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Show THE ZEPHYR DECEMBER 1993 Changing Times PAGE 21 to be glossed over, ignored, treated as if it didn't happen. Apparently our society's taboos function to shield and protect the liar, while censuring the person exposing the liar. When children lie, they are reprimanded quickly. But when adults lie, what happens? Not much, particularly if it's in the public arena. It's been hard since then, not to sec how acceptable the practice of lying has become. A lot more lying is, of course, practiced around election time, than any other time. And we're all too tired from too many recent elections and too much election lying. So we're not going to be looking at any of these election "assertions" here. When liars arc never held accountable for their lying, lying can become an effective way of doing business. Particularly in the public arena. It can be extremely difficult to detect and correct a lie in the heat of a public meeting when an immediate decision has to be made. Differences of opinion, value judgements, political and religious beliefs, ideological persuasions, etc., arc valid areas of disagreement and are not being discussed. This is not an exordse in "politically correct" thinking, unless basic honesty is also on the hit list for correct" vigilantes. Some information is fairly straightforward "facts." We've all had enough philosophy to know that the philosophers can quibble endlessly about the true nature of simple facts. In practical life, it can be demonstrated that a certain car is either black or white, or that a certain amount of money was spent from a certain government account. The kind of lying I am talking about is of this most simple nature. The English language has many effective ways a person can indicate the degree of certainty they wish to ascribe to a statement they make. Using phrases like I think, I believe. I'm pretty sure, etc. gives others lots of dues about how the information should be regarded. Probably some of our conflict about lying comes from trying to expect a very high ideal of honesty in an individual sense, but also knowing how much of what we have comes from some very dishonest actions in our nation's history. An early example is our theft of this country from the native Americans, through lying and broken treaties when direct violence was ineffective or impractical. Our nation still lies about its role in the world. But this is marching into the ideological areas that arc supposed to be avoided. "anti-political- ly By Jack Campbell PUBLIC LYING am worried about the amount of public lying that is being condoned. I am worried that there is no adequate mechanism to counter this lying. I am worried that this lying could ultimately "monkey wrench" the system we are now using. In slower, more leisurely cultures lies and liars are more readily identified and neutralized. and In our rapidly paced culture, where the time of our lives is severely it is very difficult to allocate the time to evaluate the public assertions upon which public decisions may be premised. No one wants to spend time in an endeavor as negative and unsavory as identifying public lies and the people who utter them. We hope that if we just ignore the lies and liars, that things will somehow miraculously get better, that the lies will somehow cease, and we can get on with the more positive and constructive activities of our private and community lives. But when there is no accountability for liars, when their lies are never identified and answered, these lies can form the substance of an infection that can do appreciable harm to a community. An essential aspect a healthy community, is that the community have the capability to talk and argue, agree and disagree, share ideas, explore differences and similarities, in a constructive arena of public discourse. Too much lying can undermine and destroy this most important aspect of community. If we value our community, we need to reframe the way we deal with lying. Taking the time to deal with and counter lies is a necessary part of building and maintaining community. (And of course, spending more time dealing with what we at first thought was a lie, can have the exciting benefit of discovering that what was almost passed over as a lie, is actually the truth.) I over-extend- ed over-committ- TABOOS AND LYING I've wondered if there isn't something more going on with public lying that makes it harder to deal with. I have a hunch that identifying a liar may be one of our culture's taboos. Anthropologists love to discover the taboos of a "primitive" people's culture. Touching or mentioning a taboo is believed to cause dire consequences. Death, disease, accident, both for the person and for the tribe, are possible consequences. How well do we know the taboos that function in our own culture? Several months ago I had an interesting experience with someone lying in public This situation raised an interesting question. ..which is the more serious social impropriety, lying in public when the lie becomes the basis for a public decision, or identifying the lie and the liar after subsequent events dearly demonstrate that it was a lie. In this case the lying was condoned without consequences. There was more disapprobation attached to the identification of the lying, than to the lying itself. Lying in public is supposed 94 West 1st NorthfjMoabT Utah 84532 HU block west of Main StreeOUHl IT'S ELF SEASON AGAIN! Merry Christmas from the Rim Team. RITUALISTIC LYING Another possible source of our ambivalence towards lying is that most of us experience one very mild form of lying many times a day. The standard greeting "how are you" rarely means what is literally said. Very few people using the standard greeting are interested in how you arc. In fact most of the time if you give anything other than the requisite "I'm fine, how arc you," the person asking is cither perplexed at the answer, or is put out that you're wasting their time by telling them even a few words about how you arc. It's always amusing to have someone walk by you in the opposite direction and ask "how are you?" You frequently don't even have time to give the required "fine, how are you?" before they have gone past. An interesting component of the "how are you" greeting is that the second party is almost always expected to lie in response. An insincere greeting requiring an equally insincere response, repeated many times throughout each day, has to have some cumulative effect. One simple result is that it devalues the greeting for those rare people who really DO mean what they're saying, and do care about how others are feeling, and have a few moments to listen. We've all experienced someone having to say, "no, really, how ARE you," when they got the ritualistic "fine, how are you" response by mistake. TIME AND LYING It seems like time is both a partial cure for lying and one of the costs of lying. If something isn't done to reduce the efficacy of lying sodety will have to allocate more of our time to correct the results of lying. To prevent lying, we may have to spend more of our time evaluating what people say in public and spend more time developing healthier ways for the public process to occur. Both require the expenditure of time. My preference as an old maintenance person is to spend time trying to prevent the problem. It's usually easier to prevent a problem than it is to fix it. The tools we might develop to minimize public lying, would be good permanent additions to have in our community building tool box. Life would be easier if other communities had already assembled the tool boxes we need. These aren't available yet. But that means we can have the creative excitement of developing and assembling these techniques ourselves. |