When my father was in graduate school his family didn't tell him that his father had died. For like, two years, until he came home.
Not so close to that side of the family.
The difference between the 'don't tell her that she's stuck with an awful haircut for the next 2 months' and the Plame thing seems like one hurt the person being lied to, and the other hurts a 3rd person.
I cheated on a French test in 8th grade.
people tell about two lies every 10 minutes
I don't even talk this much.
Although I guess I do make up for it some with all the time I spend reassuring your mom that she's the only one.
Everyone would agree that telling a Nazi knocking at your door that you are not harboring Jews is a lie worth telling -- a heroic, necessary lie.
Shorter: I took Philosophy 101 once.
I think that this issue in America has a lot to do with English and American Protestant sects which made truth-telling an absolute. (All the Ten Commandments say is "Thou shalt not bear false witness", i.e., you shouldn't testify falsely or make false accusations.)
Mark Twain wrote a funny piece about a Baptist sect which split over the question of lying to save children's lives when savage Indians asked "Are there any children hiding in this house". The relatively sane branch of the church came to be called The Lying Baptists.
7: Everyone but the Truth-telling Baptists.
The "don't tell him, it'll upset him" thing is a very live issue in our household at the moment. One of my wife's family is ill, and my wife has been kept ill-informed about the whole thing and it's driving her crazy.
I can't imagine worrying so much about someone else that i try to manage their emotions for them by information witholdings.
the situation of 10 sounds dreadful.
however, i can completely understand doing that (carefully) with children, esp. young children. if someone actually is deathly ill or dead, and the parent is already upset and attempting to cope with their own grief, then the last thing they need is to have to a)explain what's happening to children and b) comfort them, when the parent is really not okay themselves.
I never lie.
Oh, and just last night I read the entire new article at Stanford about Kurt Godel, and understood it completely.
My mom does the withholding-information thing all the time. I can see why she does it, but in many cases I don't agree that it's the best thing to do.
Meh. Lying (by omission) in order to protect people's sensibilities is, except perhaps in the case of small children or those on their deathbeds, not a good plan.
The fact of the lie hurts more than the truth being guarded. How is anybody expected to grow up, deal with what's real, and continue to love regardless?
As for the small lies, well. I'd minimize those as well. They're a form of avoiding people's eyes. Do that enough times, make it a habit, and you can't look anyone in the eye any more.
The most cutting lie ever told to me was when my parents, when I was 8, took my security blanket and stored it away, telling me it'd been lost in the move. I was given it back six years later; apparently they thought I was too attached. I was devastated twice. It's a good thing my parents were otherwise saints, 'cause that one hurt.
In general, people who lie to me get excised from my life with what I can only assume to be unusual ruthlessness. I really don't like it. In turn, I really try to avoid lying to the people around me.
The culture is pretty much constructed on prudence and white lies.
White lies are the glue of middle class solidarity and capitalism--we all pretend we like each other and share values so that we can be united against the teeming protelariat. I am, actually, serious about this. Years of being flunky-to-power have convinced me of it. Also conversations with working class friends who really, really value their ability to tell the shift manager or similar exactly what they think about a work situation--conversations in which I realize how I have always grown up assuming that the lies you tell at work are neccessary, obvious, not part of putting something over on the boss but rather just a part of office culture.
Weird, my dad's family is the same way (about withholding information about sick relatives). We didn't find out my great-uncle died until two weeks after the funeral.
19: This one's going to be very hard to document. In my experience working-class people lie as much as anybody else. I agree about the ideal of being able to tell people off being a characteristic value of the w-c, but that's because of being aware that it's a rare privilege. And I'm going to insist that it's very often a dysfunctional behavior, self-defeating.
19: Do they speak truth to management, or to each other, also?
21: Yeah, I should have added that I was not arguing against lying or for telling off your supervisor. And my point was the specific social context of lying--I have no idea how you'd do a proper class analysis about frequency of lies. I have read a study (ah, a study...well, Frowner's point is proved now!) about how lying at work is viewed by white collar versus blue collar workers which generally bears out my contention.
I do think that lying in specific situations carries some class freight, though. I'd be glad to go on with office-specific contentions, but I need to prepare for work tomorrow now, alas.
I figured I'd hold off on playing top-this-horror-story, but here were are all the way past comment twenty: they didn't tell my mom's cousin in Iran for years that her son in Los Angeles had been hit by a stray bullet and lost his sight.
I understand that there's not much worse that you could say to someone and there's a real concern that the person will lose her mind or kill herself, etc. BUT THAT'S NO EXCUSE. Now that she knows, she comes to visit and help him out. I can't imagine how she feels about the time she wasn't able to do that.
