Dr. Sissela Bok: I want to ask, this evening, what we can do to bring about a more thoughtful debate on deceit, lying, and secrecy, instead of what has come to resemble, too often, shouting matches about lying and cheating between adversaries in politics and many other walks of life. For the honor of giving this lecture, I am most grateful to the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth and to the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities; the more so as I see both the concept of “commonwealth” and that of “humanities” as centrally related to my topic, “The Burden of Deceit in Public Life.”
It is crucial to think of that burden as imposed not just on individuals but on a commonwealth, a community. Practices of deceit in public life do affect us collectively and, in so doing, they place a great burden on “the common weal” – the common good. And in thinking about moral questions, including those that deceit raises, It is indispensable to draw on the humanities. We surely need moral philosophy for this purpose and the examples that history offers in such abundance; but Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher, put it just right, I think, in saying that it is poets, playwrights, and novelists who can best portray for us the moral changes human beings undergo, including degeneration and improvement, and who explain more informatively “our flexibility in such matters as seeing the worse for the better.” This flexibility is never more striking than when it comes to how we see ourselves.
Many writers have shown how a burden of deceit can weigh on individuals who realize they have been deceived; or on people who know they have lied to someone they love, as in Edith Wharton’s novel The Reef; or on those who learn that they have been living a lie, as in Ibsen’s Wild Duck; or who experience the anguish of having to deny their deepest religious or political convictions during times of persecution; or who agonize at finding that they are suspected of lies they have not told. But playwrights and novelists have conveyed, as well, burdens weighing on entire communities, as when Sophocles shows Oidipus, the King of Thebes, struggling against unbearable knowledge about himself as the plague rages in the city (a play Sophocles wrote only a year or so after the great plague at Athens).
In speaking this evening about the burden of deceit, I want also to draw on the perspective of public health; and to refer to the “burden of disease,” a concept that has become central to that field in recent decades. The study of the burden of disease represents a new approach to measuring the health of different populations. As described in The Global Burden of Disease, edited by Christopher Murray and Alan D. Lopez, this approach addresses the cumulative effect of different diseases and types of disability on human life spans, and measures the proportion of mortality and disability that can be attributed to risk factors such as tobacco, poor sanitation, and unsafe sex. I want to suggest ways in which we might use that public health perspective and that concept of a burden of disease in thinking about the societal risks from practices of deceit and excessive secrecy.
Susan Leff’s kind mention of my books Lying and Secrets, in introducing me, brings to mind a letter about them that I received over twenty years ago, from a woman who seemed to have read both from a very personal perspective involving risk analysis in her own life.
After reading Lying, she wrote, she divorced her first husband, a surgeon, having concluded that he was a pathological liar. Then she read my second book, Secrets, and shortly thereafter she divorced her second husband who, strangely enough, as she put it, turned out to be not only a salesman but, unbeknownst to her, an undercover agent.
And so as she looked toward the future, she wondered what my next book might be about. “Somehow,” she wrote, “my timing in acquiring your books does not coincide with my divorce proceedings. Might your current writings prepare me for husband number three?”
Was her letter serious or tongue-in-cheek? Most probably the latter, I concluded, but since I wasn’t sure, I could hardly send off a like-minded reply. And just in case she had written me in earnest, it may have been just as well that I did not answer. For I did not know, at the time, that I would be working on a third book in that series: Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment. The mind boggles at the suspicions that would await this lady’s hypothetical third husband.
Decades after my books Lying and Secrets first came out, I still receive many letters and email messages asking for my opinion a bout lies and fraud in many different circumstances. Some point to cases of fraud in scientific research such as the recent cloning scandal in South Korea and speculate – do the cases uncovered perhaps constitute just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to research the world over? Others bring up stock market or banking fraud and scandals in business or Congress to ask, again, whether the practices that happen to have been exposed are in reality much more widespread.
At times people ask whether entire age groups are not especially prone to deceit. It is rare, nowadays, to hear the slogan from the 1960’s: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Instead, the focus is on the young: on how they lie about their age, as for internet dating or alcohol purchases and how they cheat in schools and colleges.
For me, in part because of letters I’ve received over the decades, these questions are not new. Some people look back at their youth as a kind of Golden Age when people were more honorable, had more integrity and young people knew their place. Some single out the Depression era or the Second World War as such a time. But regardless of their point of comparison, many convey a wistful sense of our own society as culturally exhausted and morally corrupt.
