Lying for Fun and Profit

If you have ever wished that you had the ability to know when you are being lied to, you might consider.   As a student of rhetoric (I hold a master's) I have tuned that ability - not that I think I have flawless and infallible lie-detection abilities but my ability is likely better than most, and I find that people lie quite often and that most of them are very bad at it.   In fact, what most offends me these days is not that someone is lying to be but how poorly they construct their deceptions.   But back on point, the question that plagues me isn't if I am lied to or when, but the reason: why are people so prone to lying, so unnecessarily, so often, and about so many things?

This is not merely a topic of philosophy, but has significant practical concerns, particularly to the customer service profession.   To be truly successful, a person who wants to serve a customer must negotiate between two parties that lie to one another as a matter of course  - to eschew the lies their own employer wants to tell the customers to make them want products and to detect the lies those customers are telling to avoid being victimized.

Ideally, both parties would be honest with one another as a matter of course and consumer relationships would be more transparent and straightforward, but things are seldom thus.

People Lie to Get What They Don't Deserve

My sense is that this motivation covers a vast majority of lies in both commercial and noncommercial relationships: a person wants something from someone else and recognizes that they do not deserve it.

In noncommercial situations, "deserving" something is a matter of having certain qualities that make the other party inclined to provide what is wanted.   The liar recognizes this and attempts to deceive the benefactor into believing they meet the qualifications to get the reward.   This is as true of people who defraud charities to get benefits as it is of people who defraud one another to get love and friendship.

In commercial settings "deserving" is a matter of being willing to provide something of equal value in exchange for what is received.   The buyer gives an amount of money to a seller, the seller gives a product that delivers a benefit to a buyer, and the two are expected to be fair in the exchange.    (The same is true of the exchange of wage for effort in employment situations, but I will set that aside for now.)

In the instance of a transaction, the deception is temporary - and as soon as the transaction has been finalized, the deception ends - or more aptly, it begins to be revealed.   But in the larger context, a person expects to engage in multiple transactions over time, and must maintain the deception through multiple transactions, which his the reason people lie so constantly (and incidentally, that is where most liars fail because they cannot maintain the deception for the long run).

The Self-Aggrandizing Lie

The self-aggrandizing lie seems to fall outside of the principle of lying to obtain undeserved benefits.   People lie to others in order to gain esteem without having a clear or immediate objective in mind - they just crave, in a general sense, to be respected and admired by others and to have a sense of self-importance.   Coincidentally, they also feel unworthy of respect and admiration - which is true less often than many seem to accept.

In most instances, the liar is merely deceiving himself.   Other people will play along with a self-aggrandizing lie because it is of no consequence: there's really no harm in entertaining other peoples' delusions of grandeur and giving them a little undeserved respect out of a charity, and it would be at least a bit hypocritical of us to do so because we are each at least a little guilty of thinking too much of ourselves with the expectation that others will play along rather than put us in our rightful place.  It's not only socially acceptable to cater to the narcissism of others, but it is likely foundational to society itself.

There are instances in which a self-aggrandizing lie has the potential to harm others, which arise when there is a practical need for those qualities: there is no harm in believing (or pretending to believe) a person's claim to have certain abilities and skills until you must count upon them to actually use those alleged abilities for some practical end.   And this is where self-aggrandizing lies unravel, and you are disappointed for having counted upon them.

But to the point of distinction between the mercenary lie and the self-aggrandizing one: there is no immediate benefit to telling a self-aggrandizing lie, except to feel better about oneself.    There is no immediate transaction to which the lie is functional.   However, in the broader sense of a relationship, it could be argued that the self-aggrandizing lie is laying the groundwork for future transactions - the liar may not gain an immediate benefit but believes he might do so in future.   In this context, the distinction becomes fuzzy and speculative until a specific transaction presents itself, if it ever does.

Doing Honest Business

This meditation has become a bit unraveled, and I don't have a smooth transition back to where I had intended to go - so pardon this unceremonious lurch back onto the tracks:  In the context of commercial relationships, dishonesty can be avoided by being reasonable about what we are willing to give and what we are willing to accept in return.

An honest seller would be truthful about the value of their goods, and accept that they will sell only to customers who genuinely need them.   Eschewing greed for revenue requires a firm dedication to honestly recognize that some people need a product, but others don't, and that the latter market is not sustainable.   Selling as much as possible to as many people as possible regardless of whether a product is suitable and beneficial to the customer leads to deceptive practices.

An honest buyer would likewise be truthful about the value of having their needs served, and accept that they will be expected to pay a fair and appropriate amount for their needs to be met.   Casting aside the desire to deceive others into giving them more for less requires a customer to have some understanding of the full cost of production and distribution, and that to have a product available in the long run means compensating the provider for his costs such that he may sustain his operations and provide a reasonable return to investors.

And perhaps I'm being a bit Pollyannaish, but I have the distinct sense that markets do not vary from the point of honesty by very much or for very long.  A company has a core of stable customers with a genuine need for their product - and while it can deceive others into thinking the product is beneficial for them, the fact that it is not will eventually become self-evident and those customers will not stay for long.   A customer who routinely cheats his suppliers will likewise eventually be discovered and refused service.   There is greater value to both parties in seeking a stable and sustainable level of interaction.

I also have a sense that social media, of all things, is likely to be very helpful in this regard because information about both customers and suppliers is exposed, recorded, and made available for public scrutiny.   Customers are already checking up on suppliers by verifying facts and checking reputations online, and companies are already identifying instances of consumer fraud by monitoring the conversations in social media with an attentive eye toward indiscreet disclosures.

But whether this exposure will cause people to become more honest or merely more crafty and secretive in their dishonesty remains to be seen - and is likely a topic that will lead me even further afield.