge of enforcing punishment are not much interested in doing so and therefor won't care to look for the proof. So long as you don't crack, or get incredibly unlucky on the proof, you won't get in trouble. At the extreme end, it even becomes a power move, demonstrating that you can do whatever you want and say whatever nonsense you want because those in charge of correcting you are on your side.
Needless to say, that's a place you want to get the hell out of immediately.
This is a great article that I'm totally going to ignore to respond to this part:
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
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This is an amazing way to describe the feeling of an article that won't let you not write it. In "Inventing Anna", there was a scene when the very pregnant reporter was asked if she wanted to stop writing. She responded with something along the line of "I HAVE TO GET THIS STORY OUT OF MY HEAD!"
Very well said.
Yeah, yeah. Read the rest. I spent way too much of my day on this stinker for you to focus on the rat joke.
I read the rest already I just didn't have anything to add except a Bill Clinton joke that I heard like 30 years ago:
When asked if they would sleep with President Clinton, 84% of women answered "Not again."
LOL I remember that joke.
It was a very good article, though. I'm not sure if it was you or somebody else on here that said it, but real power is being able to know that even if you're caught, nothing will happen. That's where Fauci sits right now.
I said it, and you praised me for it. :)
The important connection to this thesis is: being caught isn't Fauci's (Z). Something else is.
While I didn’t vote for Clinton or Biden, I gotta say at least we could make fun of Clinton without the FBI showing up with a SWAT team at 6am. The Clinton Presidency was the last Democrat administration that was made fun of on late night television. Remember Imus at the 1996 White House Correspondents Dinner?
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4842056/user-clip-don-imus-1996-white-house-correspondents-association-dinner
GWB and Trump were rightly mocked but any jokes about Obama were racist and joking about Biden is not allowed by his CCP overlords.
As for your 30 year old Clinton joke, either I’ve never heard it or I forgot it. It was appreciated and will be updated and recycled by me in the near future.
Country gals know how difficult distinguishing fighting from fucking is in most mammals. The part of the stream of consciousness that got me was the “lying is worse than the cheating” claim of the girlfriend. First of all, cheating is lying in the sense it is breaking a vow of monogamy. Secondly, Norm MacDonald had a bit about people who said after Bill Cosby’s rufi-rape conviction: “The worst part is the hypocrisy” to which Norm would reply, “No, pretty sure the rape was the worst part. Nobody who woke up with Cosby raping them yelled ‘Help! Hypocrisy!’”
>> cheating is lying in the sense it is breaking a vow of monogamy
I'm going to argue this point because I think the difference is an important nuance to what I'm talking about in the context of lying.
A vow is a promise of future behavior. A declarative statement is a reporting of reality.
Now, vows can be made in bad faith. I can promise "I'll never cheat on you" and have every intention of doing so the moment you're not around. But I can also fail to live up to that promise at some point in the future- maybe even in the far future. That doesn't mean that I didn't make that vow in good faith at the time, or intend to keep it, or was mindful of that vow for most of the time before I broke it. Unless I make a promise I have no intention of keeping, I'm not "lying."
Promised behavior is complicated and nuanced- humans have a lot of good intentions that don't always reflect reality.
Knowingly stating something false is much more cut and dry: you know you're doing it when you're doing it (even- especially- if you outwardly dissemble with word play and legalistic language). Everyone knows when they're lying. Not everyone knows they will break a vow when they make a vow and break it later, and I'd argue most don't.
This is the important distinction.
That’s a fair point. Let me amend my stated opinion; cheating is a dishonest endeavor, often preceded by a lie (I’m going bowling tonight) or followed by a lie (I had to give Joe a ride home after bowling). Cheating and lying are traveling companions but they are indeed different symptoms of a flawed character.
In keeping with the Bill Clinton example; masturbating on an intern’s face was unseemly and in conflict with the federal law that Clinton signed, forcing private companies to provide sexual harassment training on the federal statutes regarding the sexual treatment of subordinates in the work place. Although Clinton’s behavior was totally repulsive and boorish, it was not lying. The lying was his denial of forcing or attempting to force other subordinates into similar acts. And of course the most cut and dry lie was “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”.
To your point about Clinton, I was completely taken aback by his shamelessness and complete lack of decency. An honorable man would've 1) never found himself with his appendage attached to the lips of an intern and 2) resigned the presidency.
As for Hillary, an honorable woman would've kicked an unrepentant philanderer to the curb. The best you can say for them is that they found one another and spared two unsuspecting people the misery of marrying them.
I was in high school when that happened and I remember thinking only someone as scummy as their partners would tolerate each other.
