The Sinner's Book of Lies

PREFACE

Just like the hell-fire preacher tells us: We are all sinners. We have all done things that we are not particularly proud of. We all do things that, even though we don’t think they are bad, lots of other people think they are. And what’s worse, often after telling ourselves that we should feel OK about what we did, when we grow up – or simply after sleeping on it – we too may realise that what we did was terrible.

This is a book to remind us what poor examples of humanity we all are. You shouldn’t be able to read these entries and still feel really good about yourself. There is nothing concealed here – nowhere to hide.

It is a book about our own shame. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves to justify the immoral things we do.

Sinners we all are, and sinners we shall remain I guess. However, after reading what follows, we shall know that we are sinners, and we just might be moved to do something about it.

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

A lie with a purpose is one of the worst kind, and the most profitable.

Finley Peter Dunne

You told a lie, an odious, damned lie;

Upon my soul, a lie, a wicked lie.

William Shakespeare. Emilia, in Othello, 5, 2.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

Eric Hoffer. The Passionate State of Mind

Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe.

Demosthenes

INTRODUCTION

How do we live with ourselves?

When we know we have been bad, how on earth do we live with ourselves? What do we tell ourselves to salve our consciences, to justify what we did, are doing, or what we are going to do? The answer is that we lie to ourselves. We lie shamelessly and frequently. The sinner of the book’s title is, of course, each of us.

Before embarking on this miserable course, I think there needs to be a short ramble into what we mean by a lie. We often use the term rather loosely; but for our purposes here, I want to be rather more precise.

A lie is an untrue statement uttered by someone who knows it is untrue, with the intention to deceive.

So an untrue statement made by someone who believes it to be true is not a lie, it’s an error — which is different. A false statement made as a joke, or as part of a fictional story, may not be a lie, because there was no real intention to deceive. (However, see I was only joking — a joke may not really be a joke).

All the entries here are real lies – statements we know to be false, and made in order to deceive ourselves and others about our own badness.

This is a book about our own shame. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves to justify the immoral things we do.

Crooked Logic

A very short history

I had been mulling over for some time the problem of how other people, and myself, who have done bad things, manage to live with ourselves. For God’s sake, there are child-abusers and granny-murderers who fail to commit suicide. There are rapists who even seem to be proud of their scummy selves. These excrescences do not even give themselves up to the police. On a lesser note, there are hardened criminals who also seem to be inured to the violations they perpetrate. They somehow manage to live with themselves and even, as the Americans say, contrive to ‘feel good about themselves’. How is this at all possible? How do these people manage to fool themselves?

You may be agreeing with me so far that it is a great puzzle as to how truly evil people get through their miserable lives, often without feeling miserable at all. These are, surely, bad sinners who tell lies to salve their evil consciences. But this book is also about those meaner bits of badness that even you and I carry out. We might pick up some money that isn’t really ours. We might lose our tempers and clip some little brat around the ear. We snaffle the odd bits from work. We deliberately upset others, and inconvenience them in ways it would be difficult to justify in a court of law. Nevertheless, we too are able to feel good about ourselves. We too indulge in crooked logic and lies to self-justify our own criminal and immoral activities. So this is also a book about the sinner who is you — and me as well.

In thinking about this phenomenon, often uppermost in my mind was the old idea of Socrates that nobody ever carries out an act that they believe to be immoral. So all our acts are thought by us to be moral, or at least ethically neutral (amoral) and definitely not immoral. I came to the conclusion that many unethical activities are, at the time, not thought of as bad by the people who perpetrate them. For, perhaps, ‘Evil is only good perverted’ (Longfellow). This book contains the results of my — often internal — investigation into how such self-justifications come about. It includes the many stories we tell ourselves to pull off that particular piece of psychological legerdemain. However, it became obvious to me that there are many more occasions when we are perfectly aware that what we are doing is against even our own moral code, but we do it anyway. The ways we justify such activity began to haunt me. There is logic in the way people argue with themselves to allow them to do evil. I call this sort of reasoning ‘crooked logic’ or ‘criminal logic’. It is the way crooks and criminals often argue when asked the reason for why they do what they do. But those of us who would not wish to be classed among those who batter, steal, and murder are still able to use the same logic to attempt to justify all those lesser crimes that we so often commit. It is in this way that we are able to ‘smile and smile and be a villain’.

So I started to collect these pieces of criminal logic as they occurred to me, and as I saw them used by others — all the ways we justify our crooked, devilish behaviour — and I was surprised just how much of it there was. This book contains several hundred ways I have come across, or could dream up myself, in which we persuade ourselves that what we are doing isn’t really that bad — all I’ve collected so far. I am sorry, as they say on request shows, if I have failed to include your favourite.

I think the book has several uses. You can use the book to keep yourself on your ethical toes. When you hear yourself telling yourself one of these many excuses, perhaps you may remember reading it, or something similar, within these pages. That experience may be enough to allow you to draw breath and think again. Are you being honest with yourself, or are you simply indulging in self-justification by the use of criminal logic to excuse your crooked behaviour?

