Pants on Fire

"Liar, liar, pants on fire!" - Origin unknown

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." Abraham Lincoln, (attributed)

Some of the funniest (and saddest) segments on Jon Stewart's evening political satire, "The Daily Show", are watching our leaders lie with nonchalance and almost sporting good humor. The show tracks various politicians over time and we see video of President Bush on a Tuesday grasping his podium and declaring with complete sincerity his conviction on any topic (pick one), only to watch him take the diametrically opposed position the third Thursday following. Only to steer off wildly from that two months later, claiming that whatever he is telling you now was always so, and he never said anything to the contrary.

When President Bush justified why he had misled the voting public as to his confidence in former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld prior the midterm election, he responded something to the effect of "That's not the kind of thing you announce before an election." Meaning, "of COURSE that wasn't true, but if I had been forthcoming, it might have undermined my political agenda."

Who can forget former President Clinton staring straight into a camera on live feed television and asserting with convincing affronted demeanor that he did NOT have sexual relations with a White House intern? Or Ronald "What Documents?" Reagan assuring us that we were NOT funneling funds to the Contras in Nicaragua?

Politicians rely on us to have a very short and incomplete memory of any event. When you couple that with seldom being truthfully informed in the first instance and having limited immediate influence on government policy, we find ourselves gnawing our voter registration cards in frustration and imploring the Almighty to just send us one forthright leader.

Don't hold your breath.

But we tend to accept, begrudgingly, deception as an intrinsic part of political self-preservation. The spoils are granted to the victor who can cover their tracks convincingly, or who does not overreach what the public can tolerate.

Americans did not, as a whole, have more than a titillated interest in the recreational shenanigans in the Clinton Oval Office. But play us for a country of fools and perjure yourself, and we might want to see your ego smacked down just a little.

Tell us that you are (or were) a closeted gay governor flagrante delicto with a colleague, and we'll probably buy your book telling us about your long and painful struggle to accept yourself.

But get caught patronizing an elite escort service after presenting yourself as a governor tough on prosecuting sex-trade criminal activity, and you will find yourself on the doorstep of the mansion with your suitcases in less than 48 hours (that is, if your wife hasn't already burned your clothes AND your luggage as almost every woman in America is hoping she will have done).

One of the most popular political dodges to truth-telling is claiming a faulty memory. Years ago, Texas Governor Ann Richards appointed a woman, Lena Guerrero, to head a powerful state agency. Guerrero had often publicly reflected on her happy years at the University of Texas and had been invited to speak to graduating classes on numerous occasions.

The portrait painted of a Latina who had surmounted formidable odds to pursue excellence in education and who had devoted her life to public service was admirable. Until, of course, someone took note that she had never, in fact, graduated from the University and she went down in flames.

Guerrero's response when confronted? "I forgot. I thought I graduated." Yes, well. We might forget to mail the cable bill; we might lose track of appointments and library books. But we tend to remember the more spectacular events in our lives if we were sober and conscious.

These include funding coups d'état, having sex with young, young women in berets, remembering the rules of law if you're the U.S. Attorney General and graduating from college. And yet, as disturbing as that sort of deceit may be, we understand that political survival often depends on pretending.

In the private sector, we have many sophisticated forms of half-truths that allow people to maintain polite relations and a certain level of privacy. We are not required to disclose every detail of our personal lives to anyone who is just curious, and if you want to lie like a carpet in the face of a direct and unwelcome question, it's understood.

It is also usually understood that you are lying, but your listener is likely (depending on either their lack of attachment to the outcome or the direct opposite) to go along, at least outwardly, with your story. Thus, if you call in to work claiming a raging upper respiratory infection while you are really on your way to Ikea, it probably won't create too much of a ripple.

Oh, your coworkers know - especially when they see you on the ferry with a Kvôwk convertible sofa poking out of the back of your Pathfinder. But they collude and ask you if you are feeling any better when you explain that you went to see your doctor in Renton, and since you were in the Ikea neighborhood anyway...

