The government sent me to a group therapist. My story about that cna can be found in my earlier posts under "Supervised Release." Otherwise, let me say it did not work out and I had serious questions about her methods. One thing she insisted on was that everyone lied. Which, for treatment purposes, begged the question of how she would know if and when we were lying, and if she could not, did not, then her therapy was never-ending. That she insisted on being paid in cash $40 dollars a week, that made me think she had a guaranteed income. I did not agree with her on lying.
Not that I do not know that people lie. It is that I do not think that all people lie all the time. It is just too all-encompassing for my tastes.
There are those will lie at the drop of a hat about anything. They are well-known - unless they manage to create a cult and have a major media outlet reporting their lies like they are gospel.
There are those who lie about dumb things. I have seen women do this a lot, which makes me think men are better liars. We cannot break down crying when caught, so we do the best we can to not get caught.
There are what we will call white lies. Telling the significant other the dinner they cooked is better than anything done by Bobby Flay while wondering where is the dog to eat this mess.
There are strategic lies told for an advantage. What we might call BS. These I think are told knowing they may be found out and until the politician peddling delusions as gospel, they are known to have a limited shelf life.
The danger in lying is in forgetting what is the truth. This can lead down a rabbit hole of mental health issues, or, if the lie is done with fraudulent intent, lead to prison. People need to know what is real. Lying distorts reality. In short, constant lying has no long-term profit, and seldom in the short term.
Now, let me suggest something else to read other than my feeble attempts at making sense of lying.
Jenny Erpenbeck on Spying, Lying, and Eros In Conversation with Ellen Adams in Montréal
Beyond historical and metaphorical walls, though, Le Dubé, who prefers to read in English, emphasizes the moral urgency of the Erpenbeck oeuvre. At the time of reunification of Germany, Le Dubé describes, “All of a sudden the future was dead. Everything they’d been taught to fight for was gone. When everything is collapsing, how do you build a fair society?” Climate catastrophes, xenophobia, pandemics, occupations, wars, not to mention the proto-fascist policies of Quebec’s current premier—the concerns are unyielding, for any person who enters De Stiil. “I think it’s important for people to read her. While we don’t sell her to everybody, we always mention her work.” For the uninitiated, she first recommends Go, Went, Gone. “They buy that book, but they always come back for the rest.”
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Ellen Adams: In re-reading your work, I was struck by how often infidelity comes up. Across your books, what new discoveries have you made about betrayal, whether in intimacy, or infidelity of values or the state?
Jenny Erpenbeck: When I first started to write, I didn’t know what my subject would as a long-term author. But, as it turned out, you are right. Betrayal and lying are at the center of my work, as are the layers of truth: how the same thing can be revealed again and again, or looked at from other perspectives, without being a lie, but rather a different kind of truth. If you look at Book of Words, her childhood is made up to be a good, easygoing childhood, then all of the sudden you can see that there’s something underground, not told to her, and eventually her father’s true profession is revealed. Even in The Old Child, my first main character, she’s lying to her classmates, to everyone, about her age. There’s a lot of hiding in my books. It’s always interested me. Hiding gives a certain kind of freedom because you can try something on without telling anyone, an experiment you undertake. And there’s always the question of what is the truth? In The Old Child, the truth is not revealed at all, not even in the end, so you don’t know where this lie comes from. And of course in Kairos, lying in the very middle of everything, as is the question: Who’s lying to whom, and in which way? Sometimes it’s shocking, with how little we can be content because we expect a certain truth. And if this is given to us, we are content. If someone believes a lie, it’s also sad, because it tells us that he or she is lacking the instruments to even doubt. But perhaps if you are young, it’s a blessed state of mind, to be so trusting.
In an influential 2010 study, this second scenario is indeed what Michigan State University communication researcher Kim Serota and his colleagues found. Out of 1,000 American participants, 59.9% claimed not to have told a single lie in the past 24 hours. Of those who admitted they did lie, most said they’d told very few lies. Participants reported 1,646 lies in total, but half of them came from just 5.3% of the participants.
This general pattern in the data has been replicated several times. Lying tends to be rare, except in the case of a small group of frequent liars.
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Research suggests the medium doesn’t matter much. For instance, a 2014 study by Northwestern University communication researcher Madeline Smith and her colleagues found that when participants were asked to look at their 30 most recent text messages, 23% said there were no deceptive texts. For the rest of the group, the vast majority said that 10% or fewer of their texts contained lies.
Recent research by David Markowitz at the University of Oregon successfully replicated earlier findings that had compared the rates of lying using different technologies. Are lies more common on text, the phone or on email? Based on survey data from 205 participants, Markowitz found that on average, people told 1.08 lies per day, but once again with the distribution of lies skewed by some frequent liars.
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In her classic work, DePaulo found that people tend to tell what she called “everyday lies” more often to strangers than family members. To use her examples, these are smaller lies like “told her (that) her muffins were the best ever” and “exaggerated how sorry I was to be late.” For instance, DePaulo and her colleague Deborah Kashy reported that participants in one of their studies lied less than once per 10 social interactions with spouses and children.
However, when it came to serious lies about things like affairs or injuries, for instance, the pattern flipped. Now, 53% of serious lies were to close partners in the study’s community participants, and the proportion jumped up to 72.7% among student volunteers. Perhaps not surprisingly, in these situations people might value not damaging their relationships more than they value the truth. Other data also finds participants tell more lies to friends and family members than to strangers.
Let me close with, perhaps, the wittiest expose of lying, The Misanthrope:
sch 11/19
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