Categories: uncategorized
Date: 28 May 2008 12:00:32
I told a lie.
Truth is important to me. I prefer to be honest, partly because I can't cope with the chess games of inventing a plausible lie and then making sure that everything else I say consistently fits with that lie, and partly because I struggle to tell when other people are lying. In fact I mostly get round that problem using quantum mechanics. Just as Schrodinger's cat could be simultaneously alive and dead so, when certain people tell me something, my brain bifurcates and holds two conflicting notions - the one that I've been told, and the logical negation of that. If I ask person A who ate my cake, and they say it was person B, then my brain seems quite happy to hold on to both the idea that B ate it, and the idea that A is lying and so probably A ate it. Experience gives me a balance of probabilities to assign to these two outcomes - for some people I have a 90% expectation of being lied to, for others it's a 90% chance of them telling the truth. And, just as in physics, sometimes the probabilities collapse and the truth is established. But often it's not, and I just go on not knowing. I suppose that not knowing has become a very familiar state to me and I seem to cope with it very well. (Or maybe not - maybe this permanent dissonance is why I'm completely screwed up. I don't know, so I'll go on considering both options and their relative probabilities).
I don't know if my dislike of lies dates back to this occurrence, or whether it was already present then, but there must be some strong connection, because this experience is so firmly etched in my mind. I'd done something silly and, to cover up, I'd lied to my mum about it. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, she'd been told the truth by someone else. So she challenged me, albeit half-heartedly I think. For various reasons I lied again - I said the other person must have been lying. So far, so depressingly mundane and so mundanely depressing. Now I don't really know what my mum thought - maybe she believed me (and don't mothers usually want to believe their own offspring?) or maybe she knew better. I'll never know for sure now, but at the time I was certain that she didn't believe me. So I knew my lie wasn't convincing her, and yet I felt it was important for me to keep up my pretence. Somehow it seemed important for me to maintain the lie even though she knew I was lying, and I knew she knew I was lying. I remember feeling that very strongly, even though I couldn't remotely understand why, and still can't.
Perhaps it's that incomprehension that's why I'm still concerned about that occasion. But perhaps it's the dissonance between what both parties believed and what they said. I often feel like I'm on the receiving end of that sort of thing - there were many times in my childhood where my brother would lie, either to my face or to my parents, and I would know that he was lying and that he knew it. And even when it was just me, if I told him I knew he was lying he would deny it. He knew, I knew, and he knew that I knew, but he would deny it. Of course he was sensible (in a way) to deny it: by doing so there was a chance he could convince me, but also it was a way he could achieve the usual fraternal aim of destroying his sibling. By creating such a clear cognitive dissonance he could mess with my head. After all, maybe that's why I'm so screwed up now.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately not just because of searching for the reasons for why I'm in such a mess, but also because someone is lying quite vehemently to me at the moment. But unlike those earlier occasions, this time I know the liar is actually deluded. Which, I suppose, means he's not actually lying. Hmm, as I write this I can see a further layer of irony to it all. As I said, I tend to interpret what people say to me in a quantum way, holding contradictory assertions in my head, just with different probabilities. That being the case, what would I say if you asked me who ate my cake? I'm not sure, but it seems quite possible that I'd give one answer one minute, and an opposite answer shortly afterwards, because I will have mulled things over in between times and quite possible adjusted the probabilities for each in the light of that mulling. Which is what I've observed my deluded friend to do quite often: many times I've seen him say two flatly contradictory things to different people within the space of about 10 minutes. And the thing is he's actually something of an expert in quantum mechanics, so it's really quite likely that he has the same approach to believing what he's told as I do. So not only do my childhood's experiences confirm the horrible thought that I am like (and as bad as) my brother, but I can't escape the fact that I am also like my deluded friend.
As I said above, truth is important to me. And that is, of course, what any good liar tends to say.