Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters
Dorothy Rowe
Why do we lie?Because we are frightened of being humiliated, being treated like an object, being rejected, losing control of things, and, most of all, we are frightened of uncertainty. Often we get our lies in before any of these things can happen. We lie to maintain our vanity. We lie when we call our fantasies the truth. Lying is much easier than searching for the truth and accepting it, no matter how inconvenient it is. We lie to others, and, even worse, we lie to ourselves.In both private and public life, we damage ourselves with our lies, and we damage other people. Lies destroy mutual trust, and fragment our sense of who we are.Lies have played a major part in climate change and the global economic crisis. Fearing to change how they live, many people prefer to continue lying rather than acknowledge that we are facing a very uncertain but undoubtedly unpleasant future unless we learn how to prefer the truths of the real world in which we live rather than the comforting lies that ultimately betray us. We are capable of changing, but will we choose to do this?
DOROTHY ROWE
Why We Lie
Every aspect of our national character lives in every act of character in our homes and families. If our nation keeps secrets, so too we learn to justify the secrets that we keep. If it isn’t for national security, it’s for personal security. If it’s not civil defense, it’s a defense of ourselves. If our leaders say one thing and do quite another, well, is it any surprise that we use the excuse of their faults to cover up our own?
Harold Lloyd Goodall Jr, A Need to Know: The Clandestine History of a CIA Family
Contents
Cover (#u207af957-476a-5070-9b72-2eea3d46f19a)
Title Page (#u4dabe7fb-9b0d-52e2-a82f-59ea19652af7)
Preface (#ue7e39685-c0b8-563a-a5c3-7d3de46cb3d0)
Chapter One How Can We Know What Is True? (#u206c367c-c53a-50c6-857b-29e4d4ecd09a)
Chapter Two The Curious World We Live In (#u593e342a-fe4d-55c8-a25b-47ae0076e21d)
Chapter Three Do You Know What I Mean? (#u97f4daf9-9029-5c82-be09-0b82dc2980c6)
Chapter Four Why Lying Is Necessary (#ub09db22a-8df1-54cf-a1ac-950fae91fc29)
Chapter Five How We Learn to Lie (#u082dd127-9fa2-535e-9ff0-99475b9b464a)
Chapter Six The Danger of Being Obedient (#u24d3a597-83f3-50e6-9d43-50bc07e62ab3)
Chapter Seven Deciding What Is True (#uf7cf5876-318c-58ed-9ab8-b2a6bc79125a)
Chapter Eight How Important Is the Truth to You? (#u426464d7-c67f-5a77-8242-977143fcbef0)
Chapter Nine Fantasies Are Important (#u69cc7076-aebf-544c-a9a5-b5b5fac5df24)
Chapter Ten The Delights of Shared Fantasies (#uf833b816-848e-5b98-b10d-26cdc6c6a634)
Chapter Eleven Special Fantasies: Beliefs and Delusions (#u8d1c4589-1379-51b6-8d45-e1102741c67b)
Chapter Twelve Varieties of Lies (#u40bd15eb-1a9f-5026-ab86-98a6338ce918)
Chapter Thirteen The Same Old Lies (#ude7f4a47-b014-5019-9014-61068741d920)
Chapter Fourteen Denying What Is There (#ubf931787-ffcd-584c-8d18-b84fe07d5579)
Chapter Fifteen Hypocrites All (#u3d2240f3-2f90-5deb-8bc1-dc4e0033ac32)
Chapter Sixteen Being Lied To (#u057e66bf-e112-514e-b87f-e1ac91dfe813)
Chapter Seventeen Lying for Your Government (#u03950fcb-3162-522b-ac78-9a1ce66683b4)
Chapter Eighteen Never Say You’re Sorry (#uccdb5218-f0d4-5ff3-bfd3-57e269435d36)
Chapter Nineteen Some Hard Truths (#u7a7ace71-5f97-5d50-aee5-67d728ed3221)
Notes (#u55c35cd5-0804-50a4-9868-d76c789d9702)
Index (#u874fbf68-976f-5cc5-96cb-42e8cd5389c6)
About the Author (#u8fdcbfd4-8c6e-5193-87b5-e79d80836f31)
Also by Dorothy Rowe (#uace81c63-6211-5704-bbf9-1436e5a39767)
PRAISE FOR DOROTHY ROWE: (#ub800d981-c334-5399-bf1c-b8bafe638a70)
Copyright (#u7d167c77-975c-53d8-8e32-dfe234ed3e10)
About the Publisher (#u1bfc5fbf-5fb5-5433-b19e-413ea7aec731)
Preface (#ulink_42d82fb6-434c-5394-9f4d-845446f23be6)
Lying has been in the news, but then it always has been. While I have been writing this book, we have had the lies of the bankers with their versions of, ‘It’s not my fault’, the lie that is based on the lie that many people tell themselves, ‘Because I am such a superior person I cannot be blamed for anything.’ This lie is based on the very popular but exceedingly stupid lie, ‘I can make reality do what I want it to do.’ As if reality ever bent to some mere mortal’s will! As I write, bankers and politicians are seeking to restore the public’s confidence in them with the delusional lie, ‘We can go back to where we were.’ We can never go back to where we were. Paranoid right-wing Americans are busy trying to spread their lie that Obama was born in Kenya and not in Hawaii as his birth certificate shows. Meanwhile, in Australia, everyone has been transfixed by the unbelievable lies told by a Federal Court judge who was caught for speeding and did not want to pay a $A77 fine (about £39) and get 3 demerit points on his licence. By the time you are reading this you will have learnt of even more amazing lies.
None of us likes being lied to. The only time we do is when we do not want to be told a particular truth that we already know, or at least suspect. We do not like to acknowledge that we lie, and do so frequently. We try to avoid using the words ‘lie’ and ‘lying’ in relation to ourselves. The only lies we willingly admit to are those we call ‘white lies’. We see these as being virtuous. We want to spare another person’s feelings, but the feelings we actually want to spare are our own. We do not want to be upset when another person becomes upset, or have that person reject us for being unkind.
Lies are words or actions that are intended to deceive other people or ourselves. We use a variety of words and phrases to hide the fact that someone is lying. If we want to seem to be very knowledgeable in matters psychological, we say about someone, ‘He’s in denial’, when in fact the person in question may be lying to himself. We can strenuously deny that certain events have happened or are happening. According to some people, the Holocaust never happened, or the climate is not changing. We can claim to hold certain views that in fact we do not hold, and defy anyone to call us hypocrites.
Why do we lie? In certain situations where your own or someone else’s life is in danger, lying can be a sensible thing to do. However, this kind of situation arises very infrequently. Most of us never encounter one. Sometimes we lie almost without thinking, but sometimes we lie in response to feeling that we are in great danger, even though there is no threat to our life. We are frightened, and so we lie.
What we see as being in danger is something we value even more than our life. It is our sense of being a person. We take our sense of being a person for granted, but we refer to it often as ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘myself’. It is our sense of being alive, our sense of existence. We might take it for granted but we know when it is under any threat. We move very quickly to protect it.
Each of us has experienced an extreme threat to our sense of being a person, yet we rarely talk about it. We might talk about the event itself, but not what we actually experienced. We might say, ‘I was shattered’, and our audience assume that we were using a cliché, but we were not. We might say, ‘I was panicking’, and our audience assume that we were exaggerating for effect. Very likely our audience were resisting hearing what we were saying because they did not want to be reminded of something terrible in their own life.
We have all had the experience of discovering that we are wrong in our assessment of our situation. It might be that you are being denied by someone the respect you feel you deserve, and you are being humiliated. It might be that the person you depend on and love has disappeared from your life, or has harmed or betrayed you. It might be that you discover that your future will not be what you planned it to be, or that your past proves not to be what you thought it was. In all of these situations, you discover that you have made a serious error of judgement. There is a huge discrepancy between what you thought your life was and what it actually is. As soon as you discover your mistake, you feel shaky, very shaky. Something inside you is falling apart. As the implications of your mistake become increasingly clear, the shakiness intensifies. Anxiety turns to fear, and fear to terror as you feel that you are shattering, crumbling, even disappearing.
Of course, you do not actually crumble and disappear, but you do change. You might now be older and wiser, or perhaps not wiser, but you do see things differently. From then on, you try to make sure that you never have such an experience again. Whatever your circumstances, consciously or unconsciously, you are watching for the slightest hint that such a situation might occur again. You develop many different skills aimed at deflecting such a possibility, or, when it does threaten to recur, to protect yourself from its impact. The simplest and easiest skill to employ is lying. However, no matter how skilled you are as a liar, it is rarely sensible to lie.
This is not a book about the morality of lying. I am not concerned with comparing the vice of lying with the virtue of telling the truth, nor with examining what God or Allah said about lying. Nor do I want to discuss lying in the abstract, as many moralists do. I am concerned with why we lie, and the consequences of our lies. We are very foolish indeed if we lie and fail to think about what the consequences will be.
While many thousands of people are struggling with the consequences of the terrible lies told by George Bush, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair, Bush is being paid handsomely to give lectures to his supporters, Cheney is on the talk-show circuit, warning of the terrorist threat that is even greater now, something, he says, that Obama fails to recognize. Like Bush, Blair is enjoying some very lucrative directorships and lecturing engagements. He has established his Faith Foundation, and been appointed Envoy to the Middle East to establish peace and reconciliation there. This appointment is the equivalent of the appointment of Sir Fred Goodwin, who played a major part in setting in train the economic crisis in Britain, to be in charge of a new body to regulate British banks. However, his experiences of the last few years have changed Blair. The journalist Decca Aitkenhead spent a day with Peter Mandelson, and, in the course of that day, they visited Blair. She wrote,
When we arrive I’m completely taken aback at the former PM’s appearance, for he resembles a bad actor playing Blair in the grip of some awful psychiatric meltdown. He really does look quite mad, with his face all over the place – a grotesque dance of eyebrows and teeth, manically gurning away, every feature in permanent motion – beside which Mandelson looks like a vision of poised sophistication. There are warm greetings, and as I’m introduced Mandelson pretends I’m there to shadow Blair, provoking another great jerky grimace.
Blair, Bush and Cheney made the grave mistake of forgetting that everything we do has a whole network of consequences, most of which we never anticipated. Even when we get what we wished for, it is never quite what we wanted. The lies we tell might protect us in the short term, but, in the long term, the consequences can be disastrous. When we lie to ourselves, we multiply a thousandfold the inherent difficulties we have in trying to determine what is actually going on inside us and around us. Good relationships are based on trust. When we lie to others, sooner or later, our lies will become apparent, and trust is destroyed.
On his twenty-third birthday in 1978, Timothy Garton Ash drove to West Berlin and some time later went to live for a while in East Berlin where he soon attracted the attention of the Stasi, the secret police. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 the Stasi files were opened, and those who had been spied upon could apply to see their own file. Garton Ash read his own file, and from that the files on those who had spied on him. All of those who had spied on him were ordinary Germans whom he had met, sometimes socially, sometimes in connection with his research for his doctoral thesis on Berlin under Hitler. One of the spies was code-named Michaela. She had been director of the Weimar Arts Galleries. After studying his and Michaela’s files, he went to see her. During their conversation it became clear that the Stasi had tempted her with promises of trips to art galleries outside East Germany, places where few East Germans were allowed to go. She let herself be seduced, and pretended to herself that what she was doing was harmless. She must also have told herself that no one would ever know. She had not learnt from history that all tyrannies eventually come to an end. Amongst those she spied on were her daughter and her step-daughter, and the men with whom they were associated. When the Wall came down her step-daughter read her own file, and severed her ties with her step-mother. Garton Ash did not record what Michaela’s daughter did when she discovered that her own mother had spied on her, but we can surmise.
Relationships can be very complicated, and consequently many people limit the number and kind of people to whom they will pay attention. Some people decide that, ‘Anyone who isn’t family doesn’t count’, or, ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with anyone who isn’t the same nationality as me.’ People who decide to treat as important only those who are family, or those who share their nationality, religion, race, class live in what Gillian Tett calls ‘silos’, those huge, windowless cylinders that stand, often in complete isolation, perhaps full of wheat, perhaps empty, beside a single rail track in the Australian Outback.
