Do we lie to ourselves? The argument against

 It is a commonplace that we “lie” to ourselves. In 2012, the psychologist Dan Ariely published a book on dishonesty with the title “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: how we lie to everyone (especially ourselves)”. The reviews and responses to the book never questioned the parenthetical – the notion that we lie to ourselves seems to lie in our stock of accepted truisms.

I want to tussle with that truism. I think it is wrong, for interesting reasons.

What is a lie? It would seem to require two parts. One part is that it is the communication of a falsehood. The second part is that the person communicating the falsehood both, a., knows it is false, and b., what to induce the recipient of the message to believe it is true.

Lying is one of the classic social phenomena of childhood, at least in the bourgeois West. A child, for instance, is warned that some fascinating piece of their parents’ bric-a-brac is fragile and not to be handled. A vase, a commemorative plate handed down from the great grandparents. The child, nevertheless, does in secret handle the object, and breaks it. 

When the parents discover the breakage, the child denies having handled the object. The words “lie” and “lying” get bandied about.

This is a form of deception that seems to correspond well to our notion of the double requirement of the lie.

However, there is another scenario from childhood in which the word lie comes up. In this scenario, a parent promises x, say ice cream cake on Sunday. And then doesn’t deliver on the promise – the parent tells the child that he or she forgot to get the cake. And the child, who let us say has been extra good in anticipation of the cake, feels cheated, hits out, and says that the parents “lied”.

The lie here seems to fit not so well with our paradigm. There is no evidence that the parents, at the time of the promise, were thinking that they were not going to get ice cream cake. In other words, the intent to deceive was not part of the original scenario. This scenario is quite common and recognizable. For instance, the same child grown old promises himself that he will resist sweets. He’s been told that he is not supposed to eat sweets by the doctor. So he makes a resolution – which has promise-like features, since it is, a., sincere, and b, about future activity – not to eat sweets. And he succeeds so well the first day that he decides that it wouldn’t break the spirit of the resolution to reward himself with one sweet. And then another sweet. And so on until he realizes that he has broken his resolution. Between the resolve and the breaking of the resolve he has “deceived” himself. He might even be tempted to say: I lied to myself.

Yet: it is hard to see the second case as a matter of lying. The reason is pretty simple: the lie depends on the liar knowingly communicating a falsehood. This requires that the liar have an idea of what is true and what is false, leading into the lie. Now, if I lie to myself, am I saying: there’s one self that knows what is true and what is false, and one self that is being deceived and accepts as true what is false?

Psychologically, this seems to promise the infinite growth of selves, each one hiding the truth in order to lie to the other one down the chain. This leads to a picture of selfhood that is, to say the least, different from the Western norm. The self in this picture is inherently neurotic. In which case one wonders whether the condition of knowing the truth from falsehood could ever be fulfilled.

You will have noticed that the lying scenarios I laid out to explain lying are taken from childhood. I do think Freud is on the right path in looking for the models of the self in the development of the child. And of course neurosis makes no sense if the self is identical with one consciousness - we have every reason to believe that most of our perceptions and "thoughts" are unconscious. But that doesn't mean that the unconcsious is a self, a different self. Perhaps it is preliminary to or the accompaniment of the self without itself being self-like.

The above argument leads me, at least, to think that when we speak of “lying” to ourselves, we are thinking more of the promise breaking form of deceit than the standard lying form of deceit. This has important consequences for thinking about self-deception and the communicative regime in which the self is defined.