Clouds, radars and the art of deception

Did the Prime Minister actually say that?

Well, we are not here to judge. To be fair, the jury is out on whether Prime Minister Modi had actually said clouds could help the Indian Air Force escape Pak radars in Balakot and if at all he had said that, was that actually he meant. But I think by chance we have stumbled upon an opportunity — especially given the national fervour on elections where political leaders of myriad hues merry-go-around mouthing lies and falsehood — to look at the very idea of deception or, to be more precise, lie.

To start with, why do we lie?

That’s exactly what David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy and co-founder of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New England, tried to answer in his seminal work: Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind over a decade ago. Interestingly, he has found that if we go by the developments in evolutionary biology we can see that the tendency to deceive has an ancient pedigree. It’s not a creation of ‘education’ or ‘ civilisation’ as many have argued.

Ah, that’s a relief. Go on, humour me...

Lying is universal, quipped Mark Twain. “We all do it; we all must do it,” he added. According to professor Smith, deceit is the Cinderella of human nature. Sadly, it is “essential to our humanity but disowned by its perpetrators at every turn” — like the humble fictional girl. But several sociologists and psychologists have argued that lies are there because lies work. Just as in the case of corruption. Smith says the propensity for deception probably became part of our nature because it was so helpful to us in our dealings with one another. If you remember the 2009 American romcom, The Invention of Lying , which talks about a world where everyone says the truth and one man invents the art of lying, the character — Mark — goes on to become a rich man.

We lie because we stand to gain from it. True?

That may sound too simplistic and stating the obvious, but there is a grain of truth. But that does not mean those who lie are not aware of the outcome if the lies are exposed. Smith writes: “Good liars, so the myth goes, always know what they are doing: they are calculating and exquisitely aware of their deceptions.”

Ah, that explains a lot of things!

Haste thou not! To be fair on the liar, studies have shown that humans partake in acts of deception regularly and, in most cases, involuntarily. An example is dyeing your hair. Whether you understand it or not, you are hiding a truth. Such is the case with using padded clothes. So, while treating such acts normal and making a hue and cry around verbal lies or acts of misinformation is a philosophically interesting question.

That’s indeed confusing.

There’s more. As University of Arizona academic Don Fallis argues in his paper ‘What Is Lying?’ ( The Journal of Philosophy , January, 2009), the correct definition of lying is (a) you say something that you believe to be false; and (b) you believe that you are in a situation where the following norm of conversation is in effect: “Do not say what you believe to be false” . On that cue, you cannot say with certainty whether the PM or many other politicians and business persons who we think lie about their plans and products do lie in the strictest sense of the word.

Are they not hoodwinking us?

Tough question. The best way to judge a lie is, then, to place in the context of what it achieves. Take product advertisements: which are exaggerations in most cases. If you stretch them further, they enter the realms of lie. But if the ads do help people buy the product and let the company expand its topline, the ‘lies’ are kosher. When a statesman lies about an event of strategic importance and the lies are exposed, damaging his reputation and the country’s along the way, one must say that’s unwelcome.

But to go back to Smith’s book, we must acknowledge that self-deception has been a “wonderful gift” of evolution, which is now “destroying” us. Smith says our taste for lies resembles our craving for sugar and animal fat. It is up to us to decide whether we need to consume it without control or use it for suitably vicarious gains. And be sure, the answer, in all likelihood, is going to be deceptive.

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