Mr. Leslie works in advertising and writing (newspaper columns and books)
Argues that lies are essential to civilization.
The development of the neocortex is to allow us to both be better liars and better at detecting lies. Strong correlation between brain size and "trickyness"/deceit in monkeys.
Punishing lies harshly only makes people better liars. Example of two schools, one run by nuns with strict corpreal punishment for lying, the other where it resulted in detention. At the nuns school, lies became endemic, the norm.
Politicians. They don't lie as much as they are rumoured too, but that is because no-one can lie 100% of the time. Pols lie because we reward the ones who do, who promise what we want even though it is not possible. We punish them when they tell the truth, or decribe the situation as it really is.
Medicine. The strength of the placebo effect.
Self deception. We all lie to ourselves. Seeing ourselves as others do is equivalent to clinical depression. Belief in ones self correlates with later success in most fields; the "truth" of that belief is not so important. Mr. Leslie calls this lieing to oneself.
This self deception also appears on a social level, and is hugely important to a society. The American ideal that we can all succeed in business, or that we are all if not today, then soon, to be in the upper 1%.
My take:
First, he confuses lies with vision. The vision only succeeds when you believe in it. This is also why we want our leaders to give us vision and hope. It is the only way out of the mess.
A vision is sight of how things could be, not how they are. A vision is not a lie, not some dangerous delusion. It is central to what makes us human.
I think Mr. Leslie would agree.
Hume's take: Man is driven by imagination (i.e. vision, or things which exist in the mind but do not necessarily correspond to the current state of the world) The organizing principles which support these visions are the cultural context, both broad and narrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment