By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+
“Herbie, you’d better take stock of yourself. The cops are on their way!”
“Get REAL, Flossie! You might be fooling yourself, but you’re not fooling US anymore! WE know you’re shagging the CEO!”
And something like this?
“You need to get a GRIP, Tyler, or you’ll be back in rehab before Monday morning!”
“STOP LYING to yourself, Megan. The lip implant makes you look like a slab of baloney that got run over by a rolling pin – and you KNOW it!”
And these best of all
“I am learning to be HONEST with myself. And when I get outta here in 20 years, I’m gonna turn it around!”
“I may not always tell the truth, but I am always honest with myself.”
Yes, honesty – honestly! It sounds so basic, doesn’t it? Something that we could just switch on and off whenever we choose. But can we? I’m not so sure. And think about this: if we look at the whole world from top to bottom – from the highest statesman and politicians to corporate climbers, married couples, employer-employee deals, academics, students, social media, drug dealers, and street bums – if you could add it all up, how much truth versus untruth would you expect to hear? 50-50%? I guess there is no way of knowing, but that sounds about right to me. But hey, maybe I’m cynical. Let me explain.
First, did you notice something about the imaginary quotes at the start? Yeah? What did you notice? I hope it was that they had nothing to do with lying to other people, and everything to do with lying to oneself. That’s the subject of this little essay, and it’s why – when everything is factored in – we don’t score as well on the Honesty Scale as you might think. Or hope.
But let’s take a ramble across the whole Let’s Be Perfectly Candid landscape with restroom stops by the Road of Integrity and the Parkway of Full Disclosure. I think we will find – first things first – that there are several different kinds of lies and reasons we tell them: (1) to stay sane (“If I act normal they won’t keep looking at me like that.”; (2) to make sense of the universe “I know it’s all part of God’s plan,”; (3) to deceive in order to gain some kind of advantage or profit (“Man, have I got a deal for YOU!”); (3) to avoid hurting other people’s feelings (“Of course mother knew you were painting a horse. She just said it was a Russian tank for a joke!”; (4) to avoid being caught (“If I can just get rid of the body, I’ll be Ok.”) ; (5) to fabricate, as in spreading rumors about people we don’t like (“Don’t tell anybody you heard it from me, but did you know that she used to work at Shane Shagarty’s Strip Club?”; (5) to exaggerate (“You’ll never guess how big mine is!”; (6) to break promises (“I’m breaking off our engagement because I realize that I’m not worthy of you.” (7) compulsive and just for the hell of it (“Yeah I used to play quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys and before that I was a war hero in Vietnam,…but wait a minute, that might have been after I was Mayor of Chicago.”
And finally to avoid hating yourself (“Ok, so I am weak, repulsive, unattractive, and ineffectual. I am still unique. I am still special in my own way. And I deserve to be happy, goddamn it, even if Nobody understands me. If only they knew what I’m really like, then, by God, they’d change their tune. Maybe, yeah, maybe I am just ahead of my time.”
From the very first, men and women had to rely on fantasy just to get through the night and wait for the god on the golden chariot to ride across the sky, rising out of his fiery birthplace kiln to plaster the heavens with blue enameling and make the seas come to crest and then to crashing by stabbing the waves with his many-bladed rapier. The clouds were the champion’s leftover thoughts, strewn in his wake and changing into the faces of other lesser gods. And then the stars came out after the charioteer went galloping to his lodge in the abyss and blinked down from their special rooms in that spacious night cave where people were forbidden to go. But sometimes the charioteer grew angry, and so did his torchbearers, and roaring darkness swept over the land, and these were the rains and thunders. They too were gods, but how was their rage to be appeased? The wolves howled on the mountains. Did they understand? Maybe the gods were hungry and needed a boar or a goat? Or even a virgin?
That was the science of those days, and it was when mythology was born, mythology which ultimately led to the tradition of Gilgamesh, Hercules, Beowulf, and then to Zeus and Poseidon and Aphrodite, who later, under the Romans, became Jupiter, Neptune, and Venus. And afterwards, from the grape-soaked and debauched beauty of pantheism and the chanting pagans, where humans and the gods argued and fought and made love in olive settings amid great, grey, and sculpture-yielding stones – stones they would call classic one day; then came Christ and the One God and the lesson of Original Sin. And from that marched the centuries of iron orthodoxy and the ‘spiritual’ drumbeat of catechism and the austerity of self-accusing prayer, all done while kneeling in supplication before a man in gilded robes or one in a spare gown, both of whom carried the message of the cross and all its implications, and who sternly assured the supplicants of the beneficence of the elusive but omnipotent and omniscient Redeemer and his ineffable Goodness – this despite the evidence drawn from the naked eye that God never seemed to be in the room or on the street when needed most. And how did Believers respond to being ‘ghosted’ like this? Well, they usually deflected reality by embracing The Plan), which apparently included the Slaughter of the Innocents.
Where was the Deity of the Thin Air? HE, to be precise. Well, we must assume that he was at a celestial cafe working out the details of His Plan.
