This is Our True Superpower

The Netflix series 3 Body Problem envisions a scenario in which a more advanced alien civilization, originally seeking to co-existing with humans, decides they must instead destroy us because they've learned that we are capable of lying. Even our ability to invent fictional stories, like the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, frightens them.

Of course, most of us don't consider storytelling in the same category as lying, but from the perspective of these aliens, who apparently cannot deceive one another because every mind is fully open to every other mind, do not see a difference. They don't understand that when we tell our stories, everyone is in on the "deception." We know that what we are hearing is not technically true, even if it is true at some deeper level.

That said, the alien's have a point. I mean the incredibly straight-forward "Thou shalt not lie" is one of the Christian faith's Ten Commandments. Chronic lying is the death of marriage and friendship. No one will hire a known liar. We teach our children that lying is wrong. Making the mistake of trusting a liar can be deadly.

On the other hand, we know that even the most moral of us occasionally lie. Researchers find that the average person lies an average of 1-2 times per day, 60 percent of us lie at least once during a 10 minute conversation, 40% lie on their resumes, 90% lie on their online dating profiles, 50% of teenagers admit to lying to their parents. I got these statistics from this online article, which provides a solid looking list of sources, but I remain suspicious because I don't know the organization that published the article. And besides, we are all know that beneath the veneer of objectivity, statics can be the biggest liars of all.

Lying is a bad thing, even a frightening thing, although we must consider that the vast majority of lying is done to avoid punishment or to protect ourselves or others from harm. So is it really such a bad thing? I'm guessing, for instance, that those teens would lie a lot less if they weren't worried about being punished, which tells us something about the weakness of punishment as a tool of motivation. Our daughter once told a lie that made herself look bad in the eyes of others in order to protect her girlfriends and, frankly, I couldn't feel prouder.

Unlike those aliens, humans have always lived in a world of deception, if not outright lies. And the truth is that on a day-to-day basis, we're pretty good at knowing when we're being lied to. For instance, most of us instinctively know that boastful people are trying to "lie" about their insecurity. We understand that a shy person is likely vulnerable. We can usually tell the difference between a genuine smile and a phony one. Of course, there are times when the lie is convincing or the lair so trusted that we're deceived, but most of the time, especially when we are face-to-face with a person, we adults are pretty good at sorting out the truth from the lies. And part of that is because, most of us, most of the time, are pretty terrible liars.

In his triumphantly uplifting book Humankind, Rutger Bregman writes, "Humans . . . are anything but poker-faced. We constantly leak emotions and are hardwired to relate to the people around us."

Those of us who work with young children see this every day. It takes practice to "hide" our emotions, thoughts, and feelings, a skill that these new humans have not yet learned. Their emotions leak out in every facial expression and body movement: they are incapable of "lying" about their sadness, anger, frustration, and delight. Later, sadly, they will learn society's lessons about avoiding punishment and protecting themselves from ridicule ("Don't be a baby!"). As Bregman points out, however, most of us never get very good at stopping the leaks, the "lies" we try to tell about our inner state.

"But far from being a handicap," writes Bregman, "this is our true superpower." It is what allows us to connect and collaborate with relative ease. I know it's popular to bemoan our inability to "get along," but just look around at what we've done together. Everything we know as the modern world is the product of us being able to look at one another and, despite the prevalence of deception and lies, to discover the truth about one another, at least enough to build a skyscraper, drive on a freeway, or play a board game. And this can only happen because we have learned to read our fellow humans even when they try to deceive us.

The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke believed that human consciousness was built upon our memories. "You have to begin to lose your memory," he wrote, "if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing." 

