Dear Sam Harris: Lying Is Seldom Good But Not Always Bad (Part One)
On Rectitude & Flexibility, Belief & Truth
Years ago, perhaps sometime in the transformative swell of COVID, I decided to start paying for quality information.
It was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
Sam Harris’ podcast Making Sense has been an endless source of nuanced argument, informative dispute, and enlightened conversation.
In this day and age, it has not only made me a better person, but more hopeful about our potential to overcome the exponential threats facing society.
I mention this because, as much as there are three subjects (a paltry amount given the breadth and depth of his show) upon which, I have simply never been able to agree with the verdicts reached by Sam and guests, this, to steal a phrase used by Robert Louis Stevenson in his debates with Henry James, is to all intents and purposes a humble remonstrance against an ethical imperative espoused by a man whose work I am very grateful for.
Shadow boxing for the soul, if you will.
And by putting this out into the world, I hope it generates the kind of mindful contemplation so characteristic of his content.
The subjects of my malcontent?
Guns, Free Will, and Lying.
Before I get into the metaphorical weeds on the latter, there is a consonance in my arguments against all three, a single thread which I hold responsible for a vast, insidious web of effects; a kudzu which has wound it way into the spaces between cultures, races, and people.
Namely: Anything too rigid, anything set against nature’s engine of constant change, anything which compromises our ability to mindfully adapt, be that an idea, creed, religion, fundamental text or some other form of imposed or self-imposed dogma, will always break on the wheel of time.
The annihilation of what refuses to change by what will always change.
For nature always wins.
In the lead up to the rupture, the tension between what is reified and what is evolving, no matter how many centuries or millenia pass, will give birth to, not just serious fallacies of thought and behaviour, but grotesque conflagrations of humanity.
War, genocide, religious death cults, terrorism, armed populations… you name it.
Tumours of one primal pathology: the desperate human search for certainty in an uncertain universe.
But there is no such thing.
Not in belief, not in science, and not, I hope to show, in ethics.
Which brings me to lying.
As much as I had heard him discuss the subject on his podcasts and counter arguments had appeared in mind, it was Sam’s book on Lying, that became the genesis for this post.
When I first began reading, I assumed it would be a call for radical honesty. A modern day repackaging of Kant’s categorical imperative, a universal moral law that is rational, unconditional, and impartial. One applicable to everyone in similar situations and without contradiction.
But it’s not that.
Harris and his guest for a Q&A at the back of the updated book, Ronald A. Howard, director of Stanford University’s Decisions and Ethics Center, the man who held the seminar which first attracted Sam to the idea of the ‘nearly iron-clad principle’ of never lying they champion, do concede that if the Nazis are knocking door-to-door and you’re hiding Anne Frank upstairs, there is a utility to telling a lie.
Even if they offer all sorts of wildly unrealistic, quintessentially academic notions of virtuous rehabilitation for a Nazi/murderer/choose your wicked intruder through the cleansing fires of an honest response, in a sort of quixotic moral utopia.
And as they retreat from these fringe, what they describe as incredibly rare cases, it’s really ‘white lies’ they take aim at.
But bar acknowledging that ‘to speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs.’ And that ‘candor offers no assurance that one’s beliefs about the world are true’, they leave almost entirely alone, to my astonishment, the concept of belief itself, the way in which truth and lies are employed as essential components of perception and motivation.
But more on that later.
Moreover, I was surprised to find, given what I’d heard on the podcasts, that offering an alternative moral life grounded in honesty did not include the very sort of brutal truths that white lies seek to avoid.
Instead they offer an alternative form of evasion, one euphemised as ‘truth-skilling’, which sounds as ambiguous and slippery as some of the answers to their examples.
But let’s begin with Sam’s definition of lying.
To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication. This leaves stage magicians, poker players and other harmless dissemblers off the hook, while illuminating a psychological and social landscape whose general shape is very easy to recognise. People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs - that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or people’s opinions - the more consequential the lie.