Gillian Tett is Capital Markets Editor of the Financial Times and winner of the British Press Award 2008 for the business journalist of the year. She was one of the few people who predicted two years ago the collapse of the world’s financial system. Five years ago when all the talk in the City was about mergers and acquisitions, and the equity markets, she became interested in collateral debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs), the products that proved to be the bad debts acquired by banks and building societies. Tett had trained as an anthropologist. In an interview, she explained how anthropologists are trained to think holistically.
You look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialized, so busy, they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into this mess we are in is because they were so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society. Bankers like to imagine that money and the profit motive is as universal as gravity. They think it’s basically a given and they think it’s completely apersonal. And it’s not. What they do in finance is all about culture and interaction.
Everything in the world is connected to everything else. In early 2009 the car industry was in trouble. The demand for new cars had dropped to its lowest levels, as people faced their own individual financial crisis. News reports spoke of ‘the American car industry’, ‘the Japanese car industry’, and the like, as if these were discrete industries, but they were not. The car industry is a global industry. For instance, in the motor industry in 2009, Fiat provided diesel engines to Mercedes for use in commercial vehicles. GM built Fiat diesel engines under licence for use in Vauxhall, Opel and Saab cars. Peugeot Citroen provided diesel engines for Ford vehicles and used BMW petrol engines in its Citroën and Peugeot cars, while running Joint Venture programmes for shared small cars with Toyota and commercial vehicles with Fiat.
In January 2009, the World Economic Forum met in closed session at Davos in Switzerland. Tim Weber, the Business Editor for the BBC website, was allowed to report what was said, but not who said it. There was general agreement that the root causes of the crisis were ‘too much debt, a culture of short-term rewards for long-term risk-taking and fatally flawed mathematical models. And plain old greed.’ One speaker who did allow his name to be used was Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former derivatives trader and now writer, who said, ‘Derivatives trading is all about how to make a bonus and how to screw your client.’ It became clear that, ‘Financial institutions took on debt worth 40 times their assets – and failed to understand how risky this was.’
When financial institutions became computerized, they acquired software that produced ‘models’ that purported to predict the outcome of certain financial activities, that is, what risk was being run by these financial activities. The model was an abstract concept called value at risk (VAR). When VAR included the kinds of crises that occur once in a lifetime, the result would suggest that the venture to be undertaken was far too risky. If once-in-a-lifetime crises were not included, the result suggested that it was fine to undertake what Paul Mason, Economics Editor of BBC Newsnight, called ‘suicidal risk-taking’.
This was the kind of risk-taking that financial institutions preferred. After all, it won’t happen, will it? But it did.
The unexpected often happens in private and public life. Everyone should know that from their own personal experience. Yet many people tell themselves the comforting lie, ‘My actions will have limited consequences.’ We learn as children that small actions can have surprisingly large and unexpected results, yet in adulthood many people pretend that they never knew this. When three windows of Sir Fred Goodwin’s large home were smashed, as was the rear window of his Mercedes parked in the driveway, Sir Fred was reported to be ‘shaken’. Why would people do a thing like that? Sir Fred, when head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, had plunged the bank into ruinous debt, resulting in the bank having to be propped up by £20 billion of public money. When he resigned, he could see no reason why he should not keep his £3 million tax-free lump sum as well as his £700,000 a year pension.
Why would that lead to people feeling so angry that they destroyed his property? When people tell themselves, ‘My actions will have limited consequences’, they have usually already constructed a fantasy about what those limited consequences will be. Perhaps Sir Fred had a fantasy about a very pleasant early retirement with a few lucrative directorships and the occasional attendance at some committee of the Great and the Good. Apparently, Sir Fred had no idea that some people might hate him so much they would try to harm him, nor that for the rest of his life he would be pursued by the paparazzi. In March 2009 the world’s media were offering the top price for a photograph of Sir Fred relaxing. By August he was back in Edinburgh. According to Phillip Inman of the Guardian, writing in October 2009, ‘He has turned to PR experts to rebuild his reputation, as yet to no avail.’
The universal and most popular lie we tell ourselves is, ‘I am superior to other people.’ Many people claim this superiority because they hold certain beliefs about their religion, race, nationality, class or gender, while others claim their superiority simply because they were born into a certain family. All feel that this superiority entitles them to patronize, denigrate, ignore, cheat, or harm those whom they see as their inferiors. In clinging to this lie, they deny the similarities we all share. Our species varies very little genetically, and we have the same needs, desires and fears. We all want to be recognized for being the person that we are, to have a respected role in our society, and to enjoy good relationships with others.
All the immense problems we face today – a global financial crisis, climate change along with the pollution and despoiling of the planet – derive from the way certain people have told themselves that they are superior to the people they are harming, and therefore entitled to do what they do. When the British, Germans, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese established their empires, they told themselves that they were rescuing those they colonized from their ignorance and degradation, and they were saving their souls, when the truth was that these empire builders were engaged in theft on a massive scale. Believing that merely having a religious faith is sufficient to show that you are both virtuous and superior has allowed vast numbers of people to harm others and feel no shame. Lying to ourselves is very easy, and we can always think of a lie that seems to allow us to do what we do.
Can we change?
As religious leaders have demonstrated down the centuries, exhortations to be virtuous rarely change people’s ideas about how they should behave. It is always easy to deplore other people’s behaviour, but we are not inclined to change our own behaviour at the behest of those who see themselves as having moral authority. Threats of punishment by the law can lead us to appear to change, but we simply keep our ideas to ourselves. Under Communist rule many people made an ‘inner emigration’ and lived an unpolitical life.
People change their ideas when they voluntarily examine their own ideas and the consequences of their ideas, and decide to change.
In the course of my work I have seen many individuals decide to change how they saw themselves and their world so that they now live a much more satisfactory life. In Germany there have been some profound changes in ideas. Many countries with pasts that many of their inhabitants want to forget or deny have tried to deal with their legacy by holding some kind of inquiry, but the Germans dealt with life under Communist rule with Germanic thoroughness. Garton Ash wrote, ‘Germany has had trials and purges and truth commissions and has systematically opened the secret police files to each and every individual who wants to know what was done to him or her – or what he or she did to others. This is unique.’