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One of my favorite examples of such an attitude when it comes to cultural exhaustion is an Egyptian scribe 2000 years BCE, cited by Professor Walter Jackson Bate in his marvelous book, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. This scribe wrote in sorrow about how there was no fresh, new way of saying things left. All possible phrases had already been used by “men of old” to the point of growing stale. His complaint is all the more astounding, as Bate points out, since none of what we now take to be the world’s great works of literature had been composed at the time.
A more recent set of examples, this time having to do with corruption and moral decay, is from the year 1987, with its seemingly endless scandals in science, on Wall Street and above all in the Reagan administration in connection with the Iran-Contra affair. The May 1987 TIME Magazine issue had a cover story entitled Whatever Happened to Ethics?” And the Washington Post Magazine proclaimed 1987 “The Year of the Lie” on account of the long list of falsehoods put forth to conceal the various schemes.
By now, as we are all aware, charges of lying, cheating, even treason have become still more commonplace, whether in connection with practices of deceit in business, the arts, journalism, or, especially, in politics and government. Mutual accusations — shouting matches, too often, — resonate, with adversaries showing little hesitation to impute lies to one another.
I am convinced that this spiraling of vast accusations about lying contributes in its own right to the collective burden of deceit, by making it easier for people to conclude there is lying everywhere. W hat gets lost in the way many books and articles and blogs use attribute words such as “lie,” “lying,” and “liar” to adversaries are important differences between simple errors, on the one hand, and, on the other, a variety of ways of misleading people, including duplicity, mendacity, deception, deceit, lying, exaggerations, and euphemisms.
Blurring together all such concepts hampers the thoughtful national debate we ought to be having on the role of deceit in public life and the burden it imposes. Americans, deeply divided over the War in Iraq, disagree sharply over whether President Bush and his administration misled the nation during the build-up to the war, much as citizens disagreed during the Johnson administration regarding the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and about the role of deceit and secrecy in each case. Not only is it crucial to consider the role of deceit and secrecy in public life at a time when the nation is at war; we need to ask, as well, whether the burden that practices of deceit impose is especially likely to contribute to the other burden I mentioned: the burden of disease, adding to the toll of disability and death. It is a burden that grows in war time as well as at other times of national emergency, as caused by hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and epidemics.
We can look back to September 1918, for a particularly tragic compounding of the burden of deceit and that of disease. It was when America was in the “war to end all wars” under President Woodrow Wilson that the influenza pandemic struck with all its force, ravaging military encampments and civilian populations alike. The pandemic would end up taking far more lives, in the course of a few months, than World War I itself – estimates of deaths now range between 50 and 100 million people, worldwide, mostly young adults in the prime of life: possibly 8-10% of all living adults.
In hindsight, it is almost incomprehensible that President Wilson, preoccupied with the war in Europe, took next to no public notice of the threat posed by the pandemic. It is as if he had become the prisoner of his own single-minded focus on the war. According to John M. Barry, in The Great Influenza, “no national official ever publicly acknowledged the danger of influenza.” So far as I can tell, the President himself did not lie outright about the epidemic; but in offering no leadership in the crisis, he failed utterly in his duty to the public.
Secrecy contributed to President Wilson’s failure in this regard. He had spoken most forcefully against secrecy during the 1912 presidential campaign, holding that “everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places” and that “secrecy means impropriety.” By 1918, instituted laws to stifle dissent and to enforce “voluntary” self-censorship for the press. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime for a person to convey information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces. The Sedition Act of 1918, making it illegal to speak out against the government, was invoked to send critics of the war to prison. The euphemistically named “Committee on Public Information” helped to stifle dissent in order to promote the war and keep public morale high. As a result, critics kept quiet and American newspapers remained incongruously upbeat even as the nation was overwhelmed by the pandemic. Many papers simply reiterated the official phrases about there being no need to fear illness so long as you washed your hands and took other reasonable precautions.
If critics had been free to challenge the government – not only its conduct of the war but also its response to the pandemic — it might have been possible to save thousands of lives. Instead, as the death toll mounted, citizens were left bewildered, finding no guidance from the press and increasingly skeptical of official pronouncements. The pervasive distrust contributed to the burden of deceit and compounded the burden of disease, disability, and death.
