I’d be lying if I said that my new job has turned me into a habitual liar. I’ve probably been telling lies of varying complexity, with varying levels of success, since I was a zygote. Work certainly encourages the habit, though. If I was honest with the people I interact with everyday, I’d have their claws at my throat. I can’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that withholding particular information from customers is often the lifeblood of both my sanity and my workplace’s financial stability.
It’s not something of which I’m particularly proud–the moral residue of a well-wrought and bought lie, the inescapable ickiness of it that lingers long afterward, is a lot like that filmy onionskin of sugar on your teeth after a candy binge. Even worse is the beartrap trap squirm of being caught in the teeth of your lie. But I still do it, as I think everyone does. (The unspoken consensus seems to be that people who don’t lie are either nastily blunt or naive. Or, worse, that they’re boringly pious, or are sociopaths who snap one day and start making lampshades out of people in their basement.) Sometimes it’s unthinkingly: the lie as a phosphorescent octopus swimming up from the Freudian sea within in order to dazzle, bait, or obscure the truth in a briny cloud of lie-ink.
But more often I lie to protect myself and keep other people from getting angry at me (or at least that’s what I tell myself). Or I lie make myself appear more intelligent, worldly, masculine, feminine, or idiosyncratic than I actually am. You probably remember certain middle school classmates who, after claiming to have seen certain hot, recently released blockbuster films (Independence Day, I’m looking in your direction), would be remarkably vague about their favorite scenes. If they could recall any at all, they’d often be from the film’s trailer. That kid was me. The tragedy of this sub-genre of lie is practically the stuff of Greek theater. Why? Because kids (and adults) tell lies like this to feel included–they’re a palsied attempt to reach out and commune with someone else’s experience, closing the schisms between wildly different people. Yet it’s a strange feeling to suddenly fabricate a bit of yourself, obscuring other bits, so that other people finally notice you there, like a wet kitten abandoned on their stoop, breathing awkwardly and shuffling your feet.
None of what I’m saying is particularly revelatory. (See, for example, any number of Twilight Zone episodes about how “we all wear masks,” the plot of Mean Girls, or just wander down to your local marketing firm or shopping mall.) I think we all more or less make ourselves up as we go along, depending upon circumstance and who’s watching us. This is the greatest insight from the furor of the culture wars of the eighties and nineties: that “who you are” is what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are.
Then why does lying bother us so much? Why does it continue to send irritable, sticky waves up and down the spine? Is it the Judeo-Christian system of ethics that still clings like a stubborn bathtub ring to our age? Why can’t we just get over it and accept that our everyday transactions are going to be ones where we’re going to have to be at least a little fake to even keep your head above water? (Anyone who’s ever written a resume, gone shipping for business casual clothing at Ross, or attended a “networking function” knows what I’m talking about.)
Maybe it’s not because–as iconoclastic, by-now-irritated readers are probably thinking–that you’re compromising a basic authenticity or moral fiber by telling the occasional fib about how many people you’ve slept with. The act of wearing a shirt that’s “not really you” probably isn’t going to send you into a full-blown existential meltdown. And don’t get me wrong. It’s not that thinking long and hard about authenticity and values aren’t crucially and overwhelmingly important. Truth and trustworthiness are, after all, the spinal column of intimacy. I’m talking here less about how we treat others on personal ground, which is often terrain of our choosing, and more about how we’re expected to navigate the foul-smelling bogs of polite working society, where we must more carefully manage others’ impressions of ourselves. I guess what I’m really after is how capitalism (the bête noire of this conversation) encourages certain falsehoods in order to perpetuate itself, and how it uses these falsehoods to organize our patterns of behavior.
Maybe it’s because, like other unpleasant necessities (regular dental cleanings, suffering through Hootie and the Blowfish while waiting to mail a package in an un-air-conditioned post office), the art of self-creation somehow intimates the hollowness at the heart of Western modernity–the Lovecraftian Black Slavering Nothingness lurking in the dusty floorboards beneath a century’s worth of technological and cultural innovation.
In his acclaimed short story, “Good Old Neon,” the late great David Foster Wallace writes:
There was a basic logical paradox that I called the “fraudulence paradox” that I had discovered more or less on my own while taking a mathematical logic course in school. . . . The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside–you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a supposedly intelligent nineteen-year old became aware of this paradox, he’d stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he’d figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn’t even have a form or name–I didn’t, I couldn’t. Discovering that first paradox at age nineteen just brought home to me in spades what an empty, fraudulent person I’d basically been ever since at least the time I was four and lied to my stepdad . . .
That gives me the heebie-jeebies. I prefer the relatively sunnier outlook provided by sixteenth century Italian courtesan Baldassare Castiglione, who sustained that, to survive the cold-blooded courts of Florence, you had to cultivate the quality of sprezzatura: “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it . . . an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them.” It is the art of disguising the art of living. And, in doing so, it blurs the lines between act and life, and between genius and practice. Andrew Bird’s whistling comes to mind.
The question appears to be not “what is true?”–that rabid dog at the heels of philosophy’s greatest brow-furrowers–but rather why “what is false?” is infinitely more captivating.
And why these ruminations of a blog (nominally) concerned with the business of running, rather than one about the running of a business? Because while you can fake being a runner, it’s pretty hard to fake a run.