In his conclusion written in 2009, Garton Ash pointed out that, since 1997, the technological revolution has put into the hands of the British and American governments, and into the hands of private security firms the means of spying on individuals that are far beyond what Nazi and Communist leaders could ever have imagined. He wrote, ‘East Germans today have their privacy better protected by the state than we do in Britain. Precisely because lawmakers and judges know what it was like to live in a Stasi state, and before that a Nazi one, they have guarded these things more jealously than we, the British, who take them for granted. You value health most when you have been sick.’
In 2009 when the BBC correspondent Mark Mardell was leaving his post in Europe, he wrote what he called a final essay on Europe. There he said, ‘Germany is still the most important economic and political power in Europe, but with a sense of responsibility, an ability to reflect upon its past, a horror of war, that is I think unique and little short of a miracle, an outcome few historians studying the aftermath of past conflicts could even have dared to predict. It’s probably the most grown-up country in the world today.’
Another change in how people think began in the 1970s with what then was called self-help. People with problems such as poor housing or chronic illness lost patience with the experts who were supposed to be helping them, and got together with others suffering in the same way to solve the problem they shared. Some of these self-help groups became movements, many of which effected the changes they sought. In her book The Wisdom of Whores the extraordinarily truthful epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, writing about AIDS, said, ‘It wasn’t doctors who kick-started the response to this infectious disease, it was gay men. With a flair for dramatic presentation and an inside knowledge of what makes the communications industry tick, they battered down the doors of the medical establishment, assaulted the pharmaceutical industry, took the press by storm. They gave AIDS a political face.’
The Internet and the World Wide Web revolutionized how people communicate with one another. Politicians, media moguls and the police have been forced to adapt themselves, though not without complaint, to the power of disparate groups of people all around the world. Here in London the police might have changed from using force to a softly softly approach with the people in the Climate Change movement, but whether they understand and accept what the Climate Change people are doing is another matter.
Unfortunately, many of those who organize for a cause have not learned from history. Neither exhortations nor the presentations of facts will force people to change how they think. To get people to change, you have to understand how they see themselves and their world. You must never assume that you know how another person thinks and feels. The only way to discover this is to ask that person and, if he trusts you, he will tell you.
The greatest change in ideas that I have witnessed is in how parents see their children. This was not a world-wide revolution, and the majority of children are still in servitude to their parents who see them as possessions to be used as they see fit, but a significant number of parents changed their views about how children should be raised, and this changed the society in which they lived.
The revolution that led people to question the power of parents began in the 1950s when an American paediatrician, Benjamin Spock, put forward the dangerous idea that parents should not punish children three years or younger for failing to do something that was physiologically impossible for them to do, that is, have voluntary control over their bladder and bowels. Children need to learn how to do this in their own good time. Hard on the heels of Dr Spock came T-groups, consciousness-raising groups and a plethora of therapies. All these activities gave the participants permission to break the Fifth Commandment, ‘Honour thy father and mother, so that your days be long in the land.’ Criticize your parents and you’re dead. This led these people to wonder whether, since they had suffered at the hands of their parents, they should now think hard about how they should raise their own children. Now, when I see a child doing something that would have earned me as a child a hard slap or worse from my mother, and instead the child’s mother engages the child in conversation or distracts the child, I want to tell her how wonderful she is. I refrain from doing this in case I embarrass her. After all, she was simply doing what her mother had done when she was a child.
We could decide to change our ideas and thus solve the problems we are facing, both privately and publicly. However, as Elizabeth Pisani said, ‘We can’t solve a problem that we won’t describe honestly.’
Are you prepared to give up lying?
Chapter One How Can We Know What Is True? (#ulink_56b365bb-8b00-5c62-b28c-48ab71109539)
‘Why do I lie? Because I can.’
My taxi driver was presenting me with an obvious though rarely stated truth. Then he added, ‘Lying keeps me out of trouble.’ Truth got him into trouble. Indeed, truth was trouble. Not just inconvenient truths but the perennial question, ‘How can I be sure just what is true?’
Lying is easy. All we have to do is to make up a story. It needs to be believable, but, if you tell your story with sufficient confidence and charm, many people will believe you because it suits them to believe you or they cannot be bothered to work out that you are lying and why. The truth is rarely as clear-cut and consistent as a lie. A lie is a fantasy that we can structure to suit ourselves. To find the truth we have to look at the world around us and inside ourselves, yet we are ill-equipped to see what is actually there.
We see the world, not as it is, but as we are. The world is a far less predictable and controllable place than we want it to be. Unambiguous communication with one another is impossible.
Our physiology condemns us to a lifetime of searching for the truth and then never being entirely sure that we have found it. A great many people, including people who regard themselves as being well educated, do not know this. Consequently, either they are mystified by what people do or they create some simplistic explanation that, in effect, explains nothing. If they are told that all we can do is to construct a picture of the world around us and then treat what we see as if it is real, they find this very disturbing. They want certainty, yet how can we be sure that what we say is true is actually so?
From the moment we are born, we begin learning how to construct pictures of what might be around us, and then we learn how to treat these pictures as if they were real. To live day by day we have to be able to trust our as if perceptions. If we begin to doubt them, we can no longer function efficiently in the world. This happened to me when I was a child.
I had been born into a very peculiar family. It provided me with splendid training for becoming a psychologist but, at the time, living with my family was very difficult. My father’s mother and sisters, all strong, intelligent women, had shown him that, charming and lovable as he was, he tended to be feckless and needed to be kept in order by a strong, good woman in the way they had kept him in order in his youth. When he returned from the First World War, he met and fell in love with a young woman who seemed to be the strong, good woman he believed he needed. In this he was wrong. He was right in that she was good. He would often say to me, ‘Your mother is a good woman’, but in a tone of voice that suggested that a little less application of her virtue in her judgements would not go amiss. To her, her beliefs were absolute truths, and she would never admit being wrong in any of her judgements or deeds. She was an obstinate Presbyterian who did not attend church. If asked why, she would have said that she did not approve of the minister. She would never admit the truth, which was that she was frightened of anyone who was not immediate family. She expected to be rejected, so she always got her rejection in first.
