A friend of mine and I were talking about being lied to. She has always held herself in pretty decent esteem of choosing lies from truth. So imagine her shock and dismay to have been lied to, completely missed it, and worse yet, how come I hadn't trusted the same person from the day I met him. Well, he had given me the hee-bee-gee-bees right off the bat. Approximately 2% of the population reportedly can pick out lies fairly well. There are various theories about why these people are better; many of them share some common childhood events. Neither here, nor there. This blog isn't about how come they can and the average Joe can't. Another study shows that people that suffered a stroke could pick out lies 73% of the time while the non-stroke people chose the lies 20% less of the time. Basically, that's what studies discover over and over. The average person can only pick the lies 50% of the time. In fact, even UNC law enforcement blog states that often police detectives make mistakes because those things that we associate with lying--fidgeting, averting the eyes, playing with hair, anger, frustration, etc.--can be false tells with people being interrogated. When under a stressful situation, often the liars seem to be the most calm and the hypothesis is that the liar's mind is so busy keeping the lies in order and filing them for future use, re-use actually, that all those other tells go out the window.
Think of it. Anyone lying to you may or may not be fidgeting. That's not going to be a tell. In my friend's case, it was her spouse. He lied for years and years. Speaking from the same experience, my own ex could look me in the eye, never flinch, and lie right through his teeth without a single tell. Well, maybe a single tell that I was unwilling to acknowledge. Often, we fool ourselves simply because we would like to see the good in all people. It's naive at best. Not everyone is honest 100% of the time. Even though I tend to be "overly honest" if I don't think something is someone's business and they are one of those people who won't take "none ya'" as an answer, I'll often evade the whole truth with a partially true answer. I've debated with another friend the merits of whether this is the same thing as lying. Perhaps it is, I have to concede. It's all perspective and opinion. If you perceive a half truth as a lie, an omission as a lie, then to you, it is a lie. I don't consider it a lie unless it's pretensed with other lies and the omission is on purpose to further let a person draw incorrect conclusions and mislead their judgment. If it's simply because it's not their business, then it's not and such omission is just to avoid an uncomfortable situation. My ex often switched it up on me when I would ask questions about where or what he had been doing, the argument then just became about something completely unrelated. It was exhausting. Like my friend's husband, had he not been caught red-handed, this could've went on for years and years. I'm so happy that I was lucky enough to have the truth delivered while in a blatant, in my face way, that I did not suffer her fate. I love her and she's a wonderful person. The pain she faces now in her 40s would have been much simpler, was much simpler, when it's impact wasn't 20+ years. All I can say is she should not beat herself up, nor should anyone say to her how could she not know or some other inconsideration. Yes, we often see only what we want to see. Hear what we want to hear. But sometimes, it's just the liar at fault. It's not her fault because she wanted to believe.
There are plenty of people that want to believe. How often do we hear of various cult style churches demanding people sign over a percentage of money directly out of their paychecks? Sign over land? Give any extra cash they have? Disconnect themselves from their families and friends that are not involved in that particular "church"? The lie that they often want to hear is that they are "saved", but nowhere in the Bible does it say you will be saved by giving everything to a church. We all want to feel good about ourselves. Who doesn't? But often charlatans can use that need against us. It's quite simple. They find a few sheeple, especially ones that are honest that they turn into "true believers" and for those that might pick out the liars more often than 50% those true believers are able to fool them for the charlatans. Eventually, the seemingly honest outnumber the charlatans and are preaching the word for the con-artists. Someone will catch on...ask Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, but sometimes the catch is too late to save the sheep. Ask the FBI investigators that wanted to save the lives of the children at Waco. We are often amazed and appalled at the terrorists. Who in the world would follow such crazy extremists preaching for death and destruction of any other human? Well, it wasn't so long ago that Eric Rudolph bombed the Olympics in Atlanta because of rhetoric demanding the killing of doctors, nurses and pregnant women that would be involved in abortion. A difference in religious opinion (yes, because not all religions believe in life at conception) that resulted in bombing living people--many of whom had no dog in the fight. Are they liars when they preach death and destruction of others, others' ways of life, anything that opposes them? I don't know, but at some point it all started with the desire to be better persons and defining themselves as better than someone else. The biggest lie of them all. None of us are better than anyone else. Not you. Not me. Not anyone. We are all human. The liars that would have any of us believe that we are better than anyone else are simply telling us what we want to here. We all want to be "better" in our inherent need for competition.