But beyond the political lies and the social lies, there is a whole universe of other lies out there that I've puzzled over for a number of years to explain - the lie that just doesn't go anywhere. The fiction that doesn't seem to profit the liar in any way because the falsehoods are all too obvious to the listeners. For example, I have a relative. His name is Otto.

Otto's stories are grand, and, mostly, easily verifiable. He has been a jet fighter pilot flying secret missions (he can't talk about it); a designer for Tiffany; a famous criminal attorney who graduated with distinction from Columbia University; a lover whose liaisons across three continents are legendary; an elected member of the New York City Council. Otto has his boots custom made by an Italian boot-maker in Parma. Otto has been responsible for shutting down the New York Stock Exchange. Otto flies on military transport wherever he goes (even though his luggage has Continental baggage tags and he's never been in the military, unless that's a secret, too).

Perhaps the most extreme of Otto's stories involves his tale of rendering extraordinary aid to family members after the death of another relative. In Otto's version of the event, he rushed in, took charge and offered wise counsel and guidance during a time of confusion and grief. As an extra flourish, he includes a side bar detailing his efforts to bury the relative in keeping with Orthodox tradition (which is especially odd since the deceased was not Jewish).

That he actually tells this story to people who attended the funeral and know, for certain, that Otto was across the country and did not participate in any way does not dampen Otto's enthusiasm for repeating a tale he's been telling for almost twenty years. I've almost come to believe it myself.

I would say that Otto is a psychological anomaly, if I didn't have a few acquaintances of a similar bent. I had one friend, Calvin, who was very successful. He was well-respected, incredibly intelligent, highly educated and unimpeachable in his work. Calvin never exaggerated his career, his education, his income or his status. He was accomplished, charitable and had enough money to travel anywhere. He led a moderate life, and while he was a confident man, his ego was mostly under control. It took me years to finally put together all of the discrepancies in his stories and they were almost all about travel - even though he had the money and leisure to go anywhere, he didn't and just said he did.

Calvin would call and tell me he was on his way to ski in New Mexico, or off to attend a concert in Denver, and I would come to discover he had never left his house (and, no, he wasn't afraid of flying). He was having tests run at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, but upon polite inquiry after his fictitious return, I discovered that he thought that Mayo was in Rochester, New York (it's in Rochester, Minnesota). He had tickets to go to Hawaii, fishing trips in Alaska, French Intensive courses in Montreal, Quebec, whale watches in Baja; Christmas in the Rockies.

Calvin was a regular travelogue of places that he'd never visited, local cuisine he'd never sampled, souvenirs he'd never bought and postcards he'd never written ("Didn't you get my postcard? Well, I guess mail service just isn't that reliable on the third sun of Saturn."). Why his entire fantasy life revolved around traveling when he was, in fact, capable and unafraid of travel, remains a mystery.

As do the various illnesses of my sometime-friend, Gloria. If you spend any time with Gloria, she or someone she knows will have a serious debilitating illness that is terminal. I've come to accept that her stomach cancer will pass without intervention, the various tumors scattered among her relatives will miraculously disappear, and her pronouncement that anyone she knows who had only six weeks to live will be fine.

I have gone so far as to send flowers to her in a hospital, only to learn that she had never been admitted for the life-sustaining treatment she told me she was receiving. Despite her dire pronouncements that she and her acquaintances are at death's door, they recover with remarkable regularity.

It's a challenge to befriend people who have a propensity to fabricate the truth. Even if you take a very charitable view and say, "Obviously, this person needs to tell these stories. Perhaps they have low self-esteem, or have a desperate need for attention and respect," it's not easy to just nod. It creates a real strain on the listener. Your only two responses are to confront the person - "listen, if you're going to lie, at least look at an atlas and figure out that that you went to Minnesota and not New York" - or, accept the lie and play along. "Wow, your work as criminal prosecutor and jewelry designer and fighter pilot must really keep you busy. How do you do it all and still have time to run for political office, bed all of these young and wealthy women and contribute to charitable causes?"