Ooh, now I have to add something else. I'm not actually a big fan of "truth" or the "truth to power" formulation. And it's cod-Marxist nonsense to valorize things because of the class which practices them. But it is useful--to me, anyway--to note that a lot of my assumptions about the good life, good manners, etc, are very substantially class-conditioned.
25:That, yes. I'm with you there.
A wise person once said that worrying is work that needs to be done and that when a person is sick, knowing that the worrying is being done for them sometimes takes that burden off the sick person. I'm guessing that the reasoning for not telling someone is frequently that they can't do anything but worry when, really, that can sometimes be a helpful thing to do.
19: I tell them they're idiots and they don't believe I'm serious. Works for me.
My mother convinced the rest of the entire family to keep her younger fatal brother's brain tumor from his mother, who was in her late 80's at the time. For two years they managed to convince her he was in the basement working on something, the phone connection was bad, he had gone fishing, whatever. Totally horrible.
15: I'm with you this except for the death-bed stuff. I want to know when I'm dying. If I'm too confused to follow the conversation then the truth won't make any difference and I certainly don't want to hear any "When you're better, we'll go on that cruise around the world" crap.
24: Wait, so what happened? Once she was told, did he get his sight back?
Once she was told, did he get his sight back?
No, he's blind for life. But now she spends about half of each year here with him.
And wasn't he complicit in keeping his mom in the dark? Wasn't it, possibly, that he didn't feel like having to calm her down? Twenty years seems like a stretch, but when the person doing the lying in the person who is injured--well, maybe he has a decent reason.
Yeah, he was complicit. But of course he doesn't want to upset his mother.
Right, but...sometimes you don't want to upset someone because you don't have the energy to deal with what ensues. I'm not sure why the injured person's wishes shouldn't be controlling on the issue of right/wrong. Becoming suddenly blind seems so terrible to me--I have a hard time imagining myself recovering from something like that--that it's easy to believe that your cousin needed all his resources to keep himself together, and could not worry about keeping both himself and his mother together.
How does it not come up?
"Hey sweetie, how are things?"
"Um, not much new here, you? EXCEPT THAT I'M BLIND."
?!???!??
Ok, 37 is a good point, and maybe you don't tell for a while, but years seems insane.
Cala, Iranians are masters of insincerity.
I second 38. There would seem to be a lot of "Oh, I decided to stop driving." "Oh, I haven't ever been to the internet." etc.
I cannot fathom it. does not compute. We should invade so they all tell their mothers that there's nothing to worry about, Americans do this all the time!!
?!?!??!
but years seems insane.
You Americans have such a young country, and have no sense of the broad sweep of history.
"No, I haven't seen any debased American women."
Oh, I haven't ever been to the internet.
I don't want to laugh at a blind guy, or even what someone who's never met the blind guy made up as a joke what he might say, but that's funny stuff.
He's pretty amazing at keeping up with current events, sports, etc. Last year, he would call to chat with me about how the various World Cup teams were playing.
If only Sayyid Qutb had been blinded on his ship to America, we could have been spared so much horror.
I tend to follow the "find something truthful but not hurtful to say" or "find a non-hurtful way to say the truth" in office or social settings. I don't have the energy, the memory, or the conscience to be able to do any kind of lying.
The one big lie I've told was a lie of omission to protect someone who was dying, and I'm still fiercely glad I did it.
I spent six months working nights and weekends to make a website ADA compliant. Blind people had fucking better be using the Internet.
prof: "What do you think of colleague X's teaching?"
me:"[some noncommital complimentary dodge]"
prof: "Your face is saying 'He's a good bicyclist'. "
Grice-pwned.
Blind people had fucking better be using the Internet.
Just today, I spoke to a blind person who was using a computer program that translated into Spanish and read aloud the words on the web pages she was visiting. It was pretty amazing, actually. I imagine such programs are pretty commonplace at this point.
My mom recently related to me the fact that her parents had kept from her and her siblings the fact that their grandmother was in an asylum; instead, they were told that she was dead. They didn't learn otherwise until their grandfather died and they read the "was survived by his wife" bit of the obituary.
What really pissed her off was that her cousins did know, and had been part of the conspiracy to not tell.
I think I'd always rather have the truth, deathbed, whatever. This may be one of those instances in which I reveal to unfogged how foolish I am.
I imagine such programs are pretty commonplace at this point.
Yep. Remember that speech synthesis class I'm taking? That's the sort of stuff it's used for.
30: I'm what, twice your age or more? It's not surprising I've got a collection of horror stories to trot out at appropriate or inappropriate moments.