It should also be useful as a handbook with which a reader will be able spot the crooked self-justifications and ordinary excuses of others. In the glorious (though now somewhat faded) tradition of the book Games People Play by Eric Berne, perhaps this book could be used to begin to understand the particular sub-field of transactional analysis that I might call ‘games of self-justification’. In a way, these are of games of patience, mostly carried out by only one person: They are mental, one-handed, self-abuse games, which have the aim of making ourselves feel better about something we have done that we know was wrong.

Some of the entries here have correspondences in Berne’s games. I shall try to point out those that more obviously relate to a particular game taken from that earlier book — in these references I shall refer to it as GPP. I strongly recommend every reader to look at GPP; when I read it, it changed my way of looking at the world of human interactions considerably. I hope that my book will do the same for you.

Will you be able to read this book and lie to yourself in quite the blasé way you have done before? If not:

THIS BOOK COULD CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Legal defences

I have deliberately not included many of the types of statement used by people who know that they have done wrong, perhaps by breaking the law, but are attempting to get away with it. These are the legalistic arguments that depend upon the fact that if it cannot be proved that we did what we did, then we will not be found guilty for it. We know we battered, stole, or murdered, but (at least in English law) as long as the police or whoever can’t prove it beyond reasonable doubt, then, in the eyes of the law, we may be considered innocent. We know that we are not innocent — we have simply got away with it. However, such logic cannot be ignored completely here because there are people who can con themselves into believing that, in truth, if something they do cannot be positively proved against them then, somehow, that makes the self-acknowledged, immoral activity all right.

But, such warped reasoning is not the main object of this work. There are many defences that we use to justify our own criminal or crooked behaviour to ourselves, so that our bad actions seem to us to be not quite so bad after all. This book is mainly about those — and god knows there are enough of them to be going on with.

The structure of the book

Inevitably, a work such as this needs to be sliced up in some way to make it palatable. A random list of such sorry statements would be very unattractive. However, I do not believe that any cut-and-dried classification system can be drawn up for such a subject. No matter which ways we try to classify the real world, there will always be items that do not quite fit anywhere or seem to be able to be placed into several categories. So the way I have lumped statements together, and separated them from others, must not be thought of as a real classification system — it is, in fact, rather rough and ready. I have at least decided to look first at those reasons we give to justify the actions we commit — the sins of commission; and tried to separate those from the things we don’t do that we ought to have done — our sins of omission. Even here there is a great deal of overlap. We often offer the same pitiful excuses for those things that we ought not to have done as for those we should have done but didn’t.

There are also sections on the ways we persuade ourselves that what we are going to do will be all right — our pre-justifications of immoral acts. Also, I have included several areas of more specialised immorality — the crooked behaviours that relate to cars, business, and sex.

The sins of commission constitute the largest section of the book and are split up into several other vague categories. I have tried to cross-reference between groupings where it seemed that some item obviously could have been placed elsewhere as well. But I did not try to produce some exhaustively footnoted, deeply philosophical, taxonomy of sins. I can leave that to the real philosophers.

Within each major part there are sections and sub-sections to help with these rather arbitrary groupings. Within these you will eventually find the entries or items of individual self-justifications. These are grouped into PRIMARY and SUBSIDIARY JUSTIFICATIONS. I hope you will be able to see that the subsidiary ones are other ways of saying a similar thing, or more specialised or generalised versions of the primary.

The entries

Each entry is centred, in lowercase, and bold — sometimes there is one self-justification and sometimes a few are grouped together because of their very close relationship. There follows a rambling definition, which I call the DESCRIPTION.

Then there are the EXAMPLES. In the non-specialised areas, I have restricted myself to only two of these; and, what’s more, the examples always concern the same two cases: the hitting of a child, and the stealing of some money. This apparent lack of imagination at least forces me to be imaginative in the way I present them — differently for each entry. Also, you may be surprised by the fact that pretty well all of the self-excuses given here can be applied to these two rather banal events. But, more importantly, these two tiny exemplars are intended to represent a very large area of immorality: the complete gamut of cruelty, violence, avarice, and criminality.

Following the examples are my COMMENTS on the entry. This is where I have my say about what we are telling ourselves when we have the temerity to justify our naughtiness using the particular entry under discussion.

The comments may also include the odd encouraging aphorism, aimed at helping us to resist uttering the particular lies contained in that entry.

At the end of each entry is its SELF-JUSTIFICATION RATING. This is my estimate of how valid the piece of reasoning represented by the particular entry. It must be admitted that most of these are going to be pretty poor. But some of them will be ─ well ─ not so poor.

The moral philosophy

Dotted about the book are a few descriptions of the more popular aspects of ethical theory. I felt that one of the spices that a volume such as this needs is some backing in the thinking of the ages about the subject of the book – morality. I once attended a course on ethics, but I do not pretend to be some sort of moral philosopher. Nevertheless, I have reacquainted myself with the topic for the purpose of setting out a few