They're perfect for each other. No honor.
Well, it has been decidedly convenient for her in many respects. She likes women, so in that way too....
I HAD kids in High School when the world was consumed with BJ Clinton’s abuse of self and subordinate females. Serious people were actually arguing what defined sex and if Oval Office sex with interns was a private affair and none of our business.
I told my kids that BJs were absolutely a sex act but engaging in autoerotic acts with an intern you didn’t even kiss, in a bathroom no less, didn’t qualify as an private affair. It was more like a sexual assault.
Clinton, Bill and Hillary both, were used in a textbook on rethorics here right after the scandal broke: his way of slithering through semantics and literalisms, and her way of masterfully massaging the message and the public when she appeared in a TV-program.
It was included as an example of the power of rethorics and how to do it, with the author of that textbook putting in a caveat that he hoped the students would use their knowlefge for good, not for avoiding owning up to their actions.
Quality G. I rarely agree on a thesis boiled down to one sentence.
But I do here.
Keep bringing it!
1) It's the breach of trust and the betrayal, no dice about it.
2) Fauci isn't lying. He advised, opinionated, expressed options, and so on, but /he/ didn't lock anything down. He didn't turn the key, he didn't hang the tape, he didn't man any gates or post any stickers and so on. He just said things and if people then act, well that's on them. What he is using used to be called "The Speer Defence" if I recall correctly.
As for the economy of truth-telling, there is that annoying little thing called relative truth (translating on the fly here). Think of the monorail-salesman in that Simpsons episode. To all normal social interactions in any culture ever, he lies. But not literally. Everything he says is the truth, but it is his truth: if he promises to come help you as soon as he finishes what he is doing, he might mean he's currently breathing...
And that is what real psychopathic personalities that lack the otherwise typical impulse-driven compulsive violent behaviour do all the time: they constantly redfine parameters so that they never lie, and this redefining is also constantly redefined backwards and forwards in time, and so on in some kind of insane Mandelbrot-Twister.
As for how to handle this, consider the fate of Loke in Lokasenna and after the death of Balder: the only way to deal with people who manipulate and cause strife using literalist language as to not lie (according their own equation) is taking them out permanently.
Their lying and manipulation are their way to get ypou to play their game, by making it look like society's greater game of normal social interaction, which it isn't since the liar changes the rules on you all the time.
First, they put you on the back foot with a barrage of questions/claims, then they play up to an audience (real or imagined matters not, because their acting such will draw us into 'talking in public'-mode) to make us embarassed of the conflict as such - the shame factor you mention, and then they will go on the attack using your hestiancy, your attempts to be precise and fair and your initial backpedaling as arguments for why they in fact are right and a victim.
Does this sound like certain political movements? Well, it's no coincidence.
The only winning move is not to play.
Consider Oscar Wilde's trial. The prosecutor nailed Wilde because Wilde lied about his age and could use that lie to completly destroy Wilde's defence since it hinged on him being a fêted celebrity of wit and esprit: the prosecutor simply refused to play Wilde's game.
Don't know if you've seen this video, it's a very good primer on how questioning works but also the pitfalls of trying to "help authorities with their inquiries":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE]
It's about 45 minutes, the man speaking is some Regent Law Professor James Duane, he's also witten a short paper on the topic, titled "The Right to Remain Silent: A New Answer to an Old Question", downloadable from here:
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1998119]
Dude, I've sent "Don't Talk To The Police" to more people than I have Christmas cards. And not just because I'm a heathen.
Is the "Speer Defense" that which was given by Albert Speer at Nuremburg? I actually read Albert Speer's book. Very insightful but I'm not familiar with the term "Speer Defense" TBH.
Maybe it's not a formal term as such? We used it frequently when I was a student and the course was on "morals & ethics for civil servants", the point being that it was unacceptable to play semantics, claim ignorance of the end result of you fulfilling your appointed legal task, and so on with Albert Speer as the reference point of someone defending themselves with what essentially boils down to "just followed orders".
Our professor was adamant that it was the duty of every civil servant to be firmly on the side of the people, all the people, and not just be organic machinery in the state's execution of its business. "See something - say something" so to speak, as a safeguard against things like the swedish Socialist Democrats' eugenics program which ran until the mid-1970s f.e.
Well to be clear, just because I haven't heard of it, doesn't mean it's not a thing! I was just asking but I think your explanation sounds correct, i.e., the just following orders. But, you know that, Albert Speers was one of few that were actually spared by the Nuremburg trials, right?
I think that Speers had substantially more in his defense than using following orders as an excuse. He was an architect after all. And not in the sense of Nazi plans or even of the war. He was the old fashioned, drafting board, design a building kind of architect. He played little part in the workings of the Wehrmacht.