The inherent need to believe that we are worthy, have self worth, often is what drives our willingness to believe even the most ludicrous lies. My friend's need to believe she was truly with someone that truly loved her the way she wanted, needed to be loved let her blindly ignore all the signs of a cheating husband. A young teenager who's been brow beaten down or felt low in self worth finds a mentor in a gang leader who tells them that they are loved, needed, and capable can often turn the tide of where that young teenager's life ends up...or ends. Even the terrorists' recruiting strategies tend to focus on the need that we all have to some extent to belong, to be part of something, to contribute, to have family. While all of these things might sound so different, it is not so different. I have a good friend that has been single for a long time just like I have been. She is still single, so I listen intently sometimes and realize that the inherent need to be loved, feel cared for and have someone to care about it often the true driving force behind us believing lies. It's not that the Bible says anything about killing abortion doctors. It was the praise that Eric Rudolph thought he would receive from certain others. It isn't about the terrorists wanting to die as martyrs. It's about wanting to have an impact on the world, someone to notice them, and having somewhere to belong that allows devious liars to impact their minds. This friend has had an on and off and on and off and on and off....well, you get the picture...relationship with a cad. He's kind of a womanizer, only not that good looking or smart. Yet, at some point, something he said connected with her on a deep level. They were most likely lies, maybe even based on some truths when they were spoken, but truly little more than words to ensnare this ridiculous merry go round relationship--that he shares with a couple of other women also. I don't know the other women, but I know my friend. He's probably not worthy of her admiration by a long shot and he knows it. She assumes that the other women on the same merry go round are horrible, because of words from him that allude to such. Lies. More likely the other women that are on and off and on with him are just like my friend. Hoping desperately that the lies he tells are truths. Eventually he will get off the merry go round with one of them and she of course, whichever one he is talking to that day, is the one he will be getting off with. Eventually we'll all go to heaven if we give our 10 to 15% to charlatan who made his own church. Eventually we'll get bunch of virgins in heaven because we murdered thousands in the name of a God who supposedly is speaking to us through a guy who is telling us exactly how great our cause, how great our contribution to the cause, blah, blah. blah.
We pretend not to understand liars and we often claim the people telling us the truth with proof are the liars. I had a friend years ago who was having an affair with a married man. I told her he's never leaving his wife. The only way you will "get" him is if she throws him out. She was infuriated with me and we didn't speak for a while. Eventually, we did. The truth was I was right. He wasn't leaving her. About 2 or 3 mistresses down the road, the wife had divorced him and the mistress had landed him...until he was cheating on her too. Shocking. I know. (Yes, sarcasm.) Cheaters aren't necessarily always cheaters but by humble observation over the years, if you were the mistress, you will be cheated on whether you land the man or not. Like I stated before, I could have kept my mouth shut, but I wasn't going to lie to my friend when asked...even if it meant she would hate my guts. Of course, that's the thing too. Often when we hear the truth, we want to swear someone is lying because we limit ourselves. I had a woman running around telling people I was lying about having my engineering degree. I had to be a liar. Of course, she claims she went to school and couldn't finish because of this or that. I don't remember. She was a blip in one day of my life. I apparently was a dismal reminder of what she hadn't done, of her own failure and I was therefore the brunt of her own lies. She desperately needed me to be a liar because otherwise she had to look in the mirror at herself for her own mistakes, errors and failures. Instead of someone like me being a positive sign that she could always go back and try again, she decided to tear me down by claiming I had to be a liar. Which is more pathetic? That I have my degree even after dropping out and going back and getting my degree in spite of all odds? Or that a woman would run around claiming I was a liar because she herself had failed and never tried again? Or that several people began repeating the lie over and over and over until it came around full circle back to me?
Recently a guy waited until I went to the restroom and told my boyfriend immediately that I was a liar about ever being in the military. He said that the first time he met me that I couldn't remember if I was in the Army or the Navy. I've always tried to be nice to the guy because the first time I met him I hadn't been in a good mood and felt like I had been a bit ugly to him, but when my boyfriend told me about this, I realized that the guy was actually the *sshole from the first encounter with him. Like the woman claiming I didn't have my degree, his lie was simply to put me down. I'm not sure why. He's another blip in a day or two of my life. A shallow insecure little man who needs anything that doesn't fit into his mind to be a lie. He might seem extremely believable to someone who didn't know me because of his "true believer" status that I couldn't be telling the truth because I didn't fit his stereotypes. I don't know. For all I know, he's just a sh*t stirrer who lies just for grins. Anyway, when my boyfriend responded that he knew I had been Navy, had never ever claimed anything else and that he had rode with me the other week to the regional VA hospital the jerk scurried away immediately like the little lying rodent he is. Sometimes, we have to remember the lies that some people tell are only to make themselves feel better about their own limitations. Those lies are most likely the hardest of them all to tell from truths--particularly when those lies speak to our own limitations. In that case, we are probably more likely to want to believe them even if that aching little voice is going off in our heads telling us it's probably a lie.
Obviously, I'm not a big fan of lying. I really don't like it when it's just in jest to be honest. It's not necessary in every day conversation. The world would be a much simpler place if people said what they mean, told the truth even when it hurt themselves let alone others, and could easily discern lies from truth more than just 50% of the time. Satire is supposed to be funny, haha funny not odd funny. Yet, some people don't see it as funny at all. It's the truth wrapped in twist. Sarcasm is the same. It's the intelligent mind trying to point out the lies within what someone perceives as truth. No one should be killed because they tried to point out the lies, the sheer irony of the lies that men tell younger men and women to make them into sheep either for financial gain or for some phony cause. We are appalled by such idiocy. But how do we expect such young men and women to not fall for such lies when we ourselves are just as apt to when we hear what we want to hear and take it as gospel? I know we are all mortified by the senseless murders in Paris, but ask yourself how many times have you believed a lie, perpetuated that lie by repeating it and/or been the brunt of some lie someone has told? We all know lies that we have heard that eventually were proven to not be the truth. Not a single one of us is immune. While a little children's rhyme "Liar, liar, pants on fire" makes it sound so easy to "see"...like someone's pants on fire. But truth is that we are incapable as a whole more than 50% of the time. It's not that easy and even harder when our own needs or desires are met by lies. Just food for thought as we judge those that are lied to and those that buy into them.
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