Sent to you by D via Google Reader:
via "Les Confessions" on 20/06/05
Nothing interesting is happening in my life so therefore I thought I would write about something boring at great length as I often do. Thank you. It is easy, but perhaps dangerous to be nostalgic over the past. From computer games to music, things seemed better a long time ago. We forget the crap, remember the gems, and as a consequence things long ago seem unblemished. This is all well understood.
Unfortunately, it is not a complete explanation as to why the (perceived) quality of things has changed over time. It is not sufficient to attribute it entirely to rose tinted spectacles - what if some things have got worse over time? After all, we surely would accept that some things have got better - there is better quality American drama series now compared to ten years ago (well, probably) - so can't we say something's have got worse?
This is all not related to my main point today, but I was thinking back specifically on television. Since we've moved in to our new home, we've been re-"gifted" with scheduled television. We have some sort of rooftop aerial, and one of my friends has one of those free-view boxes. So we have x number of crap TV channels. The only thing I've enjoyed watching has been two Incredible Hulk TV movies (Bixby is a god I tell you!).
Yeah, yeah - TV is now crap. la-di-da. But I'm referring to something specific here, which I was thinking about recently. It was 'The Biederbeck Trilogy'. This was a TV drama (three mini-series) written by Alan Plater and starring James Bolam and Barbara Flynn. The old people out there may
remember (it was first broadcast between 1985 and 1988 the internet tells me, so I can only presume I caught the repeats) - it was genuinely good.
And here's the kicker. It was on ITV.
ITV which has to be, objectively speaking, the worst thing in existence. Even Channel Five is better imho, if only because they show some half-decent American things (erm, like the Incredible Hulk movies and Xena and....erm, Charmed?).
I do not wish to moan again about TV, or say how things used to better in my day (well, if we're defining my day as when I was five). But I wish to speak about one of these Beiderbeck series.
You see, the second one of the three was called 'The Beiderbecke Tapes' and related to one of the main characters ending up with an audio cassette with (presumably) plans to dump nuclear waste in the Yorkshire Dales. The two main characters run around Europe trying to escape the MI5 (or whomever the baddies were, I forget) and bring the tape to the public light.
Now, to spoil the ending (it was twenty years ago, if you've not seen it are you likely to?) it turns out that the tape is fake, and there is no such plan. It's all part of what one of the characters calls misinformation. I can't remember the specifics of how they said it'd work, but basically you can pollute the notion of the truth if you pump out enough lies. When the truth comes to light, things are not so bad compared to what you've been exposed to. Or something like that.
I bring all of this up because I've been thinking about 'the truth' a bit lately.
Throughout my life, I think at one time or another, I've always known at least one (and usually more) person who compulsively lies. The type and reason for their lies varies wildly, but the end result is similar : someone who lies in a "serious" fashion at least daily. By "serious", I am not talking about a serious deception to harm you, or con you, or anything like that. But serious as in "serious departure from the truth".
It is of course acceptable to change very minor details of a story / report if it's necessary. For either brevity or ego-massaging or humour - it's not a problem. So perhaps you can slightly mix-up the chronology of a story so the climax is all the more humorous. You can exaggerate if you feel that your ego needs defending. The woman who turned you down in the bar can be a gorgeous slim young thing as opposed to a slightly minging 7ft' shot-put champion.
This sort of thing is usually OK. We almost expect it. It's like exaggerating on your CV.
White-lies are a different category altogether, I'd say, and are another moral dilemma. I don't want to get into that right now, but suffice to say, it's different.
The types of lies I'm talking about are more fundamental than this. For instance, a friend of mine relayed a story which went something like : "I was on the bus, and this woman started pushing past me. So I said to her 'If you don't get off me I'll pick you up and throw you off the bus'. I was so close to punching her bloody lights out."
Now, I'm almost certain this story didn't happen. I know my friend, and that's not how he behaves. He is, for want of a more tactful term, a pussy and is not the sort of person who would have the guts to do that. I know however that he thinks things like this all the time. So he was probably on the bus, and someone probably did push past him. But that's about it.
As he told me this story all I could think was "Does he even know he's lying?". So much for the mental health of the people I know.
I presume everyone knows someone like this - as I say I always have. Beyond mere exaggeration, beyond white lies, there's just out-and-out fantasy. As a child, I think it's more common to indulge in this sort of thing. There was a study done once which looked at children's ability to lie, shown on some rubbish TV program. A scenario was laid out as such :
A child is told about a wicked witch (represented by a small plastic toy). The wicked witch is looking for a young princess (also a small plastic toy) to kill her / eat her / whatever. The child is left with no doubt that the witch is evil, and the princess is good and innocent. The princess (i.e. the toy) is then hidden in one of a number of boxes. The child is shown this. The
witch then asks where the princess is.
Now, with very young children the child immediately tells the witch where the princess is. They do not comprehend (well, this is what it is assumed) that you can lie. The child tells the truth, blindly and unquestioningly. The "defence mechanism" that is lying has perhaps not developed. Of
course, it could just be that the child has no conception of good or evil, but it's a reasonable enough assumption.
After a certain point in a child's development (I can't remember the cut-off point they mentioned) the lying reflex develops and children gain the ability to lie. So with slightly older children (say, five years old, I forget) - the child immediately misdirects the witch so she can't find the princess. It's easy to theorise what's happened to the child's mind - an increased ability to imagine - or have and communicate abstract thoughts about things that are not real (i.e. scenario's where the Princess is in Box A, not Box B).
From my limited experience once this ability develops in some children it is rapacious. Children then lie about everything. From the totally ludicrous (imaginary friends, adventures which could not have occurred, the fantastic generally) to the mundane and banal (what they had for breakfast,
things that happened at school and so on).
