Groucho: You know I think you’re the most beautiful woman in the world?

Woman: Really?

Groucho: No, but I don’t mind lying if it gets me somewhere.[i]

— Groucho Marx, American actor and comedian.

1

Lies are the world’s first manmade pollutant. Long before coal fumes darkened the skies of eighteenth-century London, humans produced misinformation by the barrelful to explain the world to themselves and change the opinions of others.

First employed in families, then tribes, then kingdoms, the purposeful use of lies has spread like a virus, embedding itself in all means of communication. The Bible blames the first lie on the devil, embodied in a serpent. That, too, is a lie used to entrench the myth that the knowledge of good and evil brings chaos and retribution (as well as its corollary, “ignorance is bliss”). Moreover, it provides rationale for the world’s most powerful lie: women are subservient to men.

Here’s how God responded to Adam and Eve, before evicting them from the Garden of Eden after they’d eaten an apple from the Tree of Knowledge:

To the woman He said: “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over thee.”[ii]

And unto Adam He said, “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;[iii]

Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;[iv] In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”[v]

Indeed, the first writers of the biblical narrative knew a thing or two about storytelling. Our fear of snakes is almost primal. Just imagine if the creature who had seduced Eve to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge had been a Labrador puppy. The first lady of the Old Testament would have been too busy rubbing its belly—and the dog, well, he’d have peed on the tree before running off to chase the world’s first squirrel. Western civilization as we know it might have been stillborn. Women might have become the world’s dominant decision-makers.

We don’t know who told the first lie, but I suspect it came seconds after the ability to communicate. It likely had something to do with convincing a group of humans that the first-ever liar on the planet needed more food, water, or sex than any of the others.

“The world is rife with great liars,” said Robert Feldman, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts. He studies lying and deception. “We all lie every day. We live in a culture where lying is quite acceptable.”[vi]

According to another psychologist, Dr. Alex Lickerman, the fundamental reason for this is that we lie to protect ourselves. In Psychology Today, Lickerman wrote that lying is an instinctive defense mechanism intended to protect our interests, our image, our resources, and other people.[vii] He also pointed to research demonstrating that our instinct to lie is ingrained so deeply that when you confront a child about a lie, they are more likely to work at becoming a better liar than to learn to tell the truth. We are like professional burglars. When caught, our nature drives us to focus on how not to get caught the next time.

Moreover, the crime of lying, for most of us, is not planned—at least according to

Dan Ariely, who studies behavioral economics at Duke University. “One of the frightening conclusions we have,” he wrote in his 2012 book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, “is that what separates honest people from not-honest people is not necessarily character, it’s opportunity.”[viii]

The problem that this book examines, however, is not so much why it is in our nature to lie but how and why some very powerful people, along with the organizations they work for, create lies with such purpose and precision. That, and why our first instinct is to believe them. Indeed, despite our loud protestations directed at any politician, athlete, celebrity, business leader, media person, or religious leader who lies to us, our relationship with lies is quite comfortable. The seats in the Theater of Lies are well-padded and inviting.

A deep-thinking philosopher from Israel, Hebrew University professor Yuval Noah Harari, has traced this comfortable relationship (my words) back to what he believes is the driving force in our evolution as a species: our deep-rooted dissatisfaction with human reality.[ix] Translation: on both a macro and micro level, we are not happy people, so we strive to improve our environment to become so—even if it means lying to ourselves.

 In turn, Harari has divided our relationship with falsehoods into two categories: lies and fictions, as if they were on a spectrum:

 A lie is when you know perfectly well that something is not true, and you say it in order to deceive others. A fiction is very often something that you really believe, which you tell other people not in order to deceive them. It can be something small or it can be something big, like a religion or an economic theory or a racial theory.[x]

This is where I call timeout. This is not academic hair-splitting. It is wrong. When you fail to challenge what Harari refers to as fictions (what I might also refer to as myths), you are padding your seats in the Theater. The lies in your world become more and more comfortable to believe. Worse, each failure to correct these myths and fictions creates further barriers to addressing (in Harari’s words) our deep-rooted dissatisfaction.[xi]

A dissatisfaction that has become deep-rooted in our lives is our propensity to believe these lies and what sometimes we refer to as myths. The late John F. Kennedy shared it, too. In a commencement speech to the graduates of Yale University in 1962, he told them,

The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.[xii]

Fictions and myths are among the first untruths we learn in the Theater. As with a lie, they mislead us—so I place them in the same category. Understanding that the sun does not rise in the morning but that our place on the earth turns toward it, then away, is a fiction based in our bygone ignorance. The sun appears to rise when, in fact, it is stationary (relative to the earth). But that was not what our ancestors saw in the sky, so therefore that was not what they believed to be true.