And it needs to be made clear, that where pernicious lying comes into focus, and where, at the edge of our day to day dealings, we may be inclined to take the easier path even if not mindfully warranted, Sam’s instructions for honesty really can be transformative.
But this needn’t turn into a moral imperative to behave this way, blindly, no matter the situation. No matter your appraisal of it.
And furthermore, it needn’t mean that telling a white lie is somehow morally defective.
All of this is rooted in ultilitarianism - ‘the ethical doctrine that virtue is based on utility, and that conduct should be directed toward promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number of persons’.
For Sam, social lies simply never have this utlity.
I will also focus on ‘white’ lies - those lies we tell for the purpose of sparing others discomfort - for they are the lies that most often tempt us, and they tend to be the only lies that good people tell while imagining that they are being good in the process.
What could be wrong with truly ‘white’ lies. And in telling them, we incur all the problems of being less than straightforward in our dealings with other people. Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding - these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.
White lies are usually described as ‘little lies which are harmless or inconsequential to others, in order to maintain polite social manners and courtesies, or avoid hurting someone’s feelings,’ according to Psychology Today.
‘Especially, one which is judged to be better than an overhonest alternative, as for example to remain polite in a superficial social exchange, or to choose one's battles’.
Most definitions see white lies as largely in service of this type of tact - that is, ‘a keen sense of what to say or do to avoid giving offense; skill in dealing with difficult or delicate situations’.
But I also think they have another aspect, in service of pleasure, for who amongst us has not been part of an elaborate ruse to surprise someone, either with a birthday party, trip, or present of some sort?
These events are often manifested by clusters of white lies which may even cause a person to suffer temporarily, imagining that they have been forgotten, ignored, not celebrated the way they have celebrated their friends.
Yet the utlility is in the payoff.
Maybe Sam would be that guy and ruin the surprise, but it gets no mention in Lying, so we can only speculate.
Another element of the white lie I can think of in service to pleasure, is humour.
I am not talking about ‘harmless dissemblers’ like stage magicians, or even comedians who employ fictions to provoke laughter, but the everyday anecdotes shared between friends or co-workers.
Who doesn’t embellish their stories to entertain? How far, at the edge of experience, do you go? Are you always conscious of it? An embellishment is, by its very nature, ‘an untruth added to a story to make it more interesting or palatable’.
Do anecdotes and surprise parties also destroy moral wealth? Even if they ‘misrepresent our moral beliefs’?
But let’s deal with Sam’s examples.
The first concerns a gift he’s given by a friend after a trip to Bankgok. He imagines in real time, answering her direct question “Do you like it?” by saying “Yes… definitely. Where else did you go in Thailand?”
And then says:
I have now broken into a cold sweat. I am not cut out for this. Generally speaking, I have learned to be honest even when ambushed. I don’t always communicate the truth in the way that I want to - but one of the strengths of telling the truth is that it remains open for elaboration. If what you say in the heat of the moment isn’t quite right, you can amend it. I have learned that I would rather be maladroit, or even rude, than dishonest. What could I have said in the above situation?
“Wow, does one wear it or hang it on the wall?”
“You wear it. It’s very warm. Do you like it?”
“You know, I’m really touched you thought of me. But there’s no way I can pull this off. My style is somewhere between boring and very boring.”
This is getting much closer to the sort of response I am comfortable with. Some euphemism is creeping in perhaps, but the basic communication is truthful. I have given my friend fair warning that she is unlikely to see me wearing her gift the next time we meet. I have also given her an opportunity to keep it for herself or perhaps bestow it on another friend who might actually like it.
But you still didn’t tell her the actual truth.
Resorting, eventually, to saying you couldn’t pull off the look is an amelioration and essentially indistinguishable from a white lie, merely perhaps a more artful version of it, seeing as what you are really doing is, either via euphemism or switch of emphasis, altering the pitch and frame of your response to avoid hurting her feelings.
Your purpose in telling the truth is not to offend people. You simply want them to have the information you have and would want to have in their shoes.