But again, my recollection of the entire thing is a bit fuzzy. I had read his book many years ago.
No sweat, different nations and even different universities all have their own internal jargon and terminology - it may be such an artefact. I'm kind of blunt so I always come across harsher than I really am.
t was probably a deal with the Devil-thing that caused him to be spared. Germany needed him and the tens of thousands of other bureaucrats which made the whole horror possible.
Made for a chilling lecture when we first were exposed for how pitifully few were actually convicted and handed real sentences.
Not to mention that zero Allied or Soviet servicemen et c were tried. If I recall this right, several US judges and law scholars protested the trials as "Victor's Justice" at the time, for that very reason.
Well, there's no one or twenty either/or answers, I think.
But in my unfortunate experience, a remarkable number of purportedly adult liars function in a universe where they've figuratively pulled the covers over their heads and keep repeating that the truth is not out there and think *you* can't see it.
And they'll hold to that until the blanket-eating shrews from beyond space have left them with nothing but their bloody broken fingernails and a freezing bed.
People who confess more easily may have a feeling--correct or otherwise--that someone you can't see has their back and they'll pay only a transient price that someone will reimburse them the expense of.
As for plea bargaining in the criminal justice system--very efficient extortion for the authorities.
A lie is a very valuable weapon in the hands of those who wield it with impunity. It keeps others off-balance and ignorant about what's going on. And our political class is quite adept at churning them out, knowing that corporate media will memory-hole or shield the Regime's useful servants from blowback when caught. We are lead by psychopaths completely comfortable in spewing lies. No pangs of conscience disturb their sleep. Even worse, people have become so jaded by lies and corruption that lying has become acceptable and expected.
Ultimately, truth is a moot point in a society whose most influential members proclaim that men can get pregnant and give birth. It's amusing to note that the Gospel writers have Pontius Pilate act completely baffled by the meaning of "truth." https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2018:37-38&version=NIV Satraps then, satraps now...some things never change.
I wrote about Pilate's line in a 9th grade paper. I actually posited that he was being critical of the pastoral (Hebrew) community government that had condemned Jesus to the Romans, putting Pilate in the position of doing a job he really didn't want to do (as evidenced by the earlier verses where he seems to seek every possible loophole to avoid his duty under provincial law to punish the criminals the local government sent him).
But in the end, his position was more important to him than his principles, certainly compared to an anonymous Jew that the locals found obnoxious.
Counterpoint to that, Pilates also had to factor in the very real risk of yet another jewish uprising and internecine war, which would have had severe repercushinons not only for himself but the entire region.
And that's without taking the cost of letting the legions try to keep the warring jews apart or keeping them from trying to impose their laws on non-jews, or even having to employ pacification.
In that equation, one more haggard prophet rambling about the one true god and so on matters very little. It was almost two centuries later before the cult of Jesus as defined by Saul was a real power, something Pilate simply couldn't know when he made his decision. And sending to Rome for advice would have made Pilates look like a weak indecisive fool, putting him and his family/clan in jeopardy.
Which the jewish community leaders knew full well, which is why they handled the issue like they did, instead of simply stabbing Jesus to death in an anonymous assault.
Exactly my point!
But I used more words! With lotsa syllababbles!
And they were lovely.
A few weeks ago I came across a DVD of "A Man For All Seasons" in a used bookstore. I was blown away by how relevant it was to our covid crisis. Fashions change over the years; human nature remains the same.
Yes, exactly as Mel Gibson portrayed in "The Passion." And, wow, did he catch a lot of grief for it.
It used to be a fairly uncontroversial view of the historical Jesus. It's not like the Romans weren't some of the best record keepers in history. :)
Very thought provoking essay, thank you.
One element of strategic lying/truth-telling that I don't think has been explored enough is probably exemplified by your example of the cheating husband/boyfriend. I have a theory that truth-telling in these circumstances is often actually a kind of egoic weapon wielded against the spouse. In the act of the cheater's "confession", he simultaneously wounds the person he (perhaps subconsciously) blames for the affair, while giving himself a pat moral escape route for his superego and getting the result he wants (i.e. out of the relationship). The "perfect crime", in some ways, but only with the correct measure of inner blindness.
I think that depends entirely on what the cheater's motivation is in confession. Sometimes cheaters are experiencing guilt, or are at least making a tactical choice because they do want to preserve the relationship.
Men and women tend to do this very differently, of course.
you are a charming writer and a very bright person. I also commented in today's earlier article that I think you look like Gisele Bundchen. I am known to be a good guesser.
