Book review: Why do we lie?

Why We Lie
Dorothy Rowe
Fourth Estate
364 pages
Rs350

The cover of Why We Lie leads you to believe that the book will, hopefully, compel you to speak the truth once you’ve read it.

Author Dorothy Rowe, however, does not follow that track. She makes it clear upfront that this is not a book about the morality of lying.

She is simply concerned with the reasons and consequences of our lies

. Spread over fifteen chapters, she classifies complex psychological and behavioural themes as lies — for example, living in denial, hypocrisy, never saying you’re sorry, and thinking that ‘this can’t happen to me’.

It is here that the book is an eye-opener. It helps explain why lies cannot be described simply in black and white. For a generation that responds with a ‘fine’ to the question, ‘how are you?’, lying is a much more complex phenomenon. And all of us, consciously or subconsciously, are lying, either to ourselves or to the world around us.

The government is lying to us, as are spin doctors and lobbyists, and even the police who claim preparedness for a terrorist attack.

Why, even the sub-prime mortgage crisis that plunged the world into recession a year back was born out of a web of lies.

The truth, however, is not the lone arch nemesis of a lie. Rowe writes, “Lies are not the enemy of truth, myths are.”

It is in Rowe’s description of the sub-conscious lies that Why We Lie becomes a compelling read, almost therapeutic in parts since it takes the ‘crime’ out of it.

She displays a sound understanding of human psychology as she delves into the necessity of lying and the dangers of children not questioning parents’ theories.

She explains concepts that qualify as lies just because they are not the truth —  for example fantasies, beliefs, myths and delusions — and elaborates on how each is different from the other.

While some of her reasoning is insightful, Rowe does make a few arguable comments as well. For instance, in a chapter on ‘How important is the truth to you?’, she highlights the difference between introverts and extroverts: “Many introverts make lying their way of life… Meanwhile, many extroverts care about the truth and struggle daily with the problem of telling the truth without offending people.”

It’s clear that Rowe is passionate about parenting — parents, according to her, are among the most common liars, especially when they’re with kids. (Who else invented the myth that Santa Claus comes out of a chimney.)

One of Rowe’s pet peeves is the fact that parents don’t own up to their lies: “Many parents want to cling to the fantasy that they’re perfect and that any difficulties that their children experience were caused by other people, or by children themselves.” She cautions parents who lie to each other: “When children work out that their parents are lying to one another, they feel they’re on a battlefield where they have to take sides. They deplore the lies of the parent they see as an enemy, while excusing the lies of the parent they support.”