We know the sun does not really rise or set, yet we repeat this fiction, daily. In Harari’s opinion, since we are not trying to deceive someone, this is OK. Yet, we are because such acceptance masks the underlying error that what we see must be the truth.

So, if we see Black people living in urban slums, farming marginal lands, or having a higher percentage of the population in prisons, then we must believe that it to be true that Black people are somehow inferior to whites. If we experience our winters as colder and wetter, we can believe that global warming is a lie and that its promoters came up with a new name for it, climate change, to make the ideas seem more palatable.

If you see an immigrant commit a crime, or someone re-tells a story about such an event, then it must be true that more immigrants will increase the risks of crime. Worse, since the Theater of Lies lets us see all this and because we’ve been raised to believe what we see, our opinions become more entrenched (and more difficult to change).

Shelby Steele takes on Harari’s notion of fictions and expands the term to include what he refers to as poetic truths.[xiii] Steele is an American writer and documentary producer who says that when we are confronted by violence and suffering, we tend to retreat to poetic truths that offer deceptively simple explanations for complex problems. A poetic truth, as Steele defines it, is “a distortion of the actual truth that we use to sue for leverage for power in the world. It is a partisan version of reality, a storyline that we put forward to build our case.”[xiv]

The venerable Scientific American published a special edition about lies in 2019, under the title, Truth, Lies, and Uncertainty.[xv] In it, they offer up such terms as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.”[xvi] Other terms include “post-truth” (Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year),[xvii] and, of course, the splatter-gun term— “fake news.”

In 2023, the editorial board of Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper introduced a deft two-step dance to avoid calling out the Liberal Prime Minister Trudeau as a liar. Trudeau had characterized Canada’s failure to adequately rebound from the 2008 financial crisis under the management of the previous Conservative government as “wages did not rise; inequality increased; and the middle class was shrinking.”[xviii] In an editorial harrumph rather than a poke in eye, the Globe and Mail wrote, “the numbers do not back up those claims.”[xix] It then cited Canada’s actual economic data from 2009 to 2015—demonstrating that wages did indeed rise, inequality decreased, and the relative number of Canadians who could be categorized as middle class grew larger.

But what caught my attention was not the all-too-Canadian politeness in its pushback on the prime minister’s veracity; it was the introduction of a well-established religious term, this time repurposed to describe oft-repeated teachings that evolve into dogma. Catechism, as in the teaching pedagogy of the Catholic Church.

“We saw what happened in 2008 and its aftermath,” [Trudeau] said, “when GDP started to rise again, wages stayed stagnant. Inequality rose and a lot of hard-working people were being left behind. The middle class was being hollowed out, and people were growing disillusioned.” A compelling catechism indeed—if true.[xx]

Of course, as the editorial board proved, it wasn’t. Trudeau’s statements were merely a repeated positioning of the well-trod differences in political philosophy between the Liberal and Conservative parties in Canada. The facts did not matter, only the prime minister’s message, delivered to engage the nodding heads of Liberal party’s faithful as if they were congregants in a Catholic Church. In the Theater of Lies, familiarity is a load-bearing arch. Even if it is an illusion.

Because whether you use any of these words—Steele’s term, Scientific American’s, Harari’s academic definition, or a borrowed term for religious teachings—none attribute any responsibility of the all-important third party in a lie: the one who repeats it. This is where lies the dangerous power of lies, for repetition breeds consent. As far back as 1977, psychologists proved the more we hear something, the more we believe it to be true.[xxi] Calling it the illusionary-truth principle, they proved that “subjects rated repeated statements as probably more true than new statements.”[xxii] They also added the editorial comment, “repetition is an illogical basis for truth.”[xxiii] Yet, a 1992 study by McMaster University concluded:

The illusory truth of repeated statements is based on familiarity. Familiarity increases automatically with repetition, and its influence on rated truth is unintentional. Subjects do not spontaneously monitor the source of a statement’s familiarity or use that information when rating truth.[xxiv]

The non-academic language translation of the above: repetition is highly effective in convincing people that a lie is truthful, and their acceptance of this is not a conscious act—it is unintentional.

In the Theater of Lies, the producers revel in the audience’s unintentional acceptance of these so-called fictions and illusionary truths. Why? In my opinion, we, the audience, are either not curious enough to ask questions or lack the courage to ask them (a problem to which I propose solutions in Act 3). Add to that our inherent need to believe lies, and we have now constructed a theater with a powerful stage from which to perform, persuade, and, in military terms, invade our minds.

