Why do liars lie?
A more vexing challenge these days than separating facts from “fake news” is to comprehend why liars lie in the first place.
By “liars,” I don’t mean people who occasionally say something untrue because they’re trying to be polite or are embarrassed to admit to something.
I’m talking about people who live by lying. Career liars. Rest assured, these liars are not all on TV or in the public light: they walk among us. They are people we know, whose paths we cross.
The most successful liars are people you don’t even think of as liars, either because: (a) you haven’t yet caught them in their lies, or (b) your belief that they’re not liars — or that their lies are unimportant — is your way of lying to yourself.
When career liars lie, what you’re hearing is the lie they tell themselves. Liars need to believe their own lies because the facts don’t help them feel good about their own behavior, choices, or personality. For them, the truth (or the whole truth) is uncomfortable and inconvenient. The one lie they tell is a drop in the comprehensive ocean of lies in which they swim.
Career liars also know that odds are, someone will believe them. We respond positively to someone who is confident, bold, unwavering, and passionate. Liars depend on this response. This is why career liars, confronted with contradictory facts, just get louder, more adamant, or even tearfully hysterical because they know people are more likely to believe them when they act this way. We want their yelling or their tears or their hissy fit to stop, so we just believe them.
What liars are trying to do here is identify the suckers in their audience. The sucker is the liar’s livelihood; the more suckers, the better. If you decide you no longer believe the lie, no problem: the liar will just keep lying to find a sucker to replace you. As the saying goes, there’s one born every minute.
Telling the truth is a virtue by which nearly all people are brought up: you don’t hear parents telling their kids, “It’s OK for you to lie to Mommy and Daddy.” As you grow older, telling the truth becomes one of the ways you know you’re a good and moral person.
Career liars aren’t interested in that. They’re interested in power, control, and winning. To liars, deference to the facts is weakness, and fretting about right and wrong is bourgeois — something Losers do. They see lying as a tool in the arsenal of the strong, so they need to keep lying to convince themselves they are strong or are winners. In their logic, lying and getting away with it is proof of their strength, so they must prove it to themselves and others again and again. Almost certainly, in the liar’s past, someone hurt them, so lying became a means of survival, of gaining advantage, and of winning in this world which liars see as harsh and cruel.
In some cases, career liars lie to discredit people who tell the truth — or, more specifically, people who expose the truth about liars. Liars can’t defend their lies with reason or the facts, so they fight back with personal attacks, tales of how evil the truth-teller is, or pleas for sympathy that they themselves, the liars, are the “real victims” and are being treated unjustly.
One last but crucial point: If you encounter someone who lies all the time or lies only when they’re backed into a corner, what you have hold of is an amateur.
The truly expert liar combines facts and fiction so unpredictably or so consistently, that you, their audience, become confused, frustrated, and exhausted. You stop trying to figure out what’s true and what’s a lie and you just let the liar keep on lying. You stop calling that person a liar and say instead, “Well, that’s Todd being Todd” or “Who knows anymore, with her.” Or you just believe what the liar says because you can’t be bothered to check every story or confirm every so-called fact.
That, to the liar, is music: it means, in their own minds, that they’ve won.
And they have.
Tim Lemire is an author and visual artist whose work can be found on timlemire.com and YouTube.