To keep herself safe she turned her home and garden into a fortress where she could control her family and anyone who dared to seek entry. She maintained her power by resorting to tantrums, sulks or an asthma attack if her decrees were ignored or challenged. Compared to my mother, Calvin and Luther were free-thinkers. No idea that was contrary to her ideas could be uttered in her presence. All too often I forgot this. I would be excited by an idea or an event and out it would come. If what I said conflicted with the way my mother wanted to see the world, she would shut me up with, ‘You’re lying’, or ‘That’s not true.’
Once she had spoken, discussion was at an end. I would go away and, if possible, check my sources, perhaps a book I had read or a lesson in school. Finding that I was right was very reassuring, but often the source of what I had told my mother was myself. Could I trust myself to report myself correctly? Had the event actually occurred or had I imagined it?
The issue for me was not a moral one. I was not asking myself, ‘Have I deliberately and wickedly told my mother a lie?’ It was not a moral issue for my mother. She did not chide or punish me for lying. She was stating absolutely and incontrovertibly that I was incapable of knowing what the truth was. She was attacking the very fundamentals of my existence. I was mistaken in what I saw, heard, thought and felt. This robbed me of any point of stability and certainty in what I was experiencing. Under the onslaught of her endless criticism, and that from my elder sister, I began to doubt that I could distinguish what I actually experienced from my dreams or from my fantasies. We are not born knowing how to distinguish what we call our perceptions of the real world from our dreams and from the stories (fantasies) we create. Toddlers struggle to learn how to do this. In adult life we occasionally wonder, ‘Did that really happen or did I imagine it?’ We also have those moments of confusion when we see something fairly clearly and then, on further inspection, what we thought we saw proves to be something else altogether. When we make these kinds of mistakes, we often mutter to ourselves, ‘I must be going crazy.’ If we are confident in ourselves, we can dismiss these mistakes as matters of no importance, but, if we doubt our ability to operate in this world, mistakes like these further diminish our self-confidence and increase our confusion.
There was no one I could talk to about what was happening to me. Sometimes my doubts became so great that I lost all confidence in the solidity of the world around me. Just putting one foot in front of the other became a matter of defying my doubts. I knew that I could easily have lost my grip on reality and plummeted into the unknown.
Now I know that what I was experiencing was not unusual. Most people have this experience at least once in their lives because few people live lives devoid of disasters. A disaster can be something that everyone would agree was a disaster, or it can be a very private matter, a loss of hope or a grave disappointment, but, whichever it is, in the chaos of the disaster, our trust in reality can fail. We can find that the world around us ceases to be real: or that which we call ‘I’ vanishes, leaving a hole the size of the universe inside us. If we can manage to survive this state of complete uncertainty, sooner or later our world becomes real again: our ‘I’ becomes safely lodged inside us again.
Two things saved me. My mother was physically lazy. She did not follow me on my excursions to the bush or the beach. She never came to my school to talk to the teachers or to attend a function there. Away from her, my confidence would revive. But it was books that developed my confidence by showing me how differently different individuals saw themselves and their world. If I did not see things the way my mother did, then that was to be expected. Literature demonstrates that each of us sees everything in our own individual way. For instance, two people look at a tree. They agree that what they are looking at is a tree. However, one person sees a beautiful, warm, friendly tree and the other an ugly, strange and possibly dangerous tree. Thus the tree itself is true for both these people but that which each person has imposed on the tree is an individual truth. There are truths which we share and truths which are our own. Shared truths make relationships and society possible: individual truths are the essence of who we are as a person.
Whenever my mother told me I was lying she was attacking both my confidence in my ability to understand what was going on around me and my sense of being a person. We are not born knowing how to understand our environment and knowing who we are as a person. We spend our childhood learning this. In calling me a liar my mother was being as destructive to me as she would have been had she attempted to murder me. In my childhood I became aware of the two forms of attack. She would not only hit me but occasionally be so beside herself with rage that she would threaten to kill me and then kill herself. As I grew into a strong, solidly built child my fear of what my mother could do to me physically diminished. However, her attacks on me as a person continued until, in my mid-thirties, I left Australia and put half the world between my mother and myself. By then I had regained my confidence in the truth of my perceptions. I had no doubt about the importance of a meticulous search for truth, both our shared truths and our individual truths.
We search for truth, both shared and individual truths, in many different ways. All of our arts are concerned with the exploration of shared and individual truths. If we lack the ability to create art, we can explore shared and individual truths in the living of our life, conforming to society’s expectations when it suits us to do so and at other times exploring the possibilities of our individual truths by creating alternative interpretations of our experiences. When we act on our alternative interpretations, we create different outcomes. However, there are many people who refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary and marvellous uncertainty of existence. They turn away from the wonder of being alive and construct instead something that is mundane, repetitive and deadening. Those people who are frightened by uncertainty and try to deal with their fear do this by controlling others, be they individuals like my mother or organizations like the State and the Church.
Whatever the form of government, the State has always used repression and social sanctions to produce conformity in its subjects. The recognition of individual truths has always been very limited, even in those places where people pride themselves on freedom of speech. The religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have always used their sacred texts as the means of enforcing conformity of thought and deed among their followers. Within each of these religions, individuals who came to believe that their individual truths were truer than the shared truths of that particular religion formed break-away groups, where the original individual truths then become shared truths which must be believed by all the members of that group. In the twentieth century, increased military efficiency and the invention of cameras, radio, film and television made possible the creation of large totalitarian states – the USSR, Communist China, North Korea – where all citizens were required to give up who they were and become what the State wanted them to be. Increasingly, computers are being used to bring together all the technologies of indoctrination and surveillance in order to ensure that all citizens live the terrible lie of denying their own individual truths. Naomi Klein, describing the vast social experiment that is taking place in the city of Shenzhen, China’s first ‘special economic zone’, told how, ‘Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city… The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range.’ The aim is to install about two million CCTVs in Shenzhen. This is just part of a much bigger programme called ‘Golden Shield’. Meanwhile, in countries that pride themselves on their freedom both government agencies and private businesses install surveillance cameras. In 1949 George Orwell saw all this and worse in his novel of what was then the future, 1984. Orwell saw how easily we could lose our freedom and not realize that it had gone.
