A few years ago, I was at a party – well, all right, it was a knitting group but don’t go away – where guests introduced themselves by occupation. I said I was a professor, which was true and always easier than admitting or claiming to be a writer (people assume you’re lying or deluded and one way or another they’re probably right). Another woman said she was a dentist and she didn’t want to hear that we all hated dentists, and there was a maths teacher who was sick of people telling her they were terrible at maths.
I saw their points. The dentist went on to say that she didn’t much like patients either, because they often lied to her, claimed to brush and floss more regularly than was possible given the state of their teeth. She said that when they told her these lies, she asked them if it was the toilet they were brushing twice a day because it certainly wasn’t their teeth.
I was horrified, imagining the patients, prone and vulnerable with bright lights in their eyes, mocked and scolded by someone holding sharp implements in their open mouths. But people lie, I said, when they’re frightened, and when you say that you make them more frightened, and ashamed. She shrugged and said they should brush their teeth more often, which I’m sure was true, but not the point. She was, clearly, in the wrong job.
This isn’t dentist-bashing. My dentist is patient and kind and I trust him not to treat anyone, including recalcitrant children, like a recalcitrant child, which probably means that his patients don’t lie to him. I know I can explain my liking for toffee and very hard biscotti and serious crust on a sourdough loaf and he will nod and do what he can to mitigate the logical consequences of my choices.
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When I was a child, I was often accused of lying. Sometimes I thought I was telling stories and my audience thought I was telling a different kind of truth, which is the persistent plight of a novelist. Sometimes my life was just more surprising than adults could credit; once a teacher punished me for “pretending” I’d been to Hungary, because it was the 1980s and everyone knew Hungary was behind the Iron Curtain and no one could go there, except my parents who – apple, tree – tended to question what “everyone knows”.
[ From the archive: Lies, bullsh*t and knowledge resistance: A spotter’s guideOpens in new window ]
The adults in my life did have cause to doubt my word, because I did a lot of imagining and I wasn’t always sure what I’d made up, and also I did some outright lying, perhaps occasionally to make life more interesting but more often because I had learned to be afraid of the consequences of the truth.
I was among those children for whom the structures of formal education are not intuitive. Many of school’s requirements seemed to me arbitrary and unpredictable. I was constantly surprised by the timetable and so often had the wrong homework and books in the wrong time and place. The rules of sports were and remain opaque and strange to me. Subjects involving numbers and answers that were right or wrong were as difficult as narrative and interpretation and expression were natural. And so I was always in trouble, always ashamed and afraid, and sometimes tried to lie my way out of the worst of it.
[ Irishwoman Rachel Duffy has proven the truth at the heart of Traitors UKOpens in new window ]
I don’t think it was or is good to lie, and as we grow up we should find better ways through institutions and relationships. Some people clearly lie because they have no respect for those they betray, or for convenience or the love of power, because they are autocrats or narcissists or, frighteningly, both. Perhaps such people really believe that their own desires are the same thing as truth.
But most of us, generally meaning well enough, intending no harm but maybe not particularly brave, don’t lie when we feel safe, trusted and trusting. Almost all children learn lying as part of normal development – the treasured example from a two-year-old in our household was, “Mummy, you don’t need to come upstairs, nothing’s happened” – but when they learn that there is no shame in truth, the fabulation remains benign, in the realm of imagination and jokes and storytelling rather than deception and betrayal. And I think there’s an extent to which the same is true of vulnerable adults: sometimes – not always – a liar needs more trust, not more humiliation.