Even leaving aside the notion you can be certain that what you would want to know in someone else’s shoes, is the same as what they would want to know, the reality is that the truth will offend.
Complete honesty is often brutal, and brutality as this example tacitly admits, is no means by which to achieve social harmony.
Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm is the perfect example of what happens if you approach every social situation with radical honesty. And as much as it is delightful watching him expose the prudish underbelly of LA socialites, I don’t believe it’s a recipe for spreading joy and harmony in the world.
He is constantly in tension with it. Not just unkind, but frequently mind-blind.
Or worse, sociopathic.
And ultimately - selfish.
Like those people we all encountered growing up, who took great pride in saying the unsayable or blurting out tactless judgments in the earshot of their intended targets.
‘I’m not afraid to speak my mind, I’ll say anything’ they would bumptiously declare. But really, these people were simply unpleasant to be around.
No matter that they were ‘speaking the truth’, it was their truth.
And no one wanted to fucking hear it.
I am not denying that tact can play a role in minimizing conflict. Holding one’s tongue, or steering a conversation towards topics of relative safety, is not the same as lying.
It’s still concealing a truth in the service of social harmony, which makes it neither morally worse nor better than a white lie.
Moreover - the instinct to respond with a lie of this colour in awkward situations, speaks to the messiness of reality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, identified something he termed the Ludic Fallacy - the error of applying principles derived from games or simplified models to real-world situations, leading to inaccurate predictions or assessments of risk.
So many of the examples in Lying are the kind of academic explorations that map poorly to real situations, and indeed, with textual answers that have been pondered and prepared with great care, nearly always ignoring the likelihood of follow up questions by a ‘victim’ likely to probe your equivocations.
Moreover, as St Augustine once wrote:
The essence of lying is in deception, not in words; a lie may be told by silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a syllable, by a glance of the eyes, attaching a peculiar significance to a word, and in countless other ways.
Because I’m wondering how the friend who bought the gift views the act of continually backtracking with ever more euphemistic answers, to the final one which maintains your notion of honesty.
How is this path more virtuous than the ‘truly ‘white’ lie? In which, to repeat the beginning of Sam’s mantra “we incur all the problems of being less than straightforward in our dealings with other people.”
And even if, in real time when blindsided and without any preparation, you are able to respond with an effortless piece of ‘truth-skilling’ to land on your final, impeccable, response, I fail to see how that giftor, no doubt stung by the rejection and thus primed for negativity, does not view your answer simply as a way of avoiding admitting out loud the only genuine truth here, which is:
That you didn’t like the gift.
Either way, it hardly qualifies as being ‘straightforward’, and certainly won’t leave her feeling good.
So who benefits?
Part of what I’m getting at here, is that people who subscribe to intractable standards of ethics, not only frequently, but selfishly, place their desire to maintain a consistent, inviolable honesty above the well-being of others.
And judge anyone who falls foul of these standards, extremely harshly.
Sam, in his own words, would rather be ‘maladroit, or rude, than dishonest’.
But does someone who rails against lies, yet never offers the brutal, honest truth really deserve to be able to moralise in this way?
Pride blinds its victims.
At one point during the Q&A, Ronald A. Howard recounts meeting someone at a conference, who was introduced as ‘the guy who always tells the truth’.
“I find it absolutely shocking that anyone would need to mention that,” he answers with no small degree of sanctimony. “It’s like saying he doesn’t steal or murder people.”
But if you seek to make every single lie the Devil, how is unequivocal truth not your God?
Sam offers two more adjacent examples meant to expose the white lie as morally unjustifiable.
Both concern opinions sought by friends. One by a woman who wants to know whether she looks fat in a dress, and another by a male friend of his similarly concerned about his weight.
Most people insist that the correct answer to this question is always ‘No'. In fact, many believe that it’s not a question at all: The woman is simply saying, ‘Tell me I look good.’ If she’s your wife or even girlfriend, she might even be saying, ‘Tell me you love me.’ If you sincerely believe that this is the situaton you are in - that the text is a distraction and the subtext converys the entire message - then so be it. Responding honestly to the subtext would not be lying.
