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“Why?”
“Because it seems re...
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“That’s it, exactly. When people tell complex stories, they don’t usually tell them in a perfect progression from start to finish.”
“Another tell is when someone gives a thirty-word answer when ‘absolutely not!’ would suffice.
“Pauses in answering can be important too. If I asked you where you were on May 7th, 2008, you’d have to pause and think, probably for a long time, to have any chance of giving an answer. But if I asked you if you had murdered someone on that date, you could answer ‘no’ immediately. Why? Because you know that you’ve never murdered anyone. On any date.”
“One much too complex for a human to comprehend. Which is what I wanted, actually. If no one knows how it works, it can’t be circumvented.”
lying to grease the skids of social interaction is an old habit that’s hard to break.”
“POLITICS (noun): Poly, meaning “many” plus Tics, meaning “blood-sucking parasites.” —Larry Hardiman
“I believe that any politician who comes to power, in part, through his skill in debate and public speeches, who is agile in handling questions at news conferences, with a glistening TV or radio image, has the conversational talents to be a natural liar.” —Paul Ekman, Telling Lies
Al Capone was responsible for the slaughter of countless men, but he went to jail for tax evasion. It was the only thing they could ever pin on him.”
Lying is evil, but lying is also compassionate. And necessary. It’s an integral part of the very fabric of our society. If you tear it away completely, society collapses. For any number of reasons. On the
first level we have the relatively harmless lies—relatively harmless—which are the cement that holds society together. Strip them all away and things get ugly fast. Does your little girl need to know what you really think about her artwork? Or that her dog isn’t still alive and running free on a farm somewhere? Or the truth about Santa and the Tooth Fairy?”
life is a series of negotiations,
Negotiations with your husband, or partner, or friend, or children. Negotiations for homes, and cars, and who’ll bring the potato salad
to the potluck dinner. That’s the second level of disaster. Negotiation is a game a lot like poker, where not showing y...
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‘a diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.’”
Alfred North Whitehead had written, “It is the business of the future to be dangerous. The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”
There is something called the Butterfly Effect. From chaos theory. In chaotic systems, the tiniest variation in starting conditions can lead to a wildly different endpoint.”
“We often want to be misled. We collude with the lie, unwittingly, because we have a stake in not knowing the truth. It may not be in the interest of a mother with a number of very young children to catch her mate’s lies that conceal his infidelity. Everyone but she may know what is happening. Or, the parents of a preadolescent using hard drugs may unwittingly strive to avoid spotting the lies that would force them to deal with a possible failure as parents, and which would bring about a terrible struggle. The targets of lies may also collusively want to believe the liar to avoid recognition
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—Paul Ekman, Telling Lies
got anywhere. Shared mythology, shared delusion, is the only thing that can unite huge swaths of humanity into common purpose. Untold millions of us once believed in sun gods, animal gods, and idols. Fake news, fake news, and fake news.
Every country has its own propaganda machine, and generates its own disinformation campaigns.”
“Shared belief in an absurdity is a much better indicator of loyalty than shared belief in the truth. And it’s a much better way to create group cohesion. If a leader asks you to believe that the sky is blue, and you do, what does that prove? The truth is easy. But if he requires his followers to believe the sky is green, they quickly distance themselves from non-believers and become firmly united in a shared delusion.”
“And the more people who believe in a shared delusion,” she continued, “the more powerful it becomes. A hundred-dollar bill is, intrinsically, entirely useless. It’s nothing but a tiny green piece of paper. And yet, we’re willing to give up items of actual, intrinsic value, like food and clothing, to get this silly scrap.
It only has value because everyone across the globe now shares the delusion that it has value. But most of us don’t even realize it is a delusion anymore. Human beings are very good at accepting shared mythology as fact.”
“And what is advertising if not fake news?”
“The idea of proposing marriage with a diamond ring seems like a tradition so old, and so steeped in our culture, you’d think it was one of the Ten Commandments delivered to Moses on Mt. Sinai. But it’s a recent, man-made creation. De Beers brilliantly fostered this shared mythology, taking a relatively abundant, relatively inexpensive item that wasn’t selling, and convincing the public over decades that a diamond engagement ring was an indispensable sign of true love. This may be fake news, but try proposing to your true love without one. You’ll quickly find yourself swimming against a swift
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“But that doesn’t change the facts. People need to be led.
“You may be a wolf,” said Paige, “but people are not sheep.” Kayla laughed. “You of all people—a Christian—can’t really believe that. How often have you said the words, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ in church? If the Lord is your shepherd, what does that make you?”
“Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You have to admit things—for example, about the sources of your own power—that will anger allies, dishearten followers, or undermine social harmony. “The most powerful scholarly establishments—whether Christian priests, Confucian mandarins, or Communist ideologues—placed unity above truth. That’s why they were so powerful. As a species,
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‘Don’t despair, the world is far from perfect, but it’s doing much better than you think.
‘Worldwide poverty levels are lower than ever, yet we all believe the opposite. To learn why things are better than you think, go to our website, or read, The Rational Optimist, Factfulness, Enlightenment Now, or Abundance.”
“The case for optimism. The need to turn off the news and politically charged social media feeds, or at minimum, to not let the media manipulate emotions on such a deeply visceral level. I also think it might be eye-opening to compare the daily sky-is-falling pronouncements from politicians and the media to the actual results, which are often the opposite.”
Each represents an example of horrendous judgment. Like Einstein’s teacher lamenting to his father that little Albert would never amount to anything. Western Union saying that the telephone had no value. A professor of military strategy commenting on the airplane, a new invention, declaring that it was useless for military applications. Or the chairman of IBM in 1943 predicting a worldwide market of only five computers.” Paige smiled. “The kids really like this last one,” she noted, “since many of them have five computers in their own home.”
You take your freedoms for granted, and assume most of the world’s freedoms are equal to yours, or even exceed them.”
Humanity was extremely adaptable,