Thank you and thank you. :)
Thanks for a sagacious article. (My internal Butt-head thought, "She said chocolate football! heh heh heh heh heh")
In all seriousness, I spend significant time ruminating on and writing about the virtue of honesty and the vices of dissembling and concealing wrongdoing. I like your plea bargain analogy. I could never consider it in a universal context to apply to all humans everywhere and eternally, but it sure seems to apply broadly in a dishonest, Pragmatist culture. I also consider whether any of those grand scale villains are anywhere close to fully conscious of what they're doing and why or whether they all constantly evade and convince themselves they're not villains. I'm still not sure if any of those "more conscious" ones exist, but I doubt any of Fauci and company are sophisticated enough to be among them if they do.
And Senator Guttermouth? It would take quite a lot to get me to return to a voting booth. You might be on the short list.
Actually, JEFFREY, I do have the audacity to state that this model probably applies to all humans everywhere.
You can have a "dishonest, Pragmatist culture," but you can have humans that are wired to be able to lie in every culture at every time in history.
I realize I'm making a bold, possibly arrogant statement by this thesis, but I believe it's an illustration of the way human minds work, not societies per se. I think human brains are pragmatic by their very nature, and societies (usually) attempt to shape behavior around transcending that or at least sublimating it- but the most effective such social mechanisms rely on this truth rather than attempting to defy it with morality-myth.
As for Fauci and other "villains," while I'm happy to throw the word around as a useful descriptor, I'm also aware it's neither groundbreaking nor revelatory to observe that villains don't see themselves as villains. When I see pieces of shit like Fauci lying, and "getting away with" lying in ways that "regular people" don't, I want to know, "what's his (Y) that this situation doesn't matter?"
1. You use almost as many quotes as I.
2. The ability to lie in every age is certainly not in dispute. The question is why it is so widespread today. You think it is "wiring". I think it is cultural influence while acknowledging (I thought it went without saying) it happens on an individual level (only individuals exist as metaphysical entities anyway). "Societies" certainly don't choose to lie.
3. It's certainly true it's not groundbreaking or revelatory to observe that (most or all) villains don't see themselves as villains. Musing on whether it is most or all who don't implies that it isn't. Did I insinuate it wasn't prosaic? Did I insinuate you weren't aware it is? I think I understand the rest of your comment. (And yes, I'm interested in "his (Y)" as well, of course. There's not much else interesting about him.)
As to your second question, the reason why it is so widespread is because older times used permanent methods to ostracise or otherwise get rid of liars, to use that term for a very broad category of undesireable behavioural modes.
Since we, meaning general white western culture, stopped doing that from aproximatively the interwar-period, lying your way to stature, status and success became a viable means of climbing the hierarchy, and as more and more liars congregated at the tops of these mountains of madness, every single liar has a stronger and stronger vested interest in keeping lying, deceitfulness, literalism, semantics and so on being a succesful strategy.
I can hazard a guess that there would be very few congress-critters and other career-politicians in the US interest in serving if all they got during the job was minimum wage and 60 square feet one-room apatment, and nothing more.
A person wanting to serve the people and its nation wouldn't mind doing living like that, since the service to the community takes precedence as a duty: an egotistical, egocentrist, narcissistic liar wouldn't even consider it - they'd go into law school or the clergy or selling meteor strike-insurance or some other grift.
I would say this has a lot to do with the transition away from- as very explicitly stated as intentional by liberal philosophers- "honor culture," which we as modern creatures are supposed to find backwards and reprehensible.
It's interesting to remind myself that, barring very context specific cases like perjury and fraud, lying isn't in itself a "crime" any more than "adultery" is anymore in most jurisdictions.
There are a lot of "little" things we have decided are no big deal anymore. Except.
Dude, if it meant having the nuclear football, I'd live in a studio apartment in New York City, which is basically one of my visions of hell.
I'm pretty sure I'm using all the quotes appropriately!
Also, I'm not trying to pick a fight about villains. My only point was that it doesn't especially matter, for the purpose of discussing lying, whether the villain in question is self-conscious or not. The distinction only means their perceived Y and Z are different.
It's fine to say propensity for lying is culturally influenced. I argue that there's a base mechanism it is acting on, and that's what I describe.
If people are behaving more dishonestly, it's because the cultural influences you're talking about are acting on these mechanisms.
My position is a cognitive model. I'm not trying to defend a philosophical position on lying. This just seems like HOW lying works, based on what I know about the building blocks of how we think in general.