Many people will say that surveillance is not a problem for law-abiding people. In saying this, they are assuming that the laws are just and wise because the people who make the laws are just and wise, and know what is best for their people. Heaven forfend that political leaders would ever lie to their people!
People who hold these views want certainty and security. They do not want to be told that there is nothing about which we can be absolutely certain, or that security and freedom always come in inverse proportion, but it can be difficult to predict just what these proportions will prove to be. Many a woman has married in the belief that her husband will give her the security she needs, only to find that he gives her the security of a prison. Most dictators come to power on a wave of popular acclaim, but the populace soon discover that their cheers have turned to tears.
I did not come upon an understanding of how we exist and make sense of our existence in one extraordinary revelation. Rather I stumbled towards it. By great good fortune, when I became a clinical psychologist, I was able to spend virtually unlimited time talking with troubled people about their experience of living. We talked in ordinary, everyday language about ordinary, everyday things, and about the kinds of painful, disturbing experiences which throw into doubt everything that we believed was true. Abstract concepts like traits, or personality types, or mental illnesses could not account for my clients’ experiences. But, if we looked at these experiences in terms of how each person interpreted the events in their lives, everything became clear. What determines our behaviour is not what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us.
My fellow psychologists did not regard what I did as proper psychology. Asking people how they saw themselves and their world was ‘subjective’ and ‘anecdotal’. Apart from a few neuropsychologists, most of my colleagues were oblivious of the extraordinary progress there had been in the understanding of how the brain functioned. It was now clear that the traditional division of brain and mind was not just erroneous but a great impediment to our understanding of ourselves. However, in ignoring all this, these psychologists were no different from other people.
The last twenty years has seen some huge advances in science. Scientists have not kept this knowledge to themselves. Many of them have written excellent books in which they not only explain their science to non-scientists but they do so in a way which excites their readers’ continuing curiosity. When the science can be combined with wonderful pictures, a good script and an interesting presenter, we watch in our millions. However, when the science concerns the natural world, or geology, or geography, or astronomy what we are being told is out there, separate from us. Being told about climate change is somewhat worrying, but then we can delude ourselves it won’t happen in our lifetime. But, when it comes to how our brains function or how we perceive, we cannot separate ourselves from the science. This is difficult enough when we are watching a television programme about cancer or about a nasty operation being performed, but how do we deal with what Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at University College London, is telling us when he writes, ‘Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain’?
Computers have been around long enough for us not to be disturbed by the idea that the brain is a kind of computer. Twenty-odd years ago neuroscientists took this metaphor seriously. Now they know that the brain is not like a computer. Unfortunately, some aspects of the brain as a computer metaphor have proved to be very popular. If you have a bad temper, it is not your fault because you were programmed early in life to be bad tempered. Those of us who have no religious beliefs are likely to be told by godly people that religious belief is ‘hard-wired’ into every brain, including ours. It is difficult to give up a self-serving metaphor, especially when the new metaphor, which is closer to the truth, is difficult to comprehend.
The neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni pointed out that, just as the casing of a computer is simply a container for the memory and the software of the computer, so, in the computer metaphor, ‘mental operations are largely detached from the workings of the body, with the body a mere output device for commands generated by the manipulation of abstract symbols in the mind’. However, it is now clear that ‘our mental processes are shaped by our bodies and by the types of perceptual and motor experiences that are the product of their movement through and interacting with the surrounding world’.
Our mind is shaped by the way our body interacts with the world around us. Thus our brain contains maps of, say, our hand curving around a cup and of our body balancing itself as we walk over rough ground.
When I was a psychology undergraduate in 1948, we were taught that, in our interactions with the world, first we had a sensation, then a perception, and then a response which was some kind of action. Over the following years, neuropsychologists accepted what researchers were telling them, namely that sensation and perception were one process. It was still assumed that perception and action were completely independent processes. Iacoboni is one of the neuroscientists researching the functions of what have been called mirror neurones that are located in the premotor cortex. These neurones seem to be an essential part of our ability to imitate others. What this research has shown is that perception and action are not separate functions in our brain but are ‘simply two sides of the same coin, inextricably linked to each other’. Iacoboni explained, ‘In the real world, neither the monkey nor the human can observe someone else picking up an apple without also invoking in the brain motor neurone plans necessary to snatch that apple themselves… In short, the grasping actions and the motor plans necessary to obtain and eat a piece of fruit are inherently linked to our very understanding of the fruit.’
That is, if your brain did not already contain a picture of what an apple was and how it could be eaten, you would not create motor plans to snatch the fruit, unless, perhaps, you had no knowledge of good manners and were so overcome with curiosity that you planned to seize and examine this strange thing.
What I had been taught all those years ago is now called the sensory-motor model of human action, whereas now we have the ideomotor model which ‘assumes that the starting point of actions are the intentions associated with them, and that actions should be mostly considered as means to achieve those intentions’.
If you want to understand another person (or yourself) you need to know not just what that person does but why he does it.
In short, our brain interprets the world, and our interpretations become our intentions in acting on the world. But, if our interpretations are only guesses about our world, how can we assess whether our actions are likely to be successful? Answer: with our Bayesian brains.
Thomas Bayes was an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister and mathematician. He created a mathematical theorem concerning the probability of an event occurring changing as more information is accumulated. A famous example of Bayesian brains at work is that scene where people are looking up into the sky and asking, ‘Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s Superman.’ In this case, the Bayesian brain is working out the probability of the hypotheses of, first, a bird, then, a plane, and, with the best evidence, Superman himself, a conclusion, all without conscious effort on the part of the observers. Computers can use Bayesian methods of calculating the probabilities that arise in very complex data. As a Presbyterian, Bayes would have been pleased that his statistical method is used in computers to filter out immoral spam. My computer manages to identify all those email offers of Viagra and penis extension, but, unfortunately, it cannot distinguish these from the emails from that very august establishment The Sydney Institute in the city of that name. My Bayesian brain knows the difference, but my Bayesian computer does not.
