Bad Lies

A poorly told lie often has a purpose - one other than pure deception

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

The first time I caught a student cheating, they lied to me. The second time too, and essentially every time after that. It was never a particularly sophisticated lie, rarely going beyond a simple denial, a ‘no, I didn’t cheat,’ except for the occasions when they deigned to accuse me of lying in turn. I didn’t really understand it - I never accused a student of cheating without being positive, and I always included the source they had plagiarized from when I sent them a message letting them know that the assignment would need to be redone.

One student, though - he gave away the game. It was always obvious when my students weren’t doing their own work - even the best and brightest fifteen year olds haven’t mastered the Associated Press’s house style, it turns out. A quick Google search of one of the sentences in the student’s essay led me to its original source, posted by CNN before he had even been born. So I wrote out the customary email, explaining to him that this was plagiarism, provided a link to the article he had copied, and told him he would have to resubmit.

And then he showed up at my classroom door. He accused me of lying, of course - what, exactly, I could have possibly had to gain from saying a random student had cheated I still don’t understand - but then he went a step further. This kid was a football player, about my height, and he puffed himself up, taking a step forward and doing his best to try and tower over me as I stood at my door. He was trying to intimidate me. It didn’t work - he wasn’t actually taller than me and when I didn’t shrink back from him he skulked away and headed to whatever his next class was.

Because bad lies - like the one he he had told, the ones that are easily disproven, the ones that contradict what you see with your own eyes - aren’t actually about the truth. He hadn’t been trying to trick me - obviously saying ‘no, I didn’t cheat,’ wasn’t going to be enough to do that. Bad lies are about power. For my students, they were a way of saying - I cheated, but I don’t think you can do anything about it.

Consider George Orwell’s 1984. The government of dystopic future England lies, and it lies constantly, but it doesn’t lie particularly well. An announcement is made that chocolate rations are being increased to twenty grams, even though the day before they were cut to twenty. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, even though they used to have always been at war with Eastasia. The Ministry of Truth spreads lies, the Ministry of Love tortures dissidents, the Ministry of Peace wages war, and the Ministry of Plenty ensures famine. The people in charge of maintaining and producing the lies, Big Brother’s middle management - like main character Winston, who helps alter Oceania’s official history - are simultaneously those most aware of how untrue those lies are and are the most expected to perform belief in them, because the purpose of the IngSoc propaganda machine isn’t to keep its citizens in the dark about the world or to boost their morale with pleasant untruths; it is to demonstrate the power of Big Brother. When Big Brother says something obviously false - two plus two is five - you repeat it as an acknowledgement of its power over you, not because it wants or needs you to believe it.

Witness, for example, Donald Trump. When he lies - exaggerating the size of crowds at his rallies, claiming that the overturn of Roe v Wade was celebrated by legal experts, or saying he won the 2020 election - he isn’t trying to convince anyone. He’s demonstrating his power. His critics try their best to debunk him to no avail, while his followers repeat what he says - his lies are functionally a loyalty test; the more outrageous the claim, the more you can prove your fealty by believing it. After the Party changes the ration cut to a ration increase, people march in the street in celebration. These sort of bad lies are highly performative, like Iran’s appointment of a blind man to the head of its film censorship board, as described in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. Putting a man who can’t watch films in charge of censoring them is a kind of bad lie - it lets the citizens of the country know that whatever reason given for changing or suppressing a movie is meaningless. The censors use their power to show that they can, and they do not need a justification for doing so.

The exercises of power that Nafisi describes - how even the most innocuous self-expression, like the color of a tie or the act of whistling are scrutinized for hidden political meaning - are, of course, quite intimate; the personal is political, and the political is, all too often, deeply personal. Bad lies can be distant background noise, broadcast over loudspeakers and tuned out by their listeners, but they can also come from someone much closer. The name the government of Oceania uses, its anthropomorphic personification of itself - Big Brother - is telling. Oceania acts like a domineering parent or abusive partner, and the final lie that Winston is made to repeat is an expression of affection: “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” 

When a bad liar is someone you know - a parent, a spouse, or a colleague - it highlights the relationship that bad lies have to power. Bad lies are less common among friend groups because those don’t usually involve a meaningful power dynamic, and because a bad friend is relatively easy to drop; we usually stick with bad relationships because leaving them would be difficult - getting a divorce or finding a new job can be a long and painful process, so we tolerate our spouse hiding their affair or our coworker spreading rumors about us. When bad lies manifest in more equitable relationships, it’s usually because the power dynamic is unclear - my students thought that they had power over me, which is why they kept resorting to bad lies.

At its most extreme, the bad lie can be a form of DARVOing (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender). The bad liar asserts - no, I didn’t do anything. You bullied me (when you told me to leave you alone). You harassed me (when you reported my behavior). You disrespected me (when you wanted me to stop hurting you). The assertion is a threat - I run this show, and if you don’t let me do what I want, I can make you pay, by either ruining your reputation or bringing official action down on your head. The power involved in a bad lie makes this especially insidious - hearing the bad lie that you are the bully, you are the victimizer, you are out of control repeatedly enough, by someone you love and who is supposed to love you can make you believe it. The bad lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: since your every action is recast negatively, why not go ahead and be bad? Why not act the way the bad liar says you act anyways, if the end result is going to be the same?

A distinction should be made: the bad liar is not the same as the unskilled liar; not everyone who does a poor job of lying is doing so on purpose. Tommy Tallarico of Hbomberguy fame is a good example of an unskilled liar: he actually thought that he could dupe whoever he wanted, up to and including the US government. When he brought a large sum of money across the border without declaring it, he wasn’t saying he was more powerful than anybody, he legitimately thought that he could fool US customs. Most of my students were just unskilled liars, vastly overestimating their ability to tell convincing lies to adults; I had one student tell me he couldn’t work on worksheet because he had left it in another classroom - when I picked up the phone to call the teacher he had allegedly left it with, he admitted it was in his backpack. The internet in particular is full of people telling lies that are bad but aren’t bad lies - they are usually lying for fun rather than anything else, and they rely on people being too lazy to double check sources online rather than any sort of power imbalance. Bad lying isn’t gaslighting, either - the gaslighter is trying to get you (and others) to doubt your sanity, while the bad liar is reasserting their power by saying something that both of you know isn’t true.

Is there an answer to bad liars? I don’t know. Trying to argue with them is a mistake - the bad lie is something everyone already knows is untrue, so presenting evidence against it isn’t going to help you. All too often, the only solution is to leave - end the relationship, quit the job, move somewhere else - and that isn’t always an easy task; by definition, the bad liar has (or believes they have) some sort of power over you. If relationships in general were more equitable, bad lies might be less common, but I’m not entirely convinced of that; bad lies often pop up in places where power differentials are unclear to the parties involved, like online, in a classroom, or in an office. Spotting a bad liar ahead of time - and thus being prepared to avoid them - might, for most people, be the only actionable solution.