Actually, I don't know if yours is worse or not. My grandmother wasn't in good enough shape to do more than say good-bye over the phone, but she should have had the chance, I think. She wasn't out of it then. I'll ask my mother how she now feels about the decision the next time I talk to her.
My old IRC interface had a text-to-speech function that I did not know it had until I one day accidentally enabled it. That was a fun five minutes until I figured out the off switch.
My aunt, then 36, wasn't told that she only had a year or so to live. Her husband spent most of that time granting her slightest whim, making sure she was happy. [He had the money to do it.] She did have about two months when she was seriously ill, and knew that she was terminal. She was not at all unhappy at being kept in the dark and spoiled.
Me, I want to know if I'm dying; I have a little list of people who've been naughty... Seriously, I'd run up my AmEx card travelling and drinking Cristal. Maybe check in to a nice suite at the Lanesborough in London and die peacefully after a surfeit of the complimentary petits-fours. [It's handy being diabetic; one can commit suicide by chocolate.]
Biohazard, I was just upset that you stepped on the "shut up, hooker" that was intended for Becks.
I had a friend who could commit suicide by celery. It would be a great punch line, but anaphylactic shock is not a fun way to go.
The little ditty I learned growing up was, "You should always tell the truth, but you needn't always be telling it." I am not against white lies, but I tend to think that actual falsehoods are a bit worse than lies of omission. I don't think that "avoid lying and refrain from blurting everything out" is a bad rule.
PK thinks Mr. B. is his father. So does Mr. B.
I shall treasure 62 forever.
But I'm still not backing up my stupid email.
I just finished my second speech synthesis project (everything but the write-up). Damn, consonants are hard to do.
Are you convinced that "F" and "Th" are the exact same sound yet?
There's five kids in my family. I'm the second. My older sister is about 7 years older than I am, and the other 4 of us are all a bit under two years apart. My parents never told us that my older sister has a different father than the rest of us. Three of us figured it out on our own, and the other was told by my oldest sister. Not telling us was definitely my mom's idea, my dad would never care about something like that. Made a lot of things make more sense, like why we never saw their wedding pics around, or why my dad doesn't have his PhD framed anywhere. That's actually how my youngest sister figured it out. She ran across Dad's diploma looking though a box of papers, and noticed the date on it meant my dad would have been across the country at the time our oldest sister was being conceived.
Not really a big deal, but I did cringe a bit in retrospect considering all the "S must be the milkman's kid" jokes I cracked growing up. She's not so different from the rest of us to make you immediately suspect different parentage, but different enough that the jokes were funny. Oh well.
65: We didn't have to do those. My [s] sounded like [f] for a while, though.
re: 65
You know they are different, Cryptic N. And now you are just stirring shit!
Don't try arguing with him on this; he's unreachable.
or should that be:
Don't try arguing with him on fis?
You'd fink it would be an easy argument to win, but no.
58: Been there, needed the epinephrine. Fortunately, a diabetic coma is probably more pleasant than anaphylaxis.
When I was in kindergarten, I did not yet have any sense of how to game the educational system. Once we did an elementary phonics exercise in which we were given a handout with a lot of pictures of objects and animals on it, and the teacher said: "Circle all the things whose name begins with a 'th' sound, as in 'thumb'." She held up her thumb for emphasis.
Only the way I heard it, when she actually said the word, she pronounced the initial consonant so that it sounded more like "f". "'th' sound, as in 'fumb'."
I knew that her statement strongly implied "th" was the sound I was looking for, but I figured that since I actually heard "fumb", circling all the "th" things would be a lie. So I circled everything beginning with F.
Teofilo has a message for your kindergarten self about "f" and "th". It's a very important one.
There are people, like my mother, who don't real want to know the truth, and will predictably forget it after you tell them. After a while you make a note of this and stop contradicting them except when it's really important, even though it means you'll have a difficult conversation you've already had, full of surprise and hurt, and yet it still will not stick after a bit of time passes. This means that when information concerning the rest of the family comes to me from her, it requires a great amount of interpretation.
My mother had a talent for forgetting unpleasant things. It's not to be sneered at at all. She didn't hold grudges, she didn't cry over spilled milk, and she didn't nag or guilttrip her kids.
Don't try arguing with him on fis?
No, the voiced "th" sounds exactly like a v, not an f. At least out of context it does.