As we seek to engage a more thoughtful debate about deceit in public life today, it is worth keeping in mind the compounding of the burdens of deceit and of disease in 1918 and during later national crises such as that of the War in Vietnam. In each case, it matters to think through the differences between ways of misleading people, and crucial distinctions without which it becomes well-nigh impossible to consider the moral questions deceit raises. I shall mention, in turn, what I see as some of the most important definitions, distinctions, and the moral questions.
With respect to definitions, there is no one way to define ‘lie” or ‘deceit,’ any more than ‘ promise,’ ‘violence,’ ‘happiness,’ or most non-technical concepts, as the philosopher John Searle has shown, in Speech Acts. What matters therefore, is to be clear about the definitions one is using, and to make sure they do not confuse important distinctions and moral questions. I have found the following helpful, while discussing alternative definitions in my books Lying and Secrets.
Secrecy, to begin with, involves concealment but need not involve any intention to mislead. While all forms of deceit, all lies, involve keeping something secret, the reverse is not true. Keeping something secret, such as one’s private hopes or fears, need not at all be meant to mislead others. But withholding part of the information needed by those to whom one speaks can be as deceptive as any lie. For a public official to fail to reveal what citizens have every right to know is as deceptive as for a physician to keep patients in the dark about a diagnosis of, say, cancer.
Deception can be either intended or wholly unintended, as when we end up deceived by mirages, dreams, or illusions without anyone who intends to mislead us. When we deceive others intentionally, we communicate messages meant to mislead them, to make them believe what we do not ourselves believe.
Self-deception includes the many forms of avoidance, such as denial, psychic numbing, and compartmentalization, by which people seem to take part in shielding themselves from perceiving knowledge.
Deceit is limited to intentional deception of others. It can take place through words or acts: anything people do or say in order to mislead others constitutes such intentional deception, as when disguises are used for such a purpose, or false passports, as well as in all cases of lying or of secrecy meant to mislead.
Lies are statements meant to mislead listeners and believed to be false by those who make them.But just as false statements need not be deceitful, so true statements can sometimes be meant to deceive. An isolated true statement told by someone known to be a habitual liar can be intended to mislead listeners, and succeed in doing so, as much as lies by persons thought honest. Persons adept at producing ‘information overload,’ moreover, as in lengthy, confusing sales agreements or insurance documents, can aim to deceive others without telling actual lies.
Mendacity characterizes someone given to different forms of deceit, including lies, and frequently including, too, self-deception.
Among the most common failures to draw distinctions in the public debates over deceit are those of conflating or confusing lies and honest mistakes; deception through outright lies, half-truths, and silence; foolish promises or predictions and knowingly false ones; telling what one knows are lies and refusing to acknowledge that what one once believed to be true has been shown to be false; and slipping into a lie and undertaking a policy of deceit – something that can happen to anyone and that is quite different from choosing to be someone who deals with others through deceit..
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In turn, when the definitions and distinctions are blurred together in the public debate, it becomes easier to short-circuit reflection about the underlying moral questions regarding when deceit might be considered excusable or even justifiable. In my book Lying, I suggested a three-step procedure for weighing a lie one takes to be needed to achieve a good purpose: first, to ask whether there are alternative courses of actions that will bring about the same aim without requiring deception; second, to set forth with care the moral reasons thought to excuse or justify the lie, and the possible counterarguments; and third, as a test of these two steps, to ask how a public of reasonable persons would respond to such arguments.
People tend to have starkly diverging perspectives on what they see as defining lies and other forms of deceit, on the distinctions I have mentioned, as well as on the underlying moral questions, depending on whether they are thinking about engaging in deceit or believe they have been deceived. Most people value truthfulness more highly in others than when it comes to their own choices. When they find themselves on the receiving end of other people’s lies, they are far more suspicious of the underlying motives than when they consider possible lies of their own. When they do consider lying, they often take for granted that they have good reason to lie without stopping to consider the moral arguments for and against their action, much less to ask whether they could be defended in public.
