Lying Liars and the Lies we Tell

July 25, 2007 by Sanjay.

In Solaris, his 1961 meditation disguised in a sci-fi setting, the polymathic Stanislaw Lem carefully laid out the case for the impossibility of communication. In a 2002 interview, Lem summarized his central conceit:

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Science fiction almost always assumed the aliens we meet play some kind of game with us the rules of which we sooner or later may understand (in most cases the “game” was the strategy of warfare). However I wanted to cut all threads leading to the personification of the Creature, i.e. the Solarian Ocean, so that the contact could not follow the human, interpersonal pattern - although it did take place in some strange manner. The method I used in the novel to demonstrate this was the particular outcome of the interest of people, who for over one hundred years have been studying the planet Solaris and the ocean covering its surface.

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I was reminded of Lem’s masterwork while navigating the latest outbreak of complaining about the US legal system on my favorite aviation-related Internet forum. One of the forum’s more balanced participants, not a reflexive lawyer-basher, wrote that “the current system … has an inherent dishonesty built into it.” Indeed.

Formalized lying is often explained as a feature (as opposed to a bug) of the adversarial model of justice-seeking now ubiquitous worldwide. However, every so often, we are reminded that the world is not quite our suburban back-yard, as in this 2003 report from the New York Times:

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It is no surprise that East Timorese believe in human rights and justice, but they apply these principles in their own way.

When United Nations experts came to help found a court system in the newborn nation three years ago, they brought with them an adversarial model in which a verdict emerges from opposing arguments.

It was a strange process, said an American lawyer who took part in the training. Culturally, she said, East Timorese tend to admit the crimes they have committed. To create a Western-style court system, she said, it was necessary to teach defendants to lie.

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Customary lying is hardly the exclusive province of the legal system. It pervades the activity of commerce, and I daresay, our private lives. In the commercial setting, it infects (but is not limited to) the otherwise perfectly honorable profession of Marketing. In private, lying undergirds our self-justification in relationship. (We’ve come a long way from the ghutti of George Washington and the Cherry Tree, baby!)

As consumers, we’re adept at applying filters to slice through the layers of misdirection that companies use to limn otherwise ordinary wares. As humans, especially as psychology-aware post-modern ironistas, we routinely deconstruct, diagnose and reflect the “pathologies” through which colleagues, friends and family relate to us. But does all this lying (to use the word in a broadly non-pejorative sense) not make true communication impossible? In that sense, are we not all Kris Kelvins para-dropped onto a strange land?

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