Either approach does not make the listener feel good. You feel combative and unkind in the first instance, or that you're playing the gullible dupe in the second. Most of us just nod, uncomfortably, and hope that our liar friend (or relative) will derive whatever satisfaction they need to get through, presumably, misleading us and move on. Additionally, if you try and face-off with a skilled liar, they are likely to rebound quickly with another tale, and you find yourself defeated and confused.

All that said, I always just presumed that lying was a deliberate social behavior. I believed that liars were fully aware of the difference between truth and fabrication, and that manipulating the listener(s) was a strategy to achieve a desired effect.

In short, I thought that lying was straight forward. But, as it often happens when I'm contemplating a topic, an information stream will intercept my thinking and I will learn that there are more complex layers than I had originally imagined.

I discovered that there is lying and then there is lying and it manifests differently in different people. But it is not the case that liars are not consciously aware of the difference between true and false. Studies indicate that except in instances of extreme mental illness where an individual is suffering from delusions, the brain recognizes the truth and chooses the untruth. And, perhaps even more surprising, the brains of liars appear to be physiologically different.

There is a hierarchy of liars. At the top of the lying chain are those people identified as "pathological" liars. Even though the label "pathological liar" does not have a standard psychological definition, nor is there a test by which it can be measured, it is "often viewed as a coping mechanism developed early in childhood and is often associated with some other type of mental health disorder."

The pathological liar is goal-oriented and "comes across as being...cunning and self-centered." Pathological liars are all about the business of manipulation. They have little or no interest in your opinion, feelings or your regard. They are driven by the absolute need to control every situation for their own interests.*

Otto and Gloria and Calvin fall into the lesser category of "chronic" or "habitual" liars. Psychologists believe that this type of lying also originates in early childhood and is the response to an environment in which telling the truth is either not modeled or rewarded, or the child has reason to believe that the truth is dangerous.

For these children, lying becomes a reflex that begins to feel right and powerful. In adulthood, the chronic liar is aware of the truth, but choosing the lie or the better story yields more satisfying results. This form of lying is not thought to be overly manipulative as much as attention seeking.*

I did not find any information on why individuals choose a particular sector of lie to tell, if it is even a decision. My source said that "compulsive liars bend the truth about everything, no matter how insignificant," but that hasn't been my experience.

Otto will tell you anything about anything, but he prefers stories in which he is the über-male, the take-charge kind of guy, the action hero. While I have heard him discuss his health, I've never heard him misrepresent it or even give it spin. Gloria, on the other hand, is all about the medical. While I wouldn't bet money on her complete veracity in other parts of her life, she admits to ups and downs, failures and successes.

Gloria doesn't pretend, for example, that she is wealthy or prestigious. But every head cold is pneumonia, every paper cut leads to deadly infection, every sinus headache is a seizure and she is, almost always, either just being hospitalized or about to be wheeled into surgery. (And I still have not a clue about Calvin and his virtual journeys. If you're a psychologist, please write and explain it to me.)

Of particular interest is that pathological liars and chronic liars are wired differently than the truthful. Successful lying requires quick reaction time; you're listener may react unfavorably to your story, ask questions or denounce you all together. A good liar always has to have a backup plan, vis a vie another lie, should the situation go awry.

Researchers are just beginning to identify that liars have a different brain physiology that indicates that their pre-frontal cortex (which is thought to play a role in both lying and antisocial behaviors) shows significantly more abundant white matter. White matter is the net of connective tissue thought to bring ideas together from different parts of the brain after processing by the gray matter (no work has yet been done to measure the white matter of members, or former members, of the current administration).**

Researchers are still debating whether a surplus of naturally occurring white matter produces more sophisticated lying, or whether it is the bi-product of lying in the same way that muscular thighs are the end result of long-distance running. In either case, accomplished liars need to be fast thinkers and their extra white matter shows that something different is going on in their brains.

That leaves the rest of us, politicians included, to fill up the ranks of situational liars. To one degree or another, we all tell lies that are specific to our circumstances, either to affect a desired outcome, as a strategy to move our agenda forward, to hide our behavior, to keep other people out of our business and, most often, to either smooth the jagged terrain of social interaction and keep peace or, in the alternative, blow it apart to our own satisfaction.

Situational lies keep our social lives running smoothly, and we agree, as a whole, that this level of lying is to everybody's best interest. We know that when someone says, "I feel like I'm putting on a little weight," they don't want us to confirm the observation by saying, "You know…I noticed the same thing. What are you? About 20 pounds heavier? People as heavy as you are far more likely to get diabetes and heart disease, you know."

Can you tell when a lie is being told? Not yet...not with complete accuracy, anyway. The standard polygraph attempts to detect lying by measuring a series of physical responses to true/false questions. When a person takes a polygraph test, four to six sensors are attached to measure breathing rate, pulse, blood pressure and perspiration, and, sometimes, twitches (like arm and leg movement) and record the findings on a graph.

A significant change such as a faster pulse or increase in blood pressure tends to indicate with high accuracy that the subject is lying. However, because the examiner's interpretation is subjective and because different people react differently to lying, a polygraph test is not perfect and can be misleading.***

Psychiatrist Daniel Langleben has turned to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor increased blood flow to areas of the brain associated with lying. Langleben has concluded that the brain must first think of the true answer ("the sky is blue") before it is able to formulate the lie ("the sky is green"). The images captured on a computer screen show the higher oxygen level in the blood flow.

Enterprising businesses in California have already begun marketing a type of modified lie detecting brain scan to clients either seeking to exonerate themselves from a false accusation, or to prove someone else is lying. At present, the cost of this method of truth detection runs about $10,000. And its customers? You can probably guess...lovers out to either prove their own fidelity or prove that their partner is cheating.

All the psychology and brain imaging aside, it's hard to enjoy the companionship of a liar even if you attempt to maintain a compassionate attitude. Whether a friend or a relative, the liar is demanding that you give them respect, sympathy, concern and attention that is based on manipulation rather than merit. If the liar is especially skilled and/or has the trappings of respectability surrounding them (or an excellent spin doctor in the case of politicians), you can be pulled quite far into the deceit before your own spider senses begin to quiver and alert you that something doesn't quite add up in their story (especially if you are being told that you are uncharitable or unpatriotic by even being suspicious).

Inevitably, your fondness turns to resentment and perhaps dislike as you contemplate the florist's bill from sending an arrangement to cheer your friend undergoing faux chemotherapy, or you buy warm gloves for the friend pretending to be on his way for medical tests in Minnesota/New York.

Maybe that's where I'm really going with this. Chronic deceivers rely on your good nature and a certain willingness to be manipulated by them. Perhaps the best response is not to parse out the psychological origins, evaluate the political necessity of their behavior or measure their white matter, but to give the time honored retort "Liar, liar, pants on fire!" and refuse to play with them anymore. And, then, put their suitcases out on the step.

* Info on lying and deception from www.truthaboutdeception.com.

** By contrast, autistic people, who have great difficulty telling lies, have considerably less white matter than normal. The research, done by YalingYang and Adrian Raine and published in The British Journal of Psychiatry, does not establish that extra white matter accounts for all lying or that only the pre-frontal cortex in the brain in involved. See www.npr.org, Into the Brain of a Liar by Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad, March 6, 2008.

*** www.science.howstuffworks.com

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Ingrid is currently living and respectably employed in Austin, Texas with a firm specializing in environmental law. She hopes to get back home to the San Juan Islands next spring to stay.
While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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