Diane Barth is a psychotherapist whose studies have delved deep into this area. She claims,

We believe lies when we feel too vulnerable to allow the truth and its consequences to manifest in our lives. When truth does emerge, we often feel terribly betrayed, and we can lose faith in our own ability to make good judgments. To protect against this pain, we sometimes continue lying to ourselves long after reality seems unavoidable.[xxv]

As I wrote this book, I was reminded of a time when my wife and I had three dogs: a black schnauzer, a gray schnauzer, and a white West Highland terrier. All of them demanded an overly large share of our bed, which, when the cat also wanted a warm spot with us, was quite hard to find. Pepper, the black one, had his own solution. He became the first animal I realized had learned the power of lies.

As the pets began to settle in the bed, if Pepper wasn’t comfortable in the spot he’d found, he would stand up, jump off the bed, look at the bedroom door, and bark. In addition to being a particularly smart and beautiful animal, Pepper also had a bark that could peel the paint off the wall. His barking got the immediate attention of the other two dogs, Ty (the gray one) and Buddy (the Westie) would, in turn, leap off the bed to investigate the source of Pepper’s trauma. Once these two were off the bed, Pepper would jump back on, select the spot he had wanted, and settle in with a satisfying “huff.” Throughout his entire life, he’d repeat this performance whenever he wanted a better place to sleep. The science tells us[xxvi] that there are many animals like my slight-of hand schnauzer who understand the power of lies. It is a survival tool as much as enlightened self-interest.

Lies work. They work because in the beginning of our lives, in the beginning of our history, in the beginning moments of each day, we’ve used lies—to ourselves—to make sense of the world. They are one of our most powerful tools to make sense of our lives. But they have now become our most dangerous.

[i]    A Night in Casablanca, directed by Archie Mayo (1946, Palm Springs, CA: Lorna Vista Productions).

Act One:

A Brief History of Lies

Chapter 1 – In the Beginning, There Were Lies.

[ii]    Genesis 3:16 KJV.

[iii]   Genesis 3:17 KJV.

[iv]   Genesis 3:18 KJV.

[v]    Genesis 3:19 KJV.

[vi]   Helen O’Neill, “Lance Armstrong’s Lies Not So Different From Our Own,” Star Tribune, January 18, 2013, https://www.startribune.com/armstrong-not-so-different-experts-on-deception-say-everyone-lies/187476051/.

[vii]   Alex Lickerman, “Why We Lie,” Psychology Today, March 8, 2010, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-in-world/201003/why-we-lie.

[viii]  Dan Ariely, The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2012).

[ix]   Yuval Noah Hariri, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2017).

[x]    “Why Do We Believe Lies?” Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions [podcast], November 30, 2020, produced by Gates Notes, https://www.gatesnotes.com/podcast.

[xi]   “Why Do We Believe Lies?”

[xii]   John F. Kennedy, Yale University Commencement Address [speech], Yale University Commencement, New Haven, CT, June 11, 1962, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkyalecommencement.htm.

[xiii]  Mark Judge, “Shelby Steele and America’s ‘Poetic Truth,’” Law & Liberty, October 23, 2020, https://lawliberty.org/shelby-steele-and-americas-poetic-truths/.

[xiv]  Judge, “Steele and America’s ‘Poetic Truth.’”

[xv]   “Truth, Lies, & Uncertainty” [interactive], Scientific American, June 2019, https://www.scientificamerican.com/interactive/truth-lies-uncertainty1/.

[xvi]  “Truth, Lies, & Uncertainty.”

[xvii] Alex Johnson, “‘Post-Truth’ is Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year for 2016,” NBC News, Nov 16, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/post-truth-oxford-dictionaries-word-year-2016-n685081.

[xviii] “The Economy According to Justin Trudeau,” The Globe and Mail, July 25, 2023, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-the-economy-according-to-justin-trudeau/.

[xix]  “Economy According to Trudeau.”

[xx]   “Economy According to Trudeau.”

[xxi] Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino, “Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16, No. 1 (February 1977): 107–112.

[xxii] Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino, “Referential Validity.”

[xxiii] Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino, “Referential Validity.”

[xxiv] Ian Maynard Begg, Ann Anas, and Suzanne Farinacci, “Dissociation of Processes in Belief: Source Recollection, Statement Familiarity, and the Illusion of Truth,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121. No. 4 (1992): 446–458.

[xxv] F. Diane Barth, “Why We Believe Liars,” NBC News, April 18, 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-do-we-believe-liars-ncna993816.