We can make grave errors in deciding the probability of a particular event, but, according to Chris Frith,
Our brains are ideal observers when it comes to making use of the evidence from our senses. For example, one problem our brain has to solve is how to combine evidence from our different senses. When we are listening to someone, our brain combines the evidence from our eyes – the sight of their lips moving – and from our ears – the sound of their voice. When we pick something up, our brain combines the evidence from our eyes – what the object looks like – and from our sense of touch – what the object feels like. When combining this evidence, our brain behaves just like the ideal Bayesian observer. Weak evidence is ignored; strong evidence is emphasized. When I am speaking to the Professor of English at a very noisy party, I will find myself staring intently at her lips, because in this situation the evidence coming through my eyes is better than the evidence coming through my ears.
When I am lecturing, I make constant assessments of the probability that my audience is interested in what I am saying. When I am talking about how we operate in the world, the response from most people suggests that they have not encountered the idea that they cannot see reality directly, or that the brain calculates probabilities in making a guess about what might be going on. I find that my audiences listen with a degree of attentiveness that they do not show when I am talking about matters with which they are familiar. I found this even in an audience comprised of highly educated people who placed great value on education. These were the parents of students at a famous public school. I had been asked to talk about communication between parents and their children. To explain why communication so often failed I needed to begin by explaining how we operate as human beings.
I have given this part of my lecture many times. I usually begin with something which I acquired from Ian Stewart, the Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University, but which I now pass off as my own.
Standing in front of my audience and with appropriate gestures, I say, ‘As I stand here everything seems totally real. I’m here, you’re over there, and beyond you are the walls, and beyond that what I can see through the windows. But actually, that isn’t what is happening. I have no idea what is actually here. What is happening is that my brain has created a picture of what might be here, and then it has played a clever trick on me. It has persuaded me that, instead of the picture being inside my head and I’m all around it, I’m in the middle and the picture is all around me. The same thing is happening to you. What you’re seeing is a picture inside your head, but your brain has tricked you into thinking that you’re in the middle and the picture is all around you.’
I go on, ‘If we could take these pictures out of our heads like a photo out of a camera and hang our pictures on the wall so that we can all walk around and look at them, we would find that no two pictures were the same.’
The next part of what I say reveals in the audience’s reaction how little biology is taught in our schools, or taught in such a way that the students do not see the implications of what they have learnt. Most of my audience – even when they are medically trained – find what I say next amazing. I run through all the features of the pictures where there would be differences. In the structuring of the depth and distances in each picture there would be differences which relate to the environment in which the person had spent the first few months of his life when he was learning how to see. Babies do not just open their eyes and see. They have to learn how to see. The baby’s brain has to set up connections between the reactions of the baby’s retinas when light strikes them and those parts of the baby’s brain which can become the visual cortex. If this learning does not take place at the precise time when it needs to take place, the baby does not learn to see, and what would have been the visual cortex is taken over by some other cortical function. Just what connections are set up in learning to see depend on the environment the baby is in. Those of us who spent our early months in rectangular rooms learned to structure depth and distance differently from those babies who were in round rooms, like kraals or yurts, or those irregularly shaped spaces that some babies, like those of refugees in Darfur, spend their first months. The paintings by Australian aboriginal artists who grew up in the Outback pay little attention to parallel lines, right angles or perspective that dominate the structure of space by those of us who were put into rectangular rooms when we were born.
I usually follow this with an account of how we have to learn how to distinguish small things close up from large things far away. If in our first year or so we spend some time in large open spaces we learn how to make fairly good guesses about an object’s size and distance from us. From then on we can look down a long road and see a car in the distance coming towards us. However, few of us as small children spend much time looking down from the top of a tall building to the street below, and so, when as adults we go to the top of a tall building and look down to the street below, what we see are toy cars and not full-sized automobiles.
The next feature where there would be differences between our pictures is in colour. The world is not a colourful place. Colour is in the eye of the beholder, in the array of cones in the retina of the eye. There is no way of knowing whether what you call blue is the same as what I call blue. Some people, usually men, cannot see colour, or they confuse red with green. In my lectures I might refer briefly to the fact that there are not only huge variations in individual perceptions of colour but in the words we use when we talk about colour. The linguist Annie Mollard-Desfour is compiling Dictionnaire des mots et expressions de couleur (Dictionary of Words and Expressions of Colour). The first volume, Le Bleu (Blue) appeared in 1998, and the fifth Le Blanc (White) in 2007 with another six to come. In an interview with Laura Spinney for New Scientist she said,
There is no objective reality of colour. It’s an impression, a sensation which forms in the brain based on information sent to it by the visual apparatus. To label that sensation, to transmit it to others, we revert to familiar symbols. Colour words, perhaps more than any others, reflect a society: its values, its practices, its history. In Benin in west Africa, for example, men and women have different colour vocabularies. Searching for colour words in literature, the press or slang, as I do, you are forced to confront the enormous diversity in the way different cultures, different symbolic systems, view the world.
Not only do different cultures identify and name colours differently but the connotations of each colour differ markedly. For the French white means purity, cleanliness and honesty but to the Chinese it is the colour of mourning. To the French someone who is just beginning to learn a skill is blue, but to the English a novice is green. For the English a pornographic film is blue but for the French it is pink.
The biggest differences among the pictures we took out of our heads and hung on the walls would be in what each of us has noticed. No one ever walks into a room and sees everything. What we notice are those things that are significant to us. They are full of meaning. We notice the people we know, or the person we wish to avoid. We might notice an object that is strikingly different from anything we have ever seen, or something familiar but unexpectedly present. As Chris Frith wrote, ‘The brain constructs a map of the world. This is essentially a map of value. The map locates the objects of high value where I am likely to be rewarded and the objects of low value where I am not likely to be rewarded.’
What we happen to notice is determined by our past experience, and, since no two people ever have exactly the same experience, no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way.
