“Why do we continue to accept being lied to?
We have no patients when our kids lie to us. Yet, it is something that is done every day to us by the media we choose to watch and the politicians we elect to govern us.
We have all done it, the little white lies we tell our spouses after coming home from watching the game with friends at the local sports bar. For me, the magic number was always 3 drinks was all I had. It was not until one evening my contacts were flushed down the toilet did, I realize I was going to have to change my lie. So, I changed it to four. Yet for three years we heard about Russian Collusion from the media and politicians. After spending 40 million dollars we found out it was a lie, and no one would admit that it was. That was just one of many we are. Are the medias and political lies just like my 4 drink lie? I want to know.
As I began to search, I found an article written by Kathleen Doheny in Everyday Health (here). In the article Ms. Doheny quotes Robert Feldman PhD, a professor from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and the author of the book “The Liar in your Life” as saying, “Lying is a part of everyday life”. This is a statement I must agree with. Still, it does not answer my original question as to why we continue to accept it.
As I continued to read the only distinction I could find between the “little white lie” and the big one was the person doing the lying. In the same article, Paul Ekman PhD, a professor at UCSF and the author of “Telling Lies” breaks it down in two categories, Compulsive Liars and Pathological Liars.
The impulsive liar tends to embellish and exaggerate. As Dr. Ekman explains it, “They tell stories they think want to be heard”. Pathological liars are bolder they “will continue to lie even when they know you know they are lying.”
With the hope to further break this issue down, I came across another article. The article was titled, 11 Fascinating Scientific Facts about Pathological Liars written by Carolyn Steber (here) and appearing in Bustle on February 22, 2018.
In the article, Ms. Steber quotes Dr. Michele Barton, the director of Psychology Life Well as saying, “A pathological liar is someone who lies without effort, someone for whom telling a lie comes more naturally than telling the truth.”
While the other ten facts of Ms. Steber article where informative, number one was the one that truly hit home. It stated most pathological liars have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and they know they are lying just to make themselves look good.
I could not find any definitive answer as to why we continue to accept the lies. The closest thing I could find had no clinical relevance. This was in an article appearing in the Atlantic written by Adam Serwer (here) on January 26, 2021 titled Biden Will Lie to You. There is no acceptable reason for any politician or for someone in the media to ever lie to us with the exception being national security. Why are President Biden’s lies are acceptable, and President Trumps are not? A lie is a lie. Maybe Mr. Serwer wants to go through life not knowing and living a lie, that is something I do not want. I think we all deserve and need to know the truth.
With everything I found or for that fact not found out leaves me with two choices as why we continue to accept being lied to.
The first is following Ayn Rand’s reasoning noted in Atlas Shrugged when she said anyone engaged infidelity is challenging their own decision-making process. Basically, saying I made the wrong choice due to faulty decision-making process. That reason has some merit, we do not want to admit picking and voting for the wrong person in the first place, questioning our own judgement?
The second one, I think is right on the fact we only want to hear is what we want to hear, and human nature wants us to trust. We want to forgive, but in both, the lies continue.
Either of those two are frightening. But more frighting than those two is the fact that most of our elected officials are narcissistic, and they are going to govern in a way that makes them look good regardless of the consequences. We see it all the time. After all it is a disorder.
These people have no shame and if we continue not to hold them accountable for their actions and lies nothing will change. But, then again with my four drink lie I may have the same disorder.
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