Deception: Spies, Lies and Forgeries

Abstract

'Everybody lies' is a statement that will be familiar to anyone who ever watched an episode of House, M.D. 1 The notoriously acerbic doctor based his approach to medical cases on the premise that every person, no matter how well intentioned or morally upright, would lie. Sometimes their deceptions were so small that the person telling the falsehood did not quite register their own deception. It could almost be the basis for a joke. Everybody lies. And if you are sitting there thinking 'Well, I don't,' then you are a liar. As human beings, in every language, we have myriad words for lying and we also have a sliding scale for the severity of the deception: 'little white lies', that by their very description hint at purity and innocence, harmless untruths told for good reasons; and at the other end full scale betrayal, words or acts that are a complete violation of another person or sometimes of an entire community. And yet, deception is more than just lying and the ways in which deception plays an active part in our day-today lives is far more complex than telling a few untruths to ease our way through awkward work or social situations. In his essay in this volume, Bariș Mete examines the role of the unreliable narrator in literary fiction, and the act of collusion between author, narrator, and reader that enables this particular form of literary deceit to function. Yet, each time we open a novel, are we not complicit in a deception? The worlds that authors create for us frequently speak to and uncover deeper truths but works of fiction are just that: constructs, that we willingly engage with. Both the historian Daniel J. Boorstin 2 and cultural theorist Ralph Keyes 3 have explored how contemporary society has become increasingly tolerant of dishonesty and deception: we live now in an era in which misrepresentation and believability can flourish at the expense of the truth. High-profile dissemblers vie for headlines: fabulist college professors, fabricating journalists, stonewalling bishops, bookcooking executives and their friends the creative accountants. They are the most visible face of a far broader phenomenon: the routinization of dishonesty […] The gap between truth and lies has shrunk to a sliver. Choosing which lie to tell is largely a matter of convenience. We lie for all the usual reasons, or for no apparent reason at all. It's no longer assumed that truth telling is even our default setting. 4 It is something that many of us are guilty of-that joke again: if you are thinking that you are not, you are probably deceiving yourself. Each time that we add a For most of us that 'Fine' is so ingrained as part of the ritualised formula that it does not even register as a lie. Given the extent of our own deception, it is strange Yet, despite the ease with which deceptions, even old ones, can be exposed, we still engage in deceptive behaviour as part of our being. Even when we are forced to face truths about ourselves, we frequently equivocate and justify, deceiving ourselves if no-one else. The study of deceptio...

The post-fact world in a post-truth era: the productivity and emergent meanings of the prefixpost-in contemporary English

“…Nowadays truthfulness in not in demand and lies are not stigmatised. We are facing the ‘routinization of dishonesty’ (Keyes 2004; Crossley & Sitbon 2016). Culture in general, and political culture in particular, is changing dramatically, and together with the changing reality it shapes the language that describes it.…”