Born Liars Read Online Free

a white flag. A lie involves words – a specifically verbal form of deceit.
    Indeed, the human knack for dissembling, born of the demands of Palaeolithic social life, was supercharged by the invention of language. Estimates of when this happened vary wildly, from fifty thousand to half a million years ago, but what’s certain is that it was a giant leap forward for deceit, because it detached communication from deed. When I don’t have to point to food to make you think there’s food there – when I can just tell you and let you discover the truth later – then the possibilities for deception become infinitely more diverse and elaborate. 1

    Reading tales of primate deceit inspires two feelings at once: discomfort, because of the suggestion that such behaviour is bred in our bones, and admiration at the guile, creativity and intelligence on display. Something like those two antithetical responses runs through the history of our attitudes to lying. We are simultaneously appalled with ourselves for being able to make up things that aren’t true, and impressed by our capacity for inventiveness; uneasy about our ease with falsity, yet certain that lies of some kind are necessary.
    â€˜Lying is indeed an accursed vice,’ wrote the sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne. ‘If we realised the horror and gravity of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes.’ Theologians from Augustine onwards have condemned lying as a heinous sin. Immanuel Kant pronounced that there was no such thing as a white lie; that lying could never be justified under any circumstance.
    Other thinkers have argued it is absurd to propose that we can, or should, live without deceit. ‘There is only one world,’ said Nietzsche, ‘and that world is false, cruel, contradictory, misleading, senseless . . . We need lies to vanquish this reality, this “truth”, we need lies in order to live.’ Oscar Wilde, in his more playful style, suggested that lying is a welcome escape route from the insufferable dullness of real life, cautioning only that it should be done with flair; he lamented ‘the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure’. Kant and Montaigne might have agreed with Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, who says, ‘For I hate him like the gates of death who thinks one thing and says another.’ Yet in the Odyssey Homer contrasts Achilles with a hero who is a ‘master deceiver among mortals’; a man who skilfully and proudly wields deceit in battle and in love. In the end, it’s Odysseus who comes across as the more attractive – more human – hero.
    There’s no settling the debate over lying. It’s been part of the buzz and thrum of human conversation ever since we started talking, and it contains just about everything: our ideas about what kind of creatures we are, what it means to be a good person, and what on earth all those other people are saying about us. What’s certain is that our ability to deceive is innate, and false speech comes naturally to our lips. ‘The human capacity to lie,’ says the literary critic and humanist philosopher George Steiner, is ‘indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and the development of man in society.’ Like it or not, we are all born liars.

First Lies
    How our children learn to lie (and why we should be impressed when they do)
    The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.
    Joseph Brodsky
    Charlotte’s four-year-old son Tom has a rather casual way with the truth. Tom has no compunction whatsoever in blaming his one-year-old sister Ella for anything that goes wrong, even if that means lying through his baby teeth. If Charlotte is in the kitchen and hears a crash in the living room, she knows that when she walks in she’ll find an upended lamp on the floor and Tom, pointing to Ella, inviting