Hiding behind belief, not answering directly even if you suspect the subtext when there simply are no certainties, is still a form of dissimulation. A sleight of hand, a parlour trick, to avoid having to tell the sincere truth about the question asked.
Moreover, it’s once again indistinguishable from a decent white lie, which, if you think she is indeed looking fat, might also involve answering the subtext, with something like, ‘no - that dress just doesn’t suit you’.
This is not only accepting that you don’t know what’s best for her, but given this lack of certainty, that it might be better not to take a risk.
These forms of the white lie and evasive ‘truth-skilling’ are versions of what Daniel Kahneman, the doyen of human behavioural psychology, who so expertly elucidated our susceptibility to cognitive biases and illusions in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, would call substitution:
If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 (System 1 is his distinction for mental processes that are fast, intuitive, and emotional. System 2: slow, deliberate, and rational) will find a related question that is easier and will answer it.
But let’s go on.
Sam gives some detail to his responses:
In fact he was probably just asking for reassurance…however, I’m more comfortable relying on the words that actually come out of a person’s mouth, rather than my powers of telepathy. So I answered my friend’s question very directly: ‘No one would ever call you ‘fat’, but if I were you, I’d want to lose twenty-five pounds.’ That was two months ago, and now he is fifteen pounds lighter. Neither of us knew that he was ready to go on a diet until I declined the opportunity to lie about how he looked in a bathing suit.
Back to our friend in the dress: What is the truth? Perhaps she does look fat in that dress, but it’s the fault of the dress. Telling her the truth will allow her to find a more flattering outfit. But let’s imagine the truth is harder to tell: Your friend looks fat in that dress, or any dress, because she is fat. Let’s say she is also thirty-five and single, and you know that her greatest desire is to get married and start a family. You also believe that many men would be disinclined to date her at her current weight. And, marriage aside, you are confident that she would be happier, and healthier, and would feel better about herself, if she got in shape.
A white lie is simply a denial of these realities. It is a refusal to offer honest guidance in a storm. Even on so touchy a subject, lying seems a clear failure of friendship. By reassuring your friend about her appearance. You are not helping her to do what you think she should do to get what she wants out of life.
He makes no suggestion for a specific answer to the question at that point in time, but even if you believe that what your friend is looking for goes beyond someone just giving her a bit of confidence, and isn’t seeking to have it torn to shreds by someone in the name of their ethics an hour before she’s goes out to dinner, the best utlity of action would be to, surely, at least wait to impose your reality on her.
And what do you say in the meantime?
When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives - about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world. Unless someone is suicidal and otherwise on the brink, deciding how much he should know about himself seems to be the quintessence of arrogance. What attitude could be more disrespectful of those we care about?
Didn’t you just agree with your friend that he’s fat and tell him to lose 25 pounds because you judged this was best for him?
And what about this woman?
The hypocrisy is clear - telling people our truths because we think they need to hear what we believe is the best thing for their present and future is also about judging how much they should understand about their own lives.
You are always making this assumption if you weigh your answers based on utilitarian outcomes.
Regardless, and leaving aside that telling this woman she’s fat involves the kind of meddling that would make Frasier Crane blush, let’s say you do what Sam advises.
You tell her she looks too big, and suggest she lose some weight to get the most out of her life.
Perhaps you catch up with her, six months later, and she is waif thin and looking exactly how you imagined she should.
Wow, you smugly think, in the bosom of the kind of post-hoc rationalisation that always accompanies narrative fallacies, I had a hand in that, I really deserve credit for this truthsaying and my unimpeachable ethical standard of never lying.
Yet you later learn when she is admitted to rehab, that all you really did was gift her a complex that led to an eating disorder, or an addiction to Ozempic.
Proponents of radical honesty often use the sun beam analogy, i.e things out in the open are disinfected by the sun’s glare, but the sun also burns what it touches for too long.
Just as much as lying denies our friends access to reality and ‘their resulting ignorance might harm them in ways we did not anticipate’, reality, or more importantly, our reality, can also harm in ways we did not anticipate.