It was Nietzsche that put paid to the likely folly of all that, and to do so, he simply reversed the order of the platitude: to wit, God didn’t invent us; rather, we invented Him . Now what I am saying is hardly an …ahem…revelation. It’s something that fewer and fewer highly educated and, one assumes, enlightened people now believe.
Of course, we will never know the truth until we die, and then we might not know or remember anything. But – and here’s my point – suppose that all of the devout centuries of gristle faces and padlock eyes, very serious Christian thinkers (who always for some terrible reason remind me of Roderick Usher in Poe’s macabre tale) was based on nothing more substantial than the prehistoric faith in a golden charioteer – just as much a fantasy, just as surely ‘real’, just as most assuredly unreal.
Wouldn’t that mean that for the last Two Thousand years, Christians have been lying to themselves? And if that is true of Christianity, wouldn’t it also probably be true of Islam, and all other religions? Wouldn’t it mean that even the martyrs, those who stood before the murdering crowd and accepted the fire – and did so because they trusted God – in fact suffered for NOTHING?
If this is true – and it probably is – how do we understand any correlation between honesty and truth? Is it ok that these people believed so strongly that death didn’t matter all that much, that it was but a brief pang, a necessary sacrifice along the way to Salvation? Can we just admire them and try to forget their tragic foolishness and how duped, insidiously conned by the jailers who confined them in the faith they were? Should we take inspiration from their last agonized, heroic gestures to the crowd, or should we say How Ridiculous? How could they ever have believed such lies?
Was Joan of Arc being honest with herself, was she crazy, or did angels visit her in a way that they never have visited me in any form I could identify?
Now mark me well. If I say that all of what I have described: Golden Chariot, Zeus/Jupiter, Jesus and Allah, amount to nothing but a self-imposed deception (augmented by heavy-handed coaching from sallow, savagely resolute examiners throughout the ages, what are we left with? And how should we appraise ourselves?
For have we not lied twofold: to the high priests and to ourselves?
I think so. And as governments, bureaucracies, ideologies, and law-makers – to which we could add trendsetters, social media wizards of manipulation, and a mainstream media which makes the vulgar self-promoters seem like modern gurus and standard bearers, should it strike us as odd, that not only are people dishonest out of fear but also out of confusion? If nobody knows what they are supposed to believe (the colossal lie of religion which at least kept a ‘spiritual’ roof over our heads), how can we make ourselves authentic now – and why should we – if everything is probably a lie and everyone who says it most often a liar – then what do we say to ourselves in the shower or when we done are standing, dripping wet, in front of the mirror? If we are bulging with youth – and not scrawny with age – we can perpetuate the lie for a few years more, but in the end, like in Dorian Grey, the mirror destroys the face; the face does not mar the mirror.
As we look back, at least according to my own experience, certain things begin to happen, and in at least two of them a Trojan War is enacted within the self: (1) we know where we failed, and in our most deeply private cubicles of the mind there really is no reason to lie or possibility of doing it, and we must suffer this truth. Stupid people continue to deny and try to cheat this mirror, but often it only spawns a labyrinth of secret behavior to set the heart free and escape the totalitarianism of the facade. For some men (as with a high ranking businessman I found out about) the solution is as simple as visiting the local dominatrix. ‘Kinky he was’, but seen another way, he was trying to be held accountable, even if it meant having the sins beaten out of him.
And then, after this rough room of reckoning, they can go home and start the narrative, the myth, the accepted version once more. And strangely – but maybe not – the people who receive them: wife, husband, sons, daughters, grannies, and grampses, smile with a kind-hearted resignation and silently turn their heads to the darkness. Why? Because they know the lie, having lied to themselves before. Most of them.
So we are all caught up in it together, aren’t we? I show you a lot but not all, because ‘all’ would drive you away. Are you the same, my brother, my sister, my mother, my father?. If you are my lover, my friend, even Jesus my Savior, please let us tell each other lies and rejoice. The truth is the underworld, the rail stations where trains leave without destination and arrive from nowhere, the nightmare when the storm troopers come to drag you out to rooms of confession. You wake of course, but the nightmare, not the waking, was the real truth, the true darkness of the soul’s bleak confrontation with ultimate Unreality. Well wasn’t it? A cloaked meeting, not with God but with existential Fear?
To lie is to remain sane, to protect what we love, and to keep from hating ourselves so much that our hearts become empty streets populated, not by true friends, but by scammers and crooks that always say, “Hey, have I met you somewhere before?” And you hesitate, mumble a bit, and then say, “Yeah, I think we have. Wasn’t it back in Miami…or Chicago… or somewhere?”
And the grins that follow, the boatloads of the dead on the River Styx, the smiles of recognition like the flaming mythical dragons that pull you under with their hooked, buckled, razor sharp teeth and tails that whip you like a medieval priest.
And you start the meeting by saying, “Let me be perfectly honest!” But the whips continue as you bullshit the day away because you have to. Later on, you think, in the shower or before the mirror, when you are alone, you’ll speak up. You try to make that pact with the mirror, who, like God, represents everything. You will speak to yourself as you would to God. But the mirror will give nothing back but your masturbatory face. It’s because you are a liar. God doesn’t know it; how could he? He’s not there. But you are. And the all-knowing mirror watches you until you finally cut the crap and start smirking.
