Culture
of Deception
“Seldom,
very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it
happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
Jane
Austen (Emma)
The
word that kept coming to me this morning was, deception. I guess that’s because
we seem immersed in it today in such obvious ways. It seems we have gone from
searching for truth to searching for the deception that suits us. I hate always
being “Debbie Downer,” but human interactions interest me. Rather than watching
“reality television” while knowing it is anything but reality, I prefer to
ponder the actual workings of human beings in our on-going effort to bend reality to
our will.
I look
to myself, of course, as an example of humanity, and I mentally examine others who
are in my orbit. And I’ve come to believe it is human nature to be deceptive. Perhaps
it’s part of having become half-way civilized. We say what we don’t mean, we
don’t say what we truly think, we try to put only our best side forward until
we have a drink or three in us, and then we blurt out what we really think. French
novelist, Andrea Malraux said, “Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what
he hides.” He’s almost right—we’re all of it.
In our
current culture, we have clear lines of division—it’s like living in a permanent
game of mock court. One side presents airtight “facts” caught on camera in real
time; the other side calls them deceptive, fake, altered, and so forth. In an
actual court room, this kind of presentation is meant to cast reasonable doubt.
In our culture, we have come to a point where it doesn’t even have to be
reasonable—in fact, the more far-fetched, the better. We like to be entertained
even when other people’s lives are in peril.
I ran
across a snatch of writing by Thomas Hardy (in Jude the Obscure) that captures a
feminine example of how we are inherently deceptive: “…that inborn craving
which undermines some women’s morals almost more than unbridled passion—that craving
to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man—was in me,
and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened.” Men may have been in
charge of the world forever, but women have honed the art of deception as a
means of power and protection. It’s natural to want to attract because it suggests
we have a tiny bit of control. Like male peacocks with their outrageous tail
plumage that has no other purpose than attraction, this deceptive behavior is not
exclusively feminine. Men are sometimes quite adept as well.
Deception
has its benefits—it is a way of maintaining the peace when to speak the truth
would be dangerous. All of us commit this offense with our “white lies,” when
we say something absolutely counter to what we believe just to keep from
rocking the proverbial boat. It’s estimated that we make no fewer than ten
deceptive comments every single day—most of them to keep the peace. But a
culture of deception is proving to be the undoing of America. “Oh, what
tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.” (Walter Scott) We
are now caught in a web of our own spinning. When we can’t agree on what is and
what isn’t true, we must at least learn how to deceive without harming. That is, if
we want to continue to be considered civilized.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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