Lying
Dr. Charles V. Ford, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, once wrote a book titled Lies! Lies! Lies! The Psychology of Deceit. Its Chinese translation is Lying: Everything You Don't Know (translated by Gao Zhuo et al., Xinhua Publishing House, 2001). The year this book was published in mainland China was exactly the year I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
That year, for a variety of reasons, I fell into the trap of lies and could not extricate myself. At twenty-two, sunk in spiritual distress caused by poverty and the disappointment of a poor college-entrance exam, I lied everywhere. Later, in order to patch up one lie after another, I had to tell still more lies.
In the end, these lies finally drove my credit rating into negative numbers. My family, my university teachers and classmates, and my girlfriend all regarded me as a habitual liar.
I myself suffered terribly because of it. I always hoped to escape from my past social circle, vanish from sight, and start a new life in a completely new environment where no one knew me. Or to kill myself and end the pain once and for all. I even tried suicide several times, but none succeeded. In the face of death, the young me was a coward (and I am not sure I am much braver now).
What saved me was my older brother. Although he was also deeply troubled by my constant lying, brotherly affection prevailed. He took me in and demanded that I reform.
At the time he had just graduated from Tongji University in Shanghai and was working in Beijing as an English translator. He used the method of overcorrection to cure my habit of lying, requiring me to think, before every sentence I spoke, whether it was a lie.
At that time I happened to spot the book Lying: Everything You Don't Know in a bookstore, so I bought it and read it carefully. I also bought, at the same time, Professor Chen Guying's The Tragic Philosopher Nietzsche and the works of the pessimistic philosopher Schopenhauer.
For me those were extraordinarily painful days. I was unable to get a foothold in society, had no money, and had no face to return to university. I chose to spend my time in the National Library of China, hoping to learn some wisdom from books that would help me climb out of this state I loathed.
A teacher I had at university—one who felt both pity and aversion toward me—apologized to me after her own son went through a similar state in adolescence. She told me that, back then, I was beset by all kinds of troubles and gave them teachers a real headache; at the time she thought something was morally wrong with me and had criticized me improperly. But later she understood that I had had a psychological illness. I also apologized to her for some of my behavior at the time. She comforted me by saying that when young people make mistakes, even God forgives them.
Now I am forty. Looking back, I can finally face, with equanimity, those absurd years of my youth. In those painful days, tormented and in urgent need of release, I read deeply, with total concentration, many books on psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and religion, and performed upon myself a very profound spiritual baptism. For a while I very much wanted to write my own Confession, as Rousseau did, to wash myself clean and begin anew.
This experience left me with a lasting aftereffect: now, deeply afraid of falling into the trap of lies again, I am stiff in dealing with people, overly meticulous and cautious.
Habitual lying is of course a poor way to get on in society, but as Nietzsche said: "For life, we need lies." A person who cannot lie at all has no choice but to live in isolation. Mark Twain had a saying: "Nobody can stand living with a person who is accustomed to telling the plain truth, but thank God none of us has to."
Dr. Charles V. Ford states in the very first chapter of his book: everyone lies.
Politicians, merchants, scholars, swindlers, and every ordinary person without exception have lied. In the biological world, camouflage is also ubiquitous. As people often see in the news, those religious leaders who claim to be "speakers of truth, speakers of reality" also lie constantly. Dr. Charles V. Ford says that, for human beings, learning to lie and to detect lies is an indispensable task.
For several years I lived strictly according to the Buddhist ten precepts (abstaining from killing, stealing, sensual misconduct, divisive speech, harsh speech, false speech, seductive speech, envy, ill will, and delusion). For a while I even stopped using a mobile phone altogether. As a result, only three friends were left around me; virtually everyone else stopped associating with me.
Because, when I was with them, I did not know how to talk, and in the end could only replace words with silence. I felt that every sentence I was about to blurt out, if I thought about it seriously, might amount to divisive speech (sowing discord), harsh speech (filthy or abusive language), false speech (lying), or seductive speech (flattering pretty words); and the opinions I expressed might also be laced with my own envy, ill will, and delusion. To avoid making mistakes, I simply stopped talking.
One can imagine how uncomfortable it is to be with someone who does not speak. So I fully understand the friends who left me; although I am no longer willing to associate with you, I sincerely hope you are well. Over time I gradually grew accustomed to living in isolation, and after that I never again enjoyed socializing with people.
In the end, even the few remaining friends only saw me once or twice a year. I now keep my social activities to within five a year. Apart from seeing patients and my own relatives, I make no new friends.
It is an immensely light thing for a person not to have to lie or detect lies. Even if one cannot completely manage without lying and detecting lies, as long as one filters out more than ninety percent of the lies coming out of one's own mouth and going into one's own ears, life is already quite comfortable. To pay some price for this is, in my personal view, worth it.
Although my present state was caused by my brother's overcorrecting discipline back then, I do not resent him in the least. Because I now live quite well, and I cannot find a better way of life. I thank him for inspiring me to undertake this self-training.
