Under the cover of lies

I heard the other day that a young man of my acquaintance fibs. He is now adult and working with a multinational concern in his campus-recruited first job. Educated at a reputed institution, he is the former frat boy who survived gruelling initiation rites to learn the ropes of organized living. The family is immigrant, which makes the achievements more impressive. Yet, He lies, says his father, matter-of-factly. I question a person's deceiving where he need not and even fabricating rationales to compound the lies - more from curiosity about the motivation behind the pastime, than from a moral high ground.

The saying is: You can fool all people some of the time, you can fool some people all the time, but you cannot fool all people all the time. But these old adages are hardly a deterrent! Lies have become an accepted form of social communication. Its practice is active across all of humanity, and knows no social barriers, age, education and gender. Although the purpose behind the action may vary in each case, do it enough times and lying becomes an end in itself.

For little children, their little untruths are a defence against a world where everybody towers over them. The motivation is fear, of being punished or deprived of rewards, mainly in physiological terms. They may give in easily to the joy of scribbling on walls or table tops, but the spirit is unwilling to take on adverse adult responses. Denial – even with the tell-tale crayon dust under the finger-nails, shows up their powerlessness. The same may be said for the poverty-stricken, the illiterate, the very elderly, and women that have no control over their lives. The lies are their survival technique before intimidating authority. The young man I mention is hardly in the same boat; he is of age, his destiny is in his own hands. Perhaps he has just not been weaned off the childish habit of fibbing.

It may also be that deception is the game he is now hooked on playing. In the age of information, new generations grow more accustomed to shades of grey than to the moralistic black and white of yesteryears. In the childhood of our time, the emphasis at home and in school is on honour, sacrifice and other virtues of righteous living – extensions of social collectivism in part, in part catechism. The story books we love to read transport us to the fantasy world of magical creatures, and each carries a lesson to learn. In school, to pass the class, we have to pass the moral science test. Right and wrong becomes clearly demarcated in the mind. Indeed, pithy proverbs pop out of long term memory at inopportune moments, to create doubt, dilemma, discomfort and the omnipresent burden of guilt. The moral science subject is now obsolete in schools, perhaps to reduce pressures on impressionable minds. The social learning at home too is in abeyance because families have shrunk, and both parents are employed. The books that fascinate the earlier generation have lost their allure. The young are left alone to role-play in the virtual reality that appears at the touch of a button. Fact is they know more about video game plots than they do about human values.

Furthermore, blatant lies have become the weapon of manipulation in today’s world. Lawyers, for instance are said to be liars by profession, scarcely concerned any more with justice. They weave webs of words to twist and turn perceptions of events, projecting as the absolute truth the perspectives of their own clients. In similar vein, the search for political power in any organization requires mastering the art of persuasion whereby a molehill may be made to assume the proportions of a mountain, and vice versa. The point is to bring down opponents wresting from them the reins of power. In corporate industry, the Madoffs, the Lehmans and the Lawsons of the world use their genius with numbers and technology with the same cynical disregard for human values to defraud their victims and even their own organizations of currency notes in the millions. They call it hustling, spinning elaborate cons to dupe the unsuspecting. There is no remorse in scamming the elderly and the financially weak out of their trust and their life savings.

Cynicism permeates the interactions of groups with other groups. There is take rather than give in this predatorial world that transposes going for the jugular from the wild into the organizational process. To use subterfuge to get close to the prey and to then move in swiftly for the kill is an act that plays out regularly in everyday life. People learn to be less disturbed by lies, which in fact interweave into their social masks. These hide their true natures or conceal their vulnerability. The motivation is again fear, but in psychological terms, because nobody wants to lose. To be the winner, the game must be played and played well. The humans tend to forget that their minds have evolved beyond that of the other animals; that they actually need to adapt to the world of other people, rather than to orders on the food chain.

The heroes the young emulate are in virtual reality, sometimes perceived as more real than real life may be. The ploy set up for immediate rewards can turn into the long term habit they wear like a second skin. They may begin to live the lie, believe in the illusion, and be caught up, unable to escape, in the traps they build for others. Like addicts, they seek the next score, the next adrenaline rush, and the next win in the games of their own making. Lies may become the compulsion that pushes people to deny their true self. Peel that cover of lies away and there might be a frightened child within, afraid to grow up, making believe his maturity.