President-elect Donald Trump tweeted 16 million Twitter followers recently saying that, “In addition to winning the electoral college in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” A number of fact checkers, across the journalistic spectrum saw no substantiation for the claim of illegal voting. According to statisticians his margins of victory came nowhere near what defines a landslide. Twitter is an efficient means of communicating with huge audiences without having to deal with a press that might require accountability and verification for one’s statements.
As I thought about it, I found the tweet a curious kind of statement for him to make. He won the election, he’s home free. Why the need to fabricate? It seemed so unnecessary to me.
However, my intent here isn’t to analyze the President-elect and his motives, but to take a critical look at what consequences that routine lying, disinformation, spin and other forms of distortions have on us in the long run. Just what does lying leave in its wake for individuals and for a society?
Human beings are not fundamentally liars. In fact we are hard wired for truth. A lie detector works at all because it picks up physical aberrations – heightened blood pressure, muscular tension, increased heartbeat, etc. – that lying produces. Our bodies protest lies.
Supporters of the liar will either wink at the prevarications or shrug them off. Detractors, already loaded for bear, become angry and revile him or her. Both reactions, it seems to me, muddy the more disturbing issue of just what lies and disinformation are doing to us individually and collectively.
I learned something of how lies and deceptions play out during my years working with recovering alcoholics, drug dependent persons and their families. There’s a lot to be learned from the dynamics of addiction.
In families where one member is addicted and the behavior is having destructive consequences for relatives, myths begin to be perpetrated. This is an attempt by a fearful family to create an acceptable narrative to live with in the face of what everyone knows at the deepest level is madness.
If it works, and everyone subscribes to the myth, the addictive behavior continues unaddressed. The consequences to the people who live the myth is a high level of undifferentiated anxiety, because at one level everyone knows they’re living a lie. Keeping family secrets by denial and fabrications are the anodynes of choice to keep a sick situation hidden.
Over time, chronic lying foments an atmosphere of distrust, doubt and chronic anxiety. In such a climate, no one can be really sure when the deception will be exposed. Distrust has a corrosive effect on individuals and social groups. It can make neighbors suspicious of one another. Lying causes people to begin to live fictions as if they were realities and eventually to become enablers in sustaining the fictions even as the fictions begin to unravel. In the meantime a lot of damage is done, particularly to the psychological and spiritual health that’s so important to living a full life individually and communally.
Some years ago, at Goucher College at a writing workshop I heard an author speak about writing his memoir. His father was a raging alcoholic. The author and other family members suffered all the abuses common in such a household. Writing memoirs presents delicate challenges, among them is how you can speak honestly what you know about your dysfunctional family and still not expose family members to humiliation. In the memoir, the author wrote truthfully of one particularly ugly scene. When his mother read it she commented, “My goodness, son, I don’t know where you get such notions.”
How denial, lies and deceit gain such firm purchase on lives is the function of enabling. Enablers keep the lies alive and well and will spread them generously abroad when put on the defensive. Twitter, ironically enough, the instrument that keeps us all in touch with friends, is today’s enabler. It’s the cyber voice that can perpetuate illusions indiscriminately, because this efficient means of communication has no structures of accountability.
Recently at the Avalon Theater in Easton, Krista Tippett interviewed Anil Dash. Dash is a professional tech consultant, entrepreneur, activist and writer. He is recognized as one of the prominent voices advocating for more humane and inclusive technology. He mentioned with some concern that, to date, there are no general tenets, agreed upon ethical codes, or responsible overseers to monitor technology. It’s wild out there in the electronic badlands with little conscience and no agreed upon boundaries. So if one tweet tells millions of Americans that there is voter fraud, the message reaches the gullible and the discriminating alike with no verifications other than the salesman’s ubiquitous appeal to his honesty: “Trust me.”
And so that is my concern in writing this: that we, as a people, over time will become sufficiently inured to deception so that we’ll only shrug or grin when deceived and there will be no one who cares enough or is even informed enough to say that the Emperor has no clothes. We will live in an unreality enabled through cyberspace.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
Rem Simpson says
I know you are upset about Trump winning however several organizations have made the claim about the illegal vote count. Check out the truth at vote.com.
Also, yes we have become used to lies from Washington. Such as you can keep your doctor and the tragedy in Libya was caused by a video. Your writing does not reflect your Christian training. More like your political leaning.
Nancy Robson says
George, I very much appreciate this meditation on what lying does to a society, regardless of whether it’s interpersonal lies, political lies, or societal lies (for example, “We’re immune to the kind of wars and societal destruction that have occurred in other parts of the world because we’re so exceptional.”). They either shatter trust in ANYthing anyone says to us, or lull us into a kind of mindless (or demoralized) acceptance of corruption.