Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

they have to take you in.’ Suze had no home. Her mother and her sister disliked Dylan (imagine the ‘I told you so’s) and so there was no one she could turn to. In similar circumstances each of us would find ourselves falling apart. Most of us would not know what was happening to us, and we would be terrified.

      The fear of being annihilated as a person is far worse than the fear of death. We can tell ourselves that when we die we shall go to heaven, or become a spirit, or return as another person. People will erect memorials to us, they will talk about us, remember us. But, if we are annihilated as a person, there will be nothing, no heaven, no spirit, no return, and no one will remember us because it will be as if we have never existed. We have disappeared like a wisp of smoke in the wind. We will do anything to stop this happening. This is why we lie. Every lie we tell, no matter how small and unimportant, is a defence of our sense of being a person.

      We will lie over the most stupid things; tell lies that are patently, outrageously lies; build lie upon lie until they form a great, sticky web of lies. We will lie when telling the truth would lead to a better outcome; we will lie when we do not know why we are lying; we will lie to people who do not matter to us, and to people who do; we will lie to people who know that we are lying; persistently, unthinkingly, we will lie to ourselves. And all for one reason. To preserve our sense of being a person.

      So much do they fear the destruction of their sense of being a person that many psychologists have avoided trying to understand just what it is that they fear. They deal with the problem of understanding what the sense of self is by hiding it in a mist of romantic fantasies, as happens in transpersonal psychology; or they talk about it in such obscure ways that no humble inquirer after the truth would dare to ask a question (ask a Freudian analyst a question and the reply is likely to be, ‘Why do you want to know?’); or they believe that the sense of being a person is not something that a proper psychologist would study because proper psychology is objective and scientific. This last position is based on the popular principle that, if you don’t talk about something, it doesn’t exist.

      Psychologists might pretend that the sense of being a person does not exist, but they cannot pretend that emotions do not exist. It is not possible to understand what emotions are without understanding what the sense of being a person is. Since this understanding is missing from much of psychology, an enormous amount of rubbish is written about emotions. Theories about emotions seem to fall into two categories. There are the ‘emotions are like the climate’ theories, and the pseudo-scientific theories that talk about ‘the emotional brain’. Both kinds of theories make us helpless. According to the climate theories, emotions roll over us like unstoppable summer storms. According to the emotional brain theories, we are mere puppets at the mercy of the most ancient parts of our brain. Lurking in our amygdala are the emotions of fear and anger, ready to burst forth at any time. More complex emotions require a functioning cortex, but, even in that part of the brain where reason is considered to reside, emotions can override the intellect. These theories do not give us a means of understanding why, say, we are able to deal calmly with a situation involving our brother, and yet fly into a rage in another very similar situation which involves our sister. Nor do these theories help us understand why, say, we feel guilty over something that was clearly not our fault, but are untroubled by another situation where we have failed to fulfil our obligations. To understand these differences we need to know why we interpreted two of these situations as threats to the integrity of our sense of being a person, and the other two situations as being unthreatening.

      If all psychologists recognized that every moment of their life they are creating meanings, and that out of these meanings come their sense of self, they would readily see that emotions are meanings, and that all these meanings relate to their sense of being a person. Emotions are rarely expressed initially in words, though they can later be put into sentences. All these sentences have just one subject – ‘I’. ‘I am angry’, ‘I am happy’, ‘I am envious’, ‘I feel guilty’ and so on. Psychologists label emotions as positive and negative, but often do not see that positive emotions have to do with ‘I’ being safe, and negative emotions have to do with ‘I’ being in danger. When the world is the way we want it to be, we are happy. When there is something wrong with our world, we are unhappy. When our body or our self is in danger, we are frightened. Being happy comes in a range of intensities, from contentment to ecstasy. Being in danger can take many forms, which is why there are so many negative emotions. Being angry involves a degree of pride, ‘How dare that happen to me!’, while being jealous involves a certain perception of ownership. ‘That person has something which is rightly mine.’

      The interpretations we call emotions enable us to make decisions about what we should do. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown, if damage to our brain prevents us from feeling emotions, that is, assessing our situation in terms of the safety or danger of our sense of being a person, we cannot make the simplest decision about what we should do. Even rational men need their emotions!

      Psychologists who espouse Positive Psychology tell us that we can learn how to be happy through the use of our positive emotions. Barbara Frederickson, a Positive Psychologist, was quoted as suggesting that ‘positive emotions – such as joy or love or attraction or contentment – enhance our readiness to engage with people and things, making us more attentive and open to and able to integrate the things we experience. Negative emotions, on the other hand, are believed to “narrow” rather than “broaden” the individual’s reactions and openness to the world.’⁷ All this could have been put more simply. When we feel safe, we open ourselves to the world and other people: when we feel we are in danger, we close ourselves off and put a barrier between ourselves and the possible sources of that danger. This quotation shows how psychologists change what people do, for instance, creating the meanings, ‘I feel joyful’, ‘I love’, ‘I’m attracted to’ into abstract nouns, and then talk about these abstractions (that is, ideas in our head) as if they are real things that can have an effect on the world. Anger never starts a conflict. Conflicts are started by angry people.

      Our sense of being a person is always vigilant, always watching for a possible threat. However, just as a strong, well-equipped army views threats to its safety very differently from that of a weak, badly equipped army, so people who see themselves as being strong and skilled in their personal defences view threats to their safety very differently from the way people who see themselves as weak and ill-equipped do. The second group see threats everywhere, and are likely to interpret ordinary remarks by another person as a threat to the integrity of their sense of being a person. For instance, people who describe themselves as being ‘sensitive’ have an amazing ability to perceive an intended insult in someone’s ordinary remark. In contrast, the first group are less likely to interpret another person’s behaviour as a slight or a humiliation, or, if it is such, they believe that they have the means to deal effectively with such threats. People in the ‘strong’ group are less likely to feel the need to lie in order to preserve their sense of being a person, but they will lie in order to advance their own interests. If they believe, say, that they have the ability to become a successful captain of industry, they might lie in order to become the person they wish themselves to be. It seems from the research that a completely truthful CV is rare.

      The meanings, ideas, attitudes, beliefs that make up our sense of being a person form a system, and, like most systems, it has a means of defending its integrity and keeping it whole. Just as the white blood cells of our body will rush to our defence when we are invaded by noxious bacteria, so a force intrinsic to our sense of being a person will rush to our defence. For want of a better term, I call this force primitive pride, and distinguish it from personal pride. We learn from other people how to take personal pride in ourselves. For instance, most of us learn from our parents to take personal pride in being clean, or to be seen to be honest. Primitive pride seems to have its origins in those brain-based operations that lead to the development of consciousness and a sense of being a person.

      When we take personal pride in ourselves we can point to something outside ourselves as evidence of our achievement and worth. Just as a two-year-old can hold up her empty plate as evidence that she has eaten all her dinner, so adults can point to an examination they have passed, the old car they have rebuilt, the sporting medals they have won, the pictures