A lot of lies are very easy to identify (even if they are logically plausible), especially if the liar themselves are unskilled (as is often the case). Most people cannot make up stories as quickly as they can remember real events and thus the most obvious sign is the frequent "Ummm..."
and "Err..." which will crop up frequently.
But most lies seem to stem from the same motive : the desire to look better/different in front of others (as mentioned before).
Some children grow out of this, as they realise there's no point as their lies gain very little advantage. Perhaps moral teachings have some effect, and people start to feel guilty about lying. Perhaps the stress of being caught out raises the "costs" of lying over time. It doesn't really matter.
With others, they have less reason to lie. If your life is actually full of excitement and adventure, why bother lying? Or perhaps the reverse. Life is bad enough without needing to lie. As Marvin says : "Making it up? Life's bad enough without making any more of it up." This is kind of how I feel. I don't have any need to lie because my life is pathetic enough as it stands.
So much for liars. But as the philosopher Homer Simpson once said : "It takes two to lie Marge. One to lie and one to listen."
This is obviously meant as a joke but is actually very profound. I am interested here in how lies are dealt with by the recipient. You see, on many occasions I have been called paranoid. And perhaps that is correct.
I started considering how I deal with information that is new to me. It is not that I instantly actively disbelieve anything I hear, merely that I have no opinion on much of what is said. I blame these liars I have encountered through my life. They have worn down what little trust I once had, I think.
So, someone tells me something. It could range from the incredible to the mundane. There's a mental checklist that one goes through :
- Does it really matter if this is true or not?
- Does this contradict something else I already know/think to be true?
- Does this sound reasonable?
- Does this person have a history of reliable information previously?
In roughly that order. And the thing is, I generally don't proceed past #1. So someone says something. Most of the time, it makes no difference to my life whether it's true or not. You might still form some sort of opinion on whether it's likely or not, but most of the time, it gets bunged into some sort of mental database as "some stuff you've heard".
The internet is particularly bad for this sort of thing. To an extent, it's all lies as people hide behind handles / nicks / avatars / etc. You're not supposed to post under your real-name, and almost by definition it starts out with a lie. But more than this, people then start making stuff up. So I've been on a mailing list where someone has claimed to work for Industrial Light and Magic so they can hold some additional weight in some silly debate. But thankfully, the internet means I lean towards a specific attitude to the truth : most of the time, it doesn't really matter.
So the guy who claimed to work for ILM. Did it matter? When he
was eventually unmasked as a fraud (quite quickly, as he was an awful liar, and was about 15) a lot of people got very angry. I'm not really sure why. It didn't make any difference to me. He was an idiot before this was proved, and where he worked had no bearing on how much of an idiot he was. Obviously in some debates or discussions someone might rely on first-hand knowledge to
make a point (which is fine), but you'd be a fool to rely on that, especially if they weren't willing to back it up.
But the issue is, I'm not sure this cavalier attitude to the truth is healthy. If nothing else it leads to very stupid sentence construction. I have to preface everything with "Well, so-and-so tells me..." or "I heard once" or something equally inelegant. Why? Because I do not know if these things are true.
This radical scepticism goes so far that unless I have personally witnessed something I am not sure I count it as true. This I cannot consider as a sustainable approach.
You see, the most important thing to a person is what is often termed their 'world view'. The way they see things, the things they believe, the approach they take. It is perhaps, more than anything else, who we are.
Parts of your world view will be based on moral axioms, not facts. So as I said previously, I do not agree with torture. I am disinterested in how effective it is, but as an aside I believe it is probably not a particularly useful tool in either behaviour modification or information extraction. A tortured man will not behave well, and a tortured man will tell you whatever you wish to hear. But primarily, my opposition is a moral one. Even if you
proved that you cut re-offending rates by 90% by the use of thumbscrews, I would still not want torture to be used.
But this factual/moral split can be dangerous. Things get intertwined. People often don't realise why they believe certain things. The torture thing is a neat utility/morality split, but in other areas it's not so clear. Take something like public transport. I prefer public transport. I'd prefer it if there were less cars. It's almost a moral point for me.
But what if someone proved cars were less polluting than buses? That cars were more cost effective society-wide, and were better for community cohesion. What would I say then? Would I know what to believe? Would I change my opinion? I'd like to think so, but it's difficult. What if it was decisively proved that violent TV did people make more violent? Would that censorship easier to justify?
In a less-grand sense, obviously I have various "gut feelings" about certain things in my personal life. Which are based, on some level, on facts. And if I'm increasingly indifferent between truth and lies in other people, how
the hell is my world view being shaped? In my sleep are certain things being marked as "true" without my realising? I honestly don't know.
Does it matter if people lie? With my friend and the bus story. I worry. Not because it matters really (although it's embarrassing when people lie in a very obvious fashion) but because I genuinely wonder if he knows the difference between reality and unreality. Perhaps one day he'll
casually hit some woman in the face and then not realise what he has done?
But should I be angry with him? For furthering mistruths? Once again, I ask : Does it really matter?
The end of Moore's Watchmen is discussed here. There's a quote I wanted to mention.
In the long run, truth is more valuable than peace. Truth endures. Peace never has.
I found this an interesting concept. I'd say that people always have a duty to act in a "good" fashion - i.e. doing no harm, helping others where they can, that sort of thing. But without wishing to sound like a self-righteous arsehole, do we have a similar duty to the truth?
I think so, but I doubt others agree.
Things you can do from here:
- Subscribe to "Les Confessions" using Google Reader
- Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favourite sites
No comments:
Post a Comment