Are you worried about getting
impregnated by one of the political lies now circulating?
How can you protect yourself,
especially now that condoms are being taken out of your health plan by the
Catholic bishops?
Rick Santimonious (by way of his
billionaire backer Foster Friess) suggests putting an aspirin between your
knees and holding it there.
You could try that, but I don’t
think it’s going to work long term.
A better idea to protect yourself
from all the liars trying to have their way with you is to buy some serious
protection. In this case, protection might be available in writing --
in Pamela Meyers’ book, “Lie Spotting.”[i]
Pamela admits that “we are facing a
pandemic of deception.” She says that we are “living in a post-truth
society,” but she knows what to do about it. Her theory starts with the simple
premise that a “lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance; its power
emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.” Lies, she says, are
“a cooperative act.”
Given that premise, if you can
identify the lies, you can agree to cooperate and believe them or not.
Of course, if you are a Progressive,
you will happily get in bed with Progressive myths, whether they have any basis
in fact or not. Likewise, if you are a Republican conservative, you will
elect to have conjugal relations with the Republican mythology, and enjoy every
passionate minute of it. If you are an evangelical you will choose to hop
in the sack with creationism, rejecting that old ugly Darwinian theory of
evolution. In politics, sex, and religion, facts and science don’t matter;
stories do.
These ideological and religious
myths may or may not be harmful to you but they are qualitatively different from
lies being told to you by people who know they are lying. Progressives,
conservatives, and evangelicals don’t even think they are telling stories.
Meyers doesn't focus on
the kind of political/religious lies and myths that the tellers actually
believe in and the listeners also want to believe in. She focuses on
knowing when you are being lied to by someone who knows he is lying and who is
trying to get away with it.
Her thesis is, that if you acquire a
little expertise in deceptology, you can often detect when you are being told a
lie. Meyers says: “When you combine the science of recognizing deception"
with the art of careful looking and listening, you can avoid collaborating in a
lie.
A few examples from Pamela’s
research:
- When someone starts off by saying “truthfully” or “to
be honest about it,” you are probably going to get told a big fat one.
- Or if they start hedging with words such as “If I
recall correctly…” or “If you really think about it…”
- Another tip off is when a person denies something but
does not use the contractions used in normal speech. For example, “I did
not have sex with that woman.”
Pamela also has some useful
observations about lying in our modern world and its consequences. She
claims that on average you are lied to between 10 and 200 times a day and that
strangers typically lie to you three times in the first ten minutes of meeting
you.
Some lies have serious
consequences. Investors have recently lost almost a trillion dollars
($997,000,000) due to corporate deceptions, according to Meyers.
If you don’t want to go to the
library or send your hard-earned loot off to Amazon to get Pamela’s excellent
book, you can still get a little protection from liars by watching Pamela’s
excellent talk
on TED or by visiting her brilliant blog www.liespotting.com.
It is a good thing to know when you
are being lied to by Ponzi schemers and crooks, but in the world of
political/religious lies where you are sometimes being fed a story by true
believers who hold tight to one myth or another, even Pamela's insights are not
going to offer you fool proof protection. These guys can lie to you with
a straight face, so to speak.
Maybe it's time to get out the
asprin after all.
[i] Pamela Meyer is founder and CEO of Simpatico
Networks, asocial networking company that owns and operates online social
networks. She holds an MBA from Harvard, an MA in Public Policy from Claremont
Graduate School, and is a Certified Fraud Examiner. The quotes in this blog are
from her book, the TED website, and Pamela's blog.
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