A white lie is often accepting, not only that you don’t know what’s best for everybody else, but that you don’t even have all the information at hand to be able to judge what they’re truly after - whether in this case, your friend is even looking for a truthful response - and therefore, acting under this uncertainty, not imposing your beliefs on them.
Which are always provisional.
In the few times in my life I have encountered someone who claims they never lie, either to themselves or the world at large, I have instantly felt suspicious. Unable to stop wondering, if they have not already violated their puritanical principle on both counts.
I fear a lie at the heart of it, too - that the concern the purveyor of a so-called radical honesty purports as an act of compassion is really about adhering to an intractable ethical standard which makes them feel morally superior.
In the domain of the personal, I will later argue that it is not only impossible to never lie to yourself, but that to do so would not always be beneficial.
In doing some additional research for this post I discovered that the psychology of lying incorporates more colours than just white to cover the different dimensions, varying by the degree to which they benefit, or harm, the individual or the world around them.
White Lies:
Harmless, trivial lies told to be polite or avoid hurting someone's feelings. They are often told to maintain social harmony or protect someone from a potentially painful truth.
Grey Lies:
A mix of altruistic and selfish motives. They might be told to benefit both the liar and the person being lied to.
Red Lies:
Lies motivated by spite, revenge, or a desire to harm others, even if it also causes harm to the liar.
Black Lies:
Selfish lies told to protect oneself from trouble or gain a personal advantage, often at the expense of others.
Orange Lies:
Lies told so often that the liar begins to believe them, and their rhetoric becomes convincing to others as well.
Black lies then, might cover the only situations where Sam acknowedged saving Anne Frank might have a noble value. But he uses it as a last resort, analagous in Lying, to using violent force when all other avenues are exhausted.
Yet instances where lying is necessary for safety are far more ubiquitous that he claims.
What do you hope your teenage daughter does if someone - clearly mentally unstable - approaches her in the street asking for a lighter, which she has in her bag?
There is a warning sounding in her stomach, urging her to leave.
At this point, any sane human being would have one overriding priority in service of this instinct: To engage as little as possible. You cannot simply ignore them, as you risk antagonising with your rudeness.
In fact the quickest, most efficient response, with the greatest utility, is to lie and simply say ‘no, I’m sorry’ or even just ‘sorry’ with a shake of the head, and walk on.
Not ‘yes, but I’m not going to give you one.’ Not reaching for subtexts or equivocation. Not even ‘No, you’re scaring me’, because you are inviting further interaction, with all the attendant risks.
If you, as her parent, later discover this man was arrested for attacking someone on the same street, are you or the girl likely to be in bed that night worrying about the lack of adherence to a templated, quasi-religious ethical standard?
One doomed to fail when it comes up against the messiness and uncertainty of reality over time?
Morality is simple in academic discussions, but for the man in the street, necessity holds a far greater sway.
You can map this situation to a girl outside a club being approached by someone with the same ruse. One that does have a subtext - as a means to signal attraction and start conversation.
Very few girls, either for their own safety or even the well-being of the person in question, will brutally shoot down their suitor. Far easier, and I believe kinder, to simply say ‘No’, whether there is one in your handbag or not.
This is a softened form of rejection that the interested party will understand, without risking his or her humiliation.
Even in situations to do with medical diagnosis, Sam holds lying of any colour to be morally abhorrent.
My grandad, recently departed, spent the last few years of his life in a nursing home with increasing dementia. Yet his personality still shone through in so many ways. He would tell us, smiling, that he’d bought a Ferrari, or been appointed CEO of the nursing home, or that he had a new girlfriend.
He seemed far happier living these lies than the reality of his situation, so who would ever benefit in trying to puncture these fictions?
It would have been nothing short of a travesty in my mind to make an ethical point of exposing how untrue his claims were, far better to play along with his rare happiness and tell him his Ferrari is safe when he asks where it is.
