Ask Lemmy

My favorite psychology professor likes to discuss the relationship between the level of fakeness in a society and the rise of totalitarianism in that same society. He says that when everybody lies more on a regular basis, even about small things, it lets bad things start to happen. And as the bad things start to happen, these people who lie about little things all the time can easily dupe themselves about the fact the bad things are happening, because they’ve gotten used to investing their mental energy into fake narratives.

Basically each problem gives a person the opportunity to tell the truth about the problem, which usually results in them having to do something about it to assuage their own conscience, or to lie about the problem, which makes space for them to act as if the problem isn’t there. It’s less scary and takes less work to lie, so we do it when we don’t feel like taking on the responsibility of the problem.

Then it becomes a cultural habit — something we do because we see others doing it and we’d rather not be the weird outlier — to lie about small things instead of facing them.

If this cultura of lying expands, it starts to encompass bigger and bigger things.

For example, instead of lying about whether your stepmother’s garlic bread tastes good, now you’re lying about whether you think it’s a good idea for your coworker to be having a third beer at lunch. “Go for it!” you say in a slightly sarcastic tone, telling yourself the sarcastic tone is sufficient feedback to fulfill your duty in this scenario. After all, he’s only a coworker, you tell yourself, actively ignoring the other night when you told him you were his friend.

Now you’re lying to your coworker and lying to yourself about whether you’re lying to your coworker. The lying has expanded.

In any given society, a certain amount of lying is expected. As an autistic, I’ve had a hard time dealing with the fact that the optimal amount of lying might not be zero. But even if it’s not zero, it is very small. And if a society’s culture gets too unbalanced, away from facing things as they come up and toward lying to ignore them instead, then the society starts to degrade.

Then everyone’s perception of the society, as in the sum total of all their experiences interacting with others including those potential interactions they haven’t had yet, starts to skew in terms of the expectation that others will lie to them. Interactions become less valuable, because any given interaction could change out from under you. You can’t trust your neighbor when they say they’ll keep an eye on your yard. You can’t trust your boss when she says you can come to her with anything. You can’t trust your friends to give you honest feedback when you ask for it.

And that state of trust just makes it more tempting to lie. Why be vulnerable with the truth when the people around you are liars? Why trust your own sense that something is wrong if you, yourself, lie all the time?

And this particular psych prof says that the extreme end of that process, of the lies getting bigger and more frequent, in a network effect across a whole society, is genocide and other atrocity.

The lies cause people to check out and when people check out to a sufficient degree they can ignore a genocide, and when people can ignore a genocide, tell themselves there’s nothing they can do to stop it, is when genocide happens.

Sort of like how the human body is always being invaded by pathogens, all day every day. It’s only when the immune system fails to kill those pathogens immediately that an infection occurs.

In the same way, the genocidal impulse is always there, coming out of the darkest and nastiest parts of the human soul. But people’s ability to pay attention, convey and receive accurate information, and fix problems as they see them (which is a result of seeing them clearly enough to be moved to action by them), acts to weed out that impulse continually.

A culture of lying is like a breakdown of the signals used in the immune system. If the T-cells can’t recognize invaders they can’t eat them. A culture of truth-telling puts people into contact with what’s going on, in a way they can’t ignore. And that same culture of truth-telling makes people respect humanity and their own society, making it feel more worth defending from intentional evil, and from unconscious mistake-making and general breakdown.