Have you ever been surprised to find someone you trusted lied to you? Or worst than this have you ever realized that people that you know personally are capable of enormous deception without any emotional pain to themselves?
I asked the questions above, because it seems, that I am finding this kind of behavior all round me. Perhaps this is due to my aging, it is a truism that, as we age we become hardened and inflexible concerning the view we have of our social world. I like to believe I'm being objective in this essay. I want to examine in depth three concepts: lies, cynicism and suspicion. Actually, the word conception is a misnomer here. We have idealized notions of lies, cynicism and suspicion, yet we actually perceive them all through our real world involvements. We perceive lies from being told untruths, and similarly we become cynical as a result of being deceived, and of course last of all we become suspicious when we find deception in operation. Specifically, we discover the truth about something of which we had been deceived. So, we will look at all of these related human experiences.
Lies are told for a variety of reasons, and likewise the people telling them are of varied natures. Some are cruel, unfeeling psychopaths, others are loving and gentle persons, and still, others are scared, helpless victims themselves. Let's not forget the liar that does so compulsively without rhyme or reason. These liars are emotionally imbalanced and their mendacious behavior is better left to another essay, not this one.
Lying is when a person attempts to deceive another about the truth, to which they are privy. Well that is the simple definition.If we look deeper into lying, we find it means something about the perpetrator of the lie. The liar, lies for a purpose. I am referring to sane liars here. Not the mentally deranged liar, that lies without a purpose in mind. We will exclude them from our discussion and examine only sane liars. As an example, a person that has committed a crime that is punishable by extreme measures will lie to avoid that punishment. It is important to remember this, because lying is sometimes wrongly connected with other human faults like, being mistaken, negligence or even confusion. I've heard people in conversation say to one another something like this:
You lied to me, you said that it was only gonna cost such and such.
And the other person will say:
Yeah, I thought it did, but the price went up. I swear I
didn't know.
Yeah, I bet you didn't, you're lying!
Aw come on you know I wouldn't do that.
And the person accused of lying probably didn't know. He or she is just mistaken, confused or negligent about his or her statements
of fact. This is not lying. It should be understood that lies are always
connected with a purposive end. Being
wrong about something, which you believe to be true can never be interpreted as
a lie. The real liar premeditates and lies to an end. He intends to deceive his victim for some
reason. That's real lying.And then something much more interesting is
going on. Going on in the mind of the
liar, I mean. What I'll call malicious liars are not having
an experience the morally inclined are having.
These people are not feeling remorse and guilt for deceiving others by their own
designs. They have no conception that their
deceptions are harmful. They may be narcissists seeking the adoration of all they converse with.They have no sense that they've done any moral
wrong to their victims. Worst these people
can feel contempt for their deceived prey. Yet, not all persons lying are this cold and cruel. People lie for other reasons too. They lie from fear. We've all seen movies where a character
is being held by criminal actors and told, if he doesn't tell them the truth
about a matter of fact, he will be killed. He proceeds to lie about
the information that his captors desire.
This person is lying to preserve his life. Still, the paradigm is the same: you weave a deceptive story to
another person for a purpose. Then
there is lying for a noble and heroic end.
Suppose you know that a close relation is terminally ill and the
relative doesn't. You meet the gravely
ill person in a hospital. It's a woman.
She thinks, she will survive and has an unshakable belief in her
survival. You can't bear to tell her
what you know, so you lie. You agree
with all her pronouncements about her living on. You agree that she's getting better, even when she coughs
spasmodically in a fit that wracks her whole body.
She is your mother and you can't bear to tell her the truth. Later at home, you break down and begin to
cry at the edge of your bed, knowing you've lied to your mother. your intentions were to spare her,
the pain of knowing she is dying, you still lied to her. As extraordinary as this sounds, you too have
perpetrated a lie upon a victim to an end.
You lied to not to cause this loved one any more pain, and perhaps
yourself the pain of watching her suffer, it is still a lie. I know it seems out of context to use the
terms: victim and perpetrate here, however, in an objective sense this is what
is happening.Your mother has not been
spared any pain, in fact it might be argued that she suffers more facing
her death, after believing your deception.
I've described some cases of lying and in all of
them, the structure is the same while the reasons vary. Lies are calculated untruths designed to
deceive their intended targets. With that said, we move on.
With cynicism we are in a different landscape. Here we are the doubting and wary observer. Cynics don't trust the real intentions of
others. They question every action,
real or imagined of their fellow human beings.
In a strange sense, it is related to lying. It's when you believe that most of your fellows are deceptive
beings. Thus, in that sense a cynic is
a believer that liars predominate on this planet. The cynic is a close relation of the paranoid personality as I'm
sure anyone will recognize.The cynic
has a rational mind, and doesn't see plotting and militating against him
everywhere as the clinically paranoid would. A cynic becomes an unbeliever in human sincerity through
experiencing life. He sees that people
lie. He recognizes this with a growing
revulsion. The cynic may have at one
time, been an innocent, unsuspecting person.
He may have even placed value in the veracity of those around him. And again to exemplify, let us imagine a
person that has owned a small construction business for 20 years. In the course of 20 years he has employed
about 200 subcontractors that have either cheated him for their services by
overcharging, or failed to perform as he had expected. He's been party to 10 civil suits against
some of these subcontractors to recover funds advanced to them. The time and money he's spent doing this has
adversely affected his profession. He
remembers ruefully all the cases as he sips a fine brandy in his penthouse
suite. He has no wife or children; he's
devoted his entire life to the business.