In defense of Sam, he would probably say that this is an inconsequential lie, and that my Grandad’s well-being doesn’t ‘demand a correct understanding of the world or people’s opinions’.
But it is still an example of a lie with noble utility.
Let’s say you’ve just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and have not had time to even begin to be able to process it yourself, let alone determine who you want to to tell and why, and someone asks if you’re ‘ok’ as ‘you don’t look great’.
What do you say in a superficial exchange, presuming at this point that you are even mindful enough and not lost in a sudden rush of impending doom and fear, to be able to even think about your response?
Is brushing it off with ‘I’m fine, thanks’ even if you are very far from it, morally abhorrent?
‘No’ would elicit more questions. ‘No’ would engage.
Perhaps it would be ethically magnificent to proclaim at that moment you have cancer to the first person who asks, but I doubt it is what you would really feel like doing.
And that, in itself, would make the very declaration of truth as you act against your heart in service of your desired identity, part lie.
You don’t owe any stranger your honesty just because they ask you for it.
Sam offers examples of people diagnosed with terminal conditions such as MS and, sadly, his grandmother with cancer, who didn’t reveal her diagnosis. Her husband, Sam’s grandfather, knew of it and decided to play along with her deception, but for most of the family, ‘she checked into hospital for “arthritis” and never returned’.
Think of all the opportunities for deepening love, compassion, forgiveness, and understanding that are forsaken by white lies of this kind. When we pretend not to know the truth, we must also pretend not to be motivated by it. This can force us to make choices that we would not otherwise make. Did my grandfather really have nothing to say to his wife in light of the fact that she would soon die? Did she really have nothing to say to her two children to help prepare them for their lives without her? These silences are lacerating. Wisdom remains unshared, promises unmade, and apologies unoffered. The opportunity to say something useful to the people we love soon disappears never to return.
I recently read The Mindful Body by Dr Ellen J. Langer, a renowned social psychologist and Harvard professor.
Dr Langer is someone who has spent her life studying the effect of placebos and the power of the mind in shaping our health, behavior, and perceptions of reality.
At the start of The Mindful Body, she reveals her mother was also diagnosed wth terminal cancer.
At this point, Ellen radically intervened - shutting off her friends and family members access to her mother, at the time because she had an unexplored instinct that negative truths might manifest the kind of fatalism the doctors and their terminal diagnosis engendered.
Instead, she writes:
I stubbornly tried to keep her spirits up and pretended that the nightmare would pass. A colleague of mine once said that I marked the edge of the optimism continuum. Perhaps that’s a polite way of saying that I was in denial…then the most amazing thing happened, my mother’s cancer vanished.
The problem was, the treatment had taken a huge toll.
Because she wasn’t supposed to survive, the doctors hadn’t worried about her life after cancer. Not having had her limbs exercised while she was in hospital, she was too weak to walk once she returned home and was confined to a wheelchair, which made her even less healthy. I was struck by how people treated her. While I saw my mother’s recovery as testament to her strength, everyone else saw only persistent weakness. They assumed the cancer would come back and she’d be in the hospital before long. They were right.
You can imagine a family member privvy to the details of the initial diagnosis, one who believed that it was not only ethically dishonest for her daughter to pretend it will ‘all be ok in the end’ given its terminal nature, but moreover, rather than live a pretense of survival, her mother should have spent those months engaging in the kind of heartfelt activity and moves towards closure Sam craved from his grandparents.
Yet this imposed reality - albeit one with good intentions - could have led to significant stress, thereby having a profoundly negative effect on her psychology, and so her health.
And what a tragedy that would have been.
Of course, we can’t know for certain that the remission was caused by a change of attitude, or that the second time around it was indeed the context which overwhelmed her mother, but the fact it did happen, for Ellen, was crucial in forming her belief that our psychology is a significant determinant of our overall health.
I could see how this dramatically affected my mother’s state of mind. I watched as the world of medicine took away her sense of control, how it made her feel sick and weak even when the cancer was gone. I saw how the diagnosis became a label that defined the way she was treated by doctors, nurses and people outside the hospital. My mother was no longer the vivacious, beautiful woman I’d known my entire life. She was a helpless cancer patient anxiously awaiting whatever treatment the medical world would try next.