After this self-training lasted for a long time, now even when I go among crowds, I have developed an immunity to lies. This is not to say that I do not lie now; to be honest, I still lie. As Nietzsche said, for life we need lies. As someone who has made a special study of lies, I am also especially good at spotting them.
Those who say they never lie are, in saying so, telling a whopper. As long as a person goes among crowds, he will tell some lies. Sometimes not lying hurts people too much. I avoid lies by avoiding socializing as much as possible.
Former Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing once mentioned in an interview that his teacher, Mr. Ji Xianlin, had said to him: "Do not tell all the truth, and do not tell falsehoods."
For one thing, I do not believe that Mr. Ji himself achieved this throughout his life; for another, I do not believe that Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing could achieve it. I believe that at most they could only try their best to do so.
What the ancients in China loved to call "leaving the world" and "casting off the mortal dust"—in modern terms—probably means a person's becoming independent from society. Society is a cage, intricate, deceitful, and full of lies; to become independent from it is truly not easy.
The French psychologist Gustave Le Bon has a classic work, The Crowd, specifically studying group psychology.
Le Bon believed that once a person enters a crowd, his IQ drops straight away, his morality is deeply influenced by the group, and his emotions are extremely easily swayed. Only when a person becomes independent from the crowd, becoming an individual, is it possible to think clearly and to face one's own heart sincerely.
The reason I write this article today is really that some recent news reports moved me and gave me the impulse to write. I was once influenced by the Buddha; although I did not accept his ideas wholesale, I do recognize many of them.
But, unfortunately, the Buddha's followers through the ages have constantly gilded the lily, embellishing the Buddha to a peerless degree, until they finally molded the Buddha himself—who had spent his whole life struggling against deification—into one of the greatest gods. This is, of course, something that would make the Buddha weep.
A great mass of lies, mixed into a great mass of lofty truths, has produced a spectacular yet self-contradictory doctrine. One slip, and one falls into a crowd of fanatical believers; the human soul is very easily captured.
A certain monk at a famous temple in northern China once said to his disciples: "Are we not the Buddha's slaves?" This offhand remark precisely reflects the true spiritual state of most religious believers.
But I think he did not put it quite right. They are not slaves of "the Buddha"; they do not know whose slaves they are; they merely think of themselves as slaves of the Buddha. As for whether the Buddha in their hearts is exactly the Buddha who actually existed in history, that is no longer important.
Dr. Charles V. Ford says that lies are used not only to deceive others but also to deceive ourselves. We Chinese have a four-character idiom that concisely expresses Dr. Ford's point: deceiving oneself as well as others. Of course, everyone cannot avoid deceiving themselves and others from time to time.
On the other hand, everyone has, as Russell put it, a fear of public opinion. So most people feel uneasy about their own lies. Even the most wicked person, after deceiving others and society, is privately still uneasy. The difference between people on this matter of unease is only one of degree, not of kind.
This is the binding effect of morality on the human heart. As for the binding force of morality, perhaps the higher a person's social standing, the more easily he scorns it.
Recently, Dr. Dacher Keltner, a prominent psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, after decades of research on human behavior, concluded that people in higher social strata are more likely to engage in unethical behavior.
He called the negative effects of wealth and power "one of the most reliable laws of human behavior." Dr. Keltner has studied wealth, power, and privilege for decades; he and other scholars have conducted pioneering research assessing how rich and poor people differ in their responses to various social situations.
Dr. Keltner conducted seven experiments and found that upper-class people are more likely to drive illegally, show a tendency toward unethical decision-making, steal others' valuables, lie in negotiations, cheat to win, and endorse unethical behavior at work.
Of course, this may also be reversing cause and effect. Perhaps it is precisely the differences in how different people respond to unethical behavior that lead to their differences in wealth and social status.
After all, possessing more wealth and status than one needs is itself what Gibran called a morbid need. Most people with such a need fear violating morality far less than they desire what they want.
Dr. Keltner's research matches most people's intuitive impression. From antiquity to the present, as social standing rises and greater temptations appear, honorable men betraying their principles is a recurring occurrence. People who were once honest and reliable stop being honest and reliable once they hold high office and power. People who were once generous and kind also do unrighteous things once they hold high office.
People are multi-faceted, and people change as circumstances change.
And yet—capsizes happen not only in puddles. Over these years I have seen many people, after a glorious run, fall into disgrace.
Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Language that sounds excessively beautiful has inevitably gone through countless layers of polishing, and its authenticity has been greatly discounted.
People who look wonderful are also mostly the product of countless layers of packaging. Fortune and misfortune are intertwined; packaging can indeed package fame, position, and wealth, but it can also harbor enormous risk.
Ordinary working people, although they look a bit crooked, misshapen, and crude, are authentic. Compared with fictitious nobility, the harm of crudeness seems smaller. A person who speaks his needs bluntly is always better than one who, by beating around the bush, cheats improper gains out of others.