He clenches his fist together hunching over a glass of brandy he set
on a pure marble table in his lavish, large kitchen. The lost time and cost of
hiring attorneys, he recalls made him lose a big shopping mall job about 2
years ago. He is a successful
builder and makes a moderate profit from his firm. Nevertheless, he feels that most people
can't be trusted. He has formed an idea
in his mind, that people can't be trusted. He has a few friends to whom he can give trust, he finds almost no one to place faith in. This person is a cynic. Yet,
again there is something deeper to the personality of a classic cynic. He is close to our next topic of discussion suspicion,
yet not quite in that set. The cynic is wrongly basing all his beliefs on his present
and past experiences. He has learned
through his profession that it is awash with liars and deceitful people,
thus generalizes this perceptual experience to all people. The cynic is to my mind the most flawed of
all I consider in the tripartite. He is
limited by his personal experiences and comes to hold stern beliefs based on
what he has experienced in the past. Even
when new experiences contradict these beliefs, the cynical person continues to
believe in his notion of all people as being untrustworthy. Cynicism abounds in the world, as far as I can see. I'm not really even sure if I'm not a cynic. I am sure I am at times. We are exposed to it in cinema and on TV all
the time. Who hasn't seen an exchange
where one person asks a rhetorical question of another, only to have them
either not give the information requested or answers negatively. The questioner then says: You know
perfectly well what I'm talking about!
How many times have you heard this statement in a movie or on TV
program? Too many you'd say? Well, as
you might expect it's a clear example of cynicism. He knows that the person
questioned, knew the correct answer all along.
Or so he believes, that's cynical. Even if the respondent does know the correct answer he's still
expressing hostile intentions. You see,
cynicism focuses on the state of mind of the active party not the passive one. Those that seek to know are the ones that
become wary of others. A cynic is often
a combative and tinged with hostility. Worst than the liar, in the cynic we see the seeds of other
human ills like: racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. If we begin to let our personal experiences rule our future
views, we become cynics. I heard a good
example of cynicism a few years ago, on National Public Radio. (As an aside,
I sure some readers might cynically believe this government-funded medium as
being tilted toward deceit in its reporting.) The report illustrates how a
cynic can be a pernicious element in our social world. A journalist interviewed a dean of a large American
university that had a statistical record of declining the entrance of Hispanic
and African-American students to graduate school, based upon their marginal
undergraduate GPA scores. The reporter
interviewing him revealed that the Dean's experience with all these
ethnic groups had been negative.That
is to say, he had found that students of these groups had failed during their
graduate matriculation. And for this
reason, he was reluctant to approve applications by people from these groups
for graduate school study. While this stance might outrage many, if we look at it from the perspective of the cynic, it makes perfect sense. It highlights how a person of this category can be quite
dangerous, if given license in any area of social interaction.
This mental state of being is very much perceptive. We suspect others in most instances through
direct contact with them. Let's say you're in a movie theater at a shopping mall and
fish 20 dollars in 3 five-dollar bills and singles from your wallet to get
refreshments before the show starts. You
don't check the money you have and not realizing it, you drop a five-dollar
bill as you get up. You know two people
are right next to you in your seat, talking to one another and not paying you
much attention. As you get to the
vendor stand you order popcorn, a large root beer and maybe some uh uh
you hesitate and just then you pull out what you think is enough, and as
the attendant comes back, you realize, looking at your cash you're missing
..what..five dollars? How could that
be? You think back as the attendant
announces: that'll be $8.50 Sir... What? Oh yeah, here. You are convinced you must've dropped it
on the seat next to you in the theater.
You hurry back to where you were seated and the couple is still sitting
next to your seat. They are giggling and eyeing you mockingly. You ease back into your seat, unsatisfied
you get up and search underneath, looking for the missing five-dollar bill. The couple is talking about the upcoming
film and once again they are eyeing you looking over to see what you are doing. You lift up other folding seats still
searching. You check your pockets:
nothing! Then, defeated you sit down in
the seat again, sip your soda and start munching on the popcorn. It occurs to you, that those two little bastards
next to you may have spotted the five bucks and snatched it. You have no proof they did. It's just a feeling you have. You feel uncomfortable next to them as the
trailers come on, you decide to change to another seat, at this point you're convinced the
sonabitches did grab your five bucks. They don't seem to be exhibiting any guilty behavior? This mental experience is what I would classify as suspicion. The suspicious person has a belief.His belief may or may not be well founded in
reality. In most cases, it comes from a
personal experience however, one can be suspicious of almost anything. One can be suspicious of the authorship of
work or art, or the writer of a piece of literature or the discoverer of a
principle of science, or the theory a scholar proposes, or of the tenets of a
religion--ad infinitum. I said before, in most cases, it's a personal
experience that most often raises suspicion. Suspicion may seem to be minor human flaw, it is
the glue that leads to the two other concepts I've discussed. Suspicious people look for liars. Suspicious people become cynics. It is suspicion that makes people untrusting
and it is suspicion that ferrets out liars.
It might seem that suspicion is a good state of mind to be in. After all, it keeps us alert and ever ready
to question the real intentions of our fellow human beings. To the contrary suspicion can make us feel
unsafe and insecure in our social world. Suspicion is definitely not a good
state of mind. Return to Portal Philosophies, Science, Mathematics, and Music
As a final word, all of the three are related yet none is
like the other. Beware of which you
encounter as you go through a typical day at work or in your leisure. Robleh Wais 6/6/08 Cynicism
Suspicion