Also, voting for me would be a bad idea. Don't get me wrong, I'd love it, but it would be a nihilistic move. I really would be a total warlord and do like Rikard was joking, giving out tanks and settling national grievances with viking raids. But I wouldn't be a giant liar or hypocrite.
Really wish I could just post images directly.
https://CheckMyPrivilege.co/memes/Guttermouth-for-Senator.png
Dear brother, this delights me.
There needs to be a skull or a poop on it. Or a skull wearing a poop hat.
To me the most unbelievable aspect of the un-fucking-believable pack of lies known as the covid hoax, is not the lies themselves but the morons that support the lies. Anyone with half a brain knows that for the entirety of human history government has lied continually about many things that are of major consequence.
Not just that but for quite some time, our government and its PR branch (aka MSM), have done NOTHING BUT lie. That's all they do. They know they're lying. They know we know they're lying. We know they know we know they're lying but they keep lying anyway.
It's one thing to ponder if perhaps they're not lying THIS TIME. OK, fine. But the default position is absolutely known. The burden for any supporter of their bullshit is to first give a case as to why THIS TIME they might have decided to stop lying for a change. Public health is too big of a deal to lie about?! BULLSHIT!
Every single person that didn't just believe the covid hysteria lies but took the ball and ran, got shitty with friends, family, significant others, coworkers or employees... they have abandoned their integrity worse than the known liars. They have lost all respect forever and have nothing valid to offer in terms of opinion any further.
In my mind such people are equivalent to a crack head trying to convince people to wash their car windows for money, i.e., human trash. The destruction in their wake is incalculable. Their complicity can never be forgotten and probably never forgiven.
>> Their complicity can never be forgotten and probably never forgiven.
Agree 1000%, but we have to figure out what to do next at some point. If it has to look very different from what we're doing now, that's fine, but what?
I'm in favor of there being a whole lot LESS of it, whatever it is. I don't think humanity would collapse if there ceased being any such thing as public health mandates managed by threat of state force.
Thanks for prodding the brain to think more strategically when speaking and negotiating with the burgeoning population of pathological liars.
Which brings me to the (two rats doing stuff in the wall) thought that won't stop; So speaking of prodding minds with a stick, what has to happen for that annoying lab rat/gnome to end up on a pike in front of some castle, so other evil doers will be dissuaded?
I'll throw in a possibility I've been thinking about: we don't know what the Y is for these guys (sic). I'm waiting to get Whitney Webb's books in the mail, One Nation Under Blackmail. I really like your premise that our relationship to the truth is all an internal plea bargain. But what if Monica was already a plea bargain and Y was a film clip with a Very Underage girl, possibly while rufied?
The level of centralized control is so insidious that I don't think it can be explained with just greed. I feel like there's dirt so shameful that a dump on the front page of the NY Times is nothing. Look what Hunter's laptop exposed, and it's not even making a p.12 byline.
<i>9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
“- and therefore tell the truth because It Is The Right Thing To Do.”</i>
Close but no cigar.
I tell the truth ( or rather, struggle with speaking comintern at work) for the same reason you don't screw around on your husband, or spread nasty gossip about your brother. It would break your heart.
Also, practically speaking, when you are handed the cheat codes to the game of life, why not use them. The iterated prisoners dilemma gives the value of honesty to non-enemies/people who want to destroy you.
Good essay. That point about confessing about a lie being essentially plea bargaining is right on I think. That leaves us with maybe four or five classifications of behavior:
1: Lies, then confesses for fear of being caught in the lie: Plea bargaining
2: Lies, then confesses to mitigate internal guilt: Avoiding additional crimes before ones' internal judge ("I robbed the store, but that doesn't mean I have to shoot the clerk; I'm not a murderer.")
3: Lies, then lies over and over mixed with confessions: The Clinton Mix Tape approach, of managing lies to avoid the truth coming out at an inconvenient time, but not fully plea bargaining.
4: Just lie, fuck it: Faucci etc. My thought here is that they believe the chance of getting caught and punished is very low so long as they keep lying.
As to number 4, I think the key here is that people learn to just never admit fault or culpability once they believe their is no way to catch them lying; that is, they are being interrogated but they know the police have no evidence, bluffing with no cards in hand. The only way to get caught is to confess.
I have seen that play out in corporations, where people are effectively trained to just lie forever because there either is no objective proof one way or the other, or they know that those in charge of enforcing punishment are not much interested in doing so and therefor won't care to look for the proof. So long as you don't crack, or get incredibly unlucky on the proof, you won't get in trouble. At the extreme end, it even becomes a power move, demonstrating that you can do whatever you want and say whatever nonsense you want because those in charge of correcting you are on your side.
Needless to say, that's a place you want to get the hell out of immediately.