Even ignoring the power of our beliefs to shape us for a moment, there are plenty of people who, when diagnosed, don’t want to suffer the transformation in people’s attitude towards them: the pity, the importunate concern, the infantilisation.
As Sam suggests, there is a cost to telling, or living, a lie. But who are we to tell other people how they should behave in the face of the kind of horror we can barely imagine?
Moreover, to do so in the name of a proclamation, a prudery masquerading as morality; the lie of prioritising the identity and ego one has tied up in a rigid imperative to never lie, no matter the circumstances, feels like a selfish act.
Never mind the arrogance associated with being certain that your ideas about it are indeed the real truth.
Even medical professionals, as this example demonstrates, are somewhat neutered in their ability to help by placing too much emphasis on truth with a capital ‘T’.
“Perhaps physicians,” Dr Langer writes, “like the rest of us, would be more effective if they accepted uncertainty as the rule, rather than the exception….The language of illness, which for the most part is rooted in a biomedical model of the body (and thus ignores the power of the mind), creates an illusion of symptoms as stable and unmanageable. As a result, people quickly adopt stereotypical responses and behaviours that are in line with what they think they know, without questioning the medical diagnosis and acting differently. It is in this manner that labels corresponding to chronic conditions rob people of personal control and prevent the possibility of optimal health and well-being.”
We have arrived at last to the subject of belief, startlingly absent from a book on lying.
These examples, and so much more of Dr Langer’s fantastic work, show just how much expectation is a significant factor in treatments, where lying to yourself about their efficacy can lead to tremendous effects.
Our very perception is often a lie.
Because perception is not about truth but survival.
Dr Padriag Gibson writes on Psychology Today.
In psychotherapy and psychological treatment, the therapeutic effect of expectations has been repeatedly studied, and it turns out that expectation is a significant factor influencing the outcome of psychological treatments (Sirigatti, Stefanile, & Nardone, 2008), and the effectiveness of therapy is built on the expectation by the patient that it will work (Wampold, 2001). Researchers are even looking into ways to evoke and encourage this kind of helpful self-deception (Gibson, 2021, 2022; Nardone, 2015; Nardone & Watzlawick, 1990).
One of the major investigations that came out of Ellen’s newfound belief in the power of the mind was something called the ‘counter-clockwise’ study, in which they took a group of 80-year-olds (“who were not modern day 80-years-olds”, she revealed on Dr Andrew Huberman’s podcast, Huberman Lab, “where 80 is the new 60, but old”) and told them, over the course of several weeks, via a retro-fitted retreat and prompts to their behaviour, to manifest a spectacular lie - that they were their younger selves.
So they talked about things from the past as if they were just unfolding. The results were incredible. Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger.
But the issue goes far deeper. As the name of her book suggests, Dr. Langer’s main concern is with mindfulness.
The simple process of noticing things. When mindful, we notice things we didn’t notice before, and we come to see that we didn’t know things we thought we know as well as we thought we knew them.
She shares my concern that pre-packaged templates of rigid behaviour might close your mind off to possibility, that science teaching probabilities as certainties, or ethical imperatives that brook no violations, cause us all to give up control in our lives by the way we respond to events.
Thereby leading to mindlessness.
We should recognise that everything changes, that everything looks different from different perspectives, that uncertainty is the rule and not the exception. When you know you don’t know something, you pay attention. Identifiying choices you are otherwise blind to.
Schools teach absolute answers. And that the world is constant and will stay that way. That certainty leads us not to notice.
Our perception is malleable.
Our very beliefs and health are malleable.
And we must use all that we can to exploit them, mindfully, in the best possible way, for the greatest possible good, rather than clinging dogmatically to reassuring, but ultimately meaningless, certainties.
Even if it means telling ourselves lies.
More on helpful self-deception, mindful flexibility, belief, lies, and uncertainty, in Part Two, coming soon.