I just want to pop in to object to the "lying about people dying is ok in the case of young children" meme. Speaking as someone who lost a parent at 7, it was really, really, really helpful that I had all kinds of adults basically telling me that my mom was probably going to die months before it actually happened. I had time to ask a lot of questions, go dote on my mother, seek reassurance from my father and other adults before the fact, and just become mentally prepared. Kids really can handle more than you think, and sudden trauma is something to be avoided. You want the trauma to be a "Your mother is sick and is probably not going to get better but she's really suffering and so maybe when she dies it'll be better for her" conversation, rather than a "your mother is dead; What's dead?" conversation.
You remember the lies as being hurtful more than the truths that hurt. I still remember one of the Christmases that my mother was sick, and I was like "will you be better by next Christmas?" and she said "Yeah." I can't remember any other conversation like that verbatim. So.
Kids really can handle more than you think
This cannot be repeated often enough. It's true of parents as well, but kids really *need* the truth about illness and death so that they can start processing it.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes to 78-79. Especially to the idea that there is somehow going to magically be a "better" time to tell a child bad news. That's almost never true -- occasionally it's "better" in a half-hour, but not a year or ten later.
Are there no defenders at all of the Lying Baptists here?
Murderous savage: "Are there children hidden in this house?"
Unfoggedetariat: "Yes."
Murderous savage: [Finds and kills several children]. "Did we find all of the children here?"
Unfoggedetariat: "No."
Murderous savage: [Finds and kills the remaining children]. "Is ther anything else we can do for you?"
Unfoggedetariat: "No."
81: It would take too much time and effort to show that the rest are nutters, Emerson. But I think I'm closer to you--lying is sometimes appropriate, and you ought to think about doing it even when it's not, just for the fun of it.
Of course lying is sometimes appropriate. I'm just saying we need to level with kids about death before it happens.
"I'm sorry about this, kids, but murderous savages are here to kill you. I'm telling you this now so you have time to process the information before the murdering commences."
Kids at that age don't understand concepts like "death," Apostropher. Don't explain; show. You can get a kitten or puppy at the local pound, and a piece of fishing twine almost anywhere.
It's almost impossible to flush a dead kitten down the toilet, you know.
Almost.
Don't explain; show. You can get a kitten or puppy at the local pound, and a piece of fishing twine almost anywhere.
Toughens you right up. As I've mentioned before, one of my earliest memories is watching my dad slaughter rabbits.
When my grandfather died, my grandmother wanted to protect us and tell us that he just went away on vacation, to which my dad said something along the lines of only if you wanted to give the kids a complex for the rest of their life about travel are you nuts.
Next-door neighbor kill a chicken when I was 4.
86: And now he's a gun nut who refuses to smile for photographs.
who refuses to smile for photographs.
I plead genetics on this one. My default facial expression is kind of a dead stare, but I don't realize I'm doing it. My dad's the same way.
The obvious question, then: is his earliest memory of your grandfather killing fluffy little bunnies?
My brother never really smiles in photos, at least with more than a slight grin. He tried smiling for a little while, but looked so creepy that I told him to go back to the way he was.
I have to feel my smile is so exaggerated the top of my head is separating, like one of Terry Gilliam's cartoons, before it shows as a faint smile.
Very poorly calibrated.
My father is honest to a fault but my mother has very firmly entrenched reality filters that are ready to be applied at a moment's notice. She's very good at filtering out some uncomfortable truths but at the same time she's always willing to face the really awful but important ones. It creates a weird, dissociative feeling sometimes and it has caused real problems in our family from time to time but, to be honest, she's very happy. Annoying as all hell to the rest of us, yes, but.
Me, I don't have it in me to lie. Little white lies, yes, sometimes, but mostly I just can't manage a good lie or a big lie. I am a terrible liar. Usually when presented with a situation where a lie might be appropriate I just sort of blurt out the truth. I'm not even good at gracefully accepting a tacky gift. When asked whether I like it I usually simply say "thank you" without giving a yes or a no and even then I feel guilty about it. I feel like it's important to establish that I am not some virtuously honest person who cannot chop down that cherry tree, etc., but that I am honest entirely through guilt and fear. A part of me also thinks I'm not smart enough to keep up with any lies I might tell and then forget about.
Once I had some kittens I was trying to give away to everyone I saw. One middle-aged guy told me he sometimes used them for target practice. He wasn't trying to be funny, though he probably was trying to bug me. He was a militiaesque white paranoid sort.
All that said, I would of course lie to protect the precious babies from the godless savages. I'd do it badly and get us all killed, but I'd do it.
78 and 79 get it exactly right. Kids need to know what's happening. Given a decent amount of love and support, they're tougher than we are.
Besides, I'm with RMP's second paragraph in 94: lousy at lying and generally too lazy to try.