This makes sense until one considers that even our memories are, to a greater or lesser extent, lies. The more we learn about how memory functions, the more we are coming to understand that what we think we remember are really just the stories we've told ourselves about what happened. Indeed, researchers tell us that the more often we recall a memory the more "fictional" it becomes as we wrap it in stories that help us make sense of what happened. Courtroom lawyers are well-aware of, and often exploit, the faultiness of eyewitness testimony. Phychologists are likewise well-aware of this phenomenon. I recently had lunch with an old friend who firmly let me know that one of my fondest memories of her "never happened." My wife and I have been together for nearly 40 years, sharing countless experiences, yet almost every day we discover that at least one of our memories of a shared event is a "lie," and likely, to at least some extent, they both are. 

Our memories, it seems, are really much more about creative storytelling that we like to admit. This is why I say that we can change the past: we do it all the time. I imagine that this would really frighten those non-human aliens. And maybe it frightens some of us as well, but there is a growing body of evidence that this process of re-shaping and even forgetting is vital to our social development. Kate Eichhorn, author of the book The End of Forgetting, writes, "(F)orgetting can also be incredibly dangerous but there are times when the ability to forget and be forgotten is integral to social transformation." Isn't forgetting the ultimate lie?

And I wonder what those aliens would think about our human capacity for counter-factual thinking, which is a scientific term for lying, when it comes to being creative or innovative. After all, in the broadest sense, when, say, the Wright Brothers had to first tell the "lie" of human flight before inventing a flying machine. In this sense, every new thing under the sun required someone to first have a fictional idea or vision.

But, of course, I'm stretching things here. Unlike those aliens, we know that storytelling, forgetting, and creative counter-factual thinking are not the same thing as lies. But even when it comes to actual lies, we understand, and usually even excuse, lies, "white lies," told to protect ourselves or others, or to promote a greater good. Even our youngest children know that the adults in their lives sometimes say things are are objectively not true and often call us on it or out us in embarrassing ways.

No, what we mean when we say "Don't lie" -- the lies we hate -- are those deceptions that are both intentional and are told for the purpose of harming or taking advantage of another person. And only a small fraction of the lies we tell, according the statistics, are done to gain power or advantage over others. Those are the lies that anger and frighten us. I don't blame a child for lying to avoid a spanking or the loss of a treasured privilege, and readily forgive lies told to protect from harm or to avoid shame: those kinds of lies are, well, human. And while these kinds of lies can certainly cause harm, the harm is not the point. It's the sociopathic lies, the lies told for power, fame, or fortune, that make me afraid.

Not surprisingly, when surveyed, we tend to believe that this kind of lying makes up far more of human nature than it actually does. We tend to be more misanthropic, pessimistic, and cynical about human nature than the actual evidence warrants. Professor of communications and media theorist George Gerbner used the term "mean world syndrome" to describe this phenomenon. He found that the more news one consumes the more likely we are to agree with the statement "Most people care only about themselves." The more we watch or read the news the more helpless we feel. It is a major contributor to stress and depression. What we forget is that "news" is, by definition, something rare, something that diverges from the norm. We want our news to be objective, but, in fact, it tells a bigger lie about human nature because it tends to focus on the exceptions rather than the rules.

"Where's the good new?" we ask. It's hard to find it in the news or on our social media feeds. The internet's algorithms inevitably elevate the lies about who we are as a species because they only care about eyeballs and humans are always attracted to novelty, like car crashes. It's not news that most of the cars are not in crashes. So where is the good news? It's outside our front doors: in our parks and schools and churches. It is out there in the world amongst the other emotionally leaky people, the people who can't help but tell us the truth even if their words and memories and stories don't always adhere strictly to it.

It's out there in the real world, the place with real people, that we learn to tell the difference between the common, normal, everyday deceptions that are part and parcel with being human. It's out there that we find that most of our lies are told with good or at least understandably human intentions. It's out there, away from our screens and "news" that we see that the mean world syndrome is itself a lie. And it's out there in the real world that we learn how to pick out and steer well clear of those relatively rare, albeit dangerous, liars who seek to do harm.

It's out there in the real world that we can rediscover our superpower which is to understand, connect, and collaborate with our fellow humans.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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