The most serious mistake they make is to evaluate the costs and benefits of a particular lie or group of lies in an isolated case, and then to favor the lies if the benefits seem to outweigh the costs. Least of all do they take into account what I call three “hidden risks” — apart from immediate costs to the persons deceived and others affected — that ought also to enter into any serious weighing of pros and cons: risks to themselves; to their colleagues, profession, or line of work; and to trust.
The first hidden risk is the most difficult one of all for persons involved in deceit to perceive: the costs to themselves. Because liars tend to overestimate their own good will and their chances of escaping detection, they underestimate the damage to their reputation and their credibility once they are found to have lied. And if they do get away with lies at first, further psychological and moral barriers may wear down; they may come to see more and more lies to be needed and find fewer among them morally problematic. In the end, they may find it harder and harder to distinguish lies from half-truths or to confront the likelihood that the cobbled-together edifice will crumble.
The second hidden risk is to the institution or profession one represents. When journalists or social scientists or public officials are found to engage in deceit, they contribute to the public’s distrust of their colleagues and their profession. Politicians who resort to smears and deceptive campaign ads have contributed to public distaste for politics and to declining numbers of voters, with many staying home at election time, declaring a “pox on both your houses.”
Most remote of all, as people calculate the pros and cons of particular lies, is the third risk: that of the corrosive and cumulative effects that their lies, once suspected, may have not only on their own credibility or that of their profession, but on trust more generally. Lies invite imitation, preventive duplicity, and retaliation after the fact. As they spread, suspicions mount and trust erodes. Naïve trust invites abuses all its own; but when distrust becomes too overpowering within a family, a community, or a nation, it becomes impossible to meet joint needs – to serve the public weal.
Everyone has reason to think through how their lies may add to the burden of deceit; but public servants, doctors, clergy, lawyers, bankers, journalists and other professionals have a special responsibility in this regard, given the privileges they have been granted. Public officials, above all, can have a uniquely deleterious effect on trust. When they act so as to undermine trust, this cuts at the roots of democracy. To the extent that citizens lose confidence in what leaders say, they are disempowered: they cannot know enough about the facts to form an intelligent opinion without relying on the information provided to them. Once disenchanted on that score, citizens may suspect even the most honest officials. As James Madison wrote, “a popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.”
To illustrate how questions arise about whether certain forms of deceit are more excusable than others, let me mention three examples. The first concerns Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin’s campaign for reelection, ten years ago. On June 16, 1996, he won the first round of the elections with about 35% of the votes. The runoff election, in which he faced Communist Party Leader Gennady Zuyganov, was scheduled for July 3. Between the two election dates, it was later discovered, Yeltsin had suffered a severe heart attack. Here was information that would have been crucial for voters considering his fitness for office. Instead, they saw videos of him dancing with vigor and apparent glee, and Yeltsin appeared on television to declare that he knew exactly what to do and that he had “the strength and will and decisiveness for that.” With the help of his doctors and his inner circle, he let it be known that he had a cold and would shortly return to work.
My second example is one we’re all familiar with. In a televised speech to the nation on August 17, 1998, President Bill Clinton admitted that he had misled his family, his colleagues, and the public about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Split screens showed the President acknowledging in August what he had denied in his earlier, finger-pointing speech January 26. Both Presidents Yeltsin and Clinton may have taken for granted that it was legitimate to lie to citizens to protect what they saw as private matters. In retrospect, few would claim that privacy automatically justify not only silence but falsehood on such scores; much less that anyone should go so far as to present deceptive or perjurious testimony in election campaigns or in court. When public official lie to citizens they turn whatever is being lied about into a matter of public concern, bringing into play the three hidden risks, no matter how rightfully private the subject of the lie may have been in itself.
My third example is that of a young English orphan, Margaret Armstrong, She was the daughter of one of England’s most notorious alleged murderers, Major Herbert Armstrong, who was hanged in 1922 for poisoning her mother. Margaret, was seven years old at the time of his trial and was sent to live with a family in a different part of the country. She lived for 73 years in fear of being branded as a murderer’s daughter. She chose to shield herself, not exactly by lying but by telling a very partial truth to anyone who asked about her parents: “I always used to say that my mother had died of food poisoning and my father had fallen and broken his neck.”
Margaret Armstrong’s dissimulation was surely excusable, considering that it began when she was a young child, trying to survive emotionally and to protect information which the public had no right to learn about. But it was a heavy burden for her to bear, since it forced her to continue to