When we look around we see a world that is appropriate to our size, a human-sized world. Mice move in a mice-sized world, and elephants in an elephant-sized world. Mice see what is important to mice, and elephants see what is important to elephants. The human-sized world we see appears to be very solid. Our body seems to be quite solid. However, we are made up of atoms, and atoms are not solid at all. There is a solid central core which is tiny. Far from the core are masses of electrons orbiting around the core. In his explanation of electricity in a booklet for non-scientists, David Bodanis explained how an atom is mainly empty space. The booklet we were holding would not slip from our hands because the electrons on the surface of our hands were shooting a powerful force field upwards, hitting the force field coming down from the electrons on the bottom of the booklet. This means that, although we think we are holding the booklet, it is actually hovering a small fraction of an inch above our skin.
Presumably, if our brain were capable of seeing reality directly, this is what we would see, along with all those elementary particles with the curious names like charm, strange, tau and gluon. When physicists talk of discovering such particles, what they have actually seen is not the particle itself, but a trace that the particle has left behind. From this, the physicists conclude that a particle has whizzed by. In much the same way, when we see a straight line of gently dispersing cloud in the blue sky above us, we conclude that a plane high up in the stratosphere has flown by. We live in a human-sized world. To see particles directly we would have to be in a particle in a particle-sized world. Then the Large Hadron Collider at Cern would be unnecessary for us to establish whether the Higgs boson actually exists, but, whatever we were, we would not be human beings.
My audience listened to this first part of my lecture with the kind of fierce attention we give to a speaker when we are being told something that we did not know but which we recognize as being of great importance to us. This kind of attention is different from the polite but bored attention we give to something we already know quite well. Later in my lecture I said something about teenagers and drugs, and immediately my audience looked bored. They knew more about drugs than they had ever wanted to know. What they wanted to hear was an account of how we perceive as it related to the difficult business of being a parent.
Why didn’t this group of well-educated people know how they operated as human beings?
Answer: because knowing this is both subversive and frightening, and it can challenge some of your most precious beliefs.
After my lecture I had quite a long discussion with the headmaster. I am sure he knew that what I had said was subversive. He did not charge me with this because he recognized that I had spelled out in detail the dilemma he faced in his work. He wanted his students to think for themselves, but he was expected by the parents and the school governors to foster in the students those ideas which would enable them to fit easily into a society for which the education they were receiving was a necessary qualification. He needed to encourage his students to develop their own ideas, but these ideas should not run counter to the ideas that their parents and the school governors wanted them to hold. He could have done what most parents and teachers do. They make it very clear to the children that their ideas are wrong, stupid and wicked. They have to give up their own ideas and accept those of the adults because the adults’ ideas are right, intelligent and good. When children do this, they become what adults call ‘good children’. As a result, many children grow up believing that, if they think anything which is different from what they have been taught to believe, there is something seriously wrong with them. They feel guilty when one of their own truths creeps into their consciousness, and they look for and follow those leaders who demand uncritical devotion. How else would people like Hitler in Germany in the twentieth century and Kim Jong Il in North Korea in the twenty-first century get such blindly obedient followers?
This was not the kind of education the headmaster wanted to give his students, but his was a high-achieving school. As he told me, the governors expected him to maintain this high standard; parents sent their children to the school in order that they do well, both at school and in their subsequent careers. Most of the children wanted to achieve, but some of the students took the need to achieve too seriously. They worked too hard and worried too much. He wanted to tell these students that such anxious effort was un necessary, and that they should enjoy their schooldays, but would the governors and the parents see this advice as being in the interests of the students?
Small children know that they see things differently from their parents. Some children manage to hang on to this knowledge and to value their own point of view, despite the authoritarian adults they encounter. Some lucky children have parents who take the child’s point of view seriously. When we take another person’s view seriously we are not necessarily agreeing with that person. A parent can say, ‘I appreciate that you have good reasons for staying up late, but I have good reasons to want you to go to bed now. In this particular situation my reasons are going to prevail. Go to bed now.’
When we take other people’s point of view seriously, we are implicitly acknowledging that our different points of view arise from the way we are as human beings. Many religious leaders talk about how important it is that we all accept people of other faiths, and there are many ecumenical gatherings of priests, rabbis, vicars, ministers and imams. In these meetings, are all these clerics saying that their different beliefs are of equal value? Or are they merely being polite to one another while secretly thinking, ‘I’m the only one that is in possession of the absolute truth and the rest of you are going to burn in hell’s fires’?
When the charge of being subversive is levelled at me by believers, I am always told that I am saying that all relative truths are equally valid. I immediately point out that I would not be so stupid as to say this. What I am saying is that we cannot help but have our own individual truths, but to show that our own truths are valid we have to test them by gathering evidence that this is so. This usually brings the discussion to an end, because those ideas which are claimed to be the absolute truths of a religion are usually the kind of ideas for which good evidence is hard to find.
There were no questions about religion after my lecture. Rather, parents wanted to know about their children’s future. My answers were not particularly comforting. I said that no one was in a pos ition to predict what the future of these students would be. The parents’ belief that success at school led to a successful career was based on the parents’ experience. They were assuming that the future would, more or less, be the same as the past. It is unlikely that the students saw the future in the same way as their parents did. Most children learn a good deal about climate change in school, so many of the students would probably know more about climate change than their parents did, and they probably did what all of us do when we hear of some likely but unpleasant outcome of climate change. We calculate what age we will be when it is predicted to occur. It is not so easy for teenagers to comfort themselves with the thought, ‘I’ll be dead by then.’ On the BBC Radio 4 programme Leading Edge the scientist Richard Sellay, talking about how climate change will affect wine production in Britain, said, ‘By 2080 the temperature in summer England is going to increase by 4.5 to 5 °C. So there’ll be Riesling on the slopes of Snowdonia, Manchester Merlot, and Sheffield Shiraz.’
This sounds all very jolly, but, if this prediction is close to being correct, there will be a steady warming of the planet over the students’ lifetime. However, there are so many variables involved that scientists cannot make precise predictions. Most scientists were surprised when, in the summer of 2007, the Northwest Passage became clear enough for shipping to pass through it. That the ice was melting was known, but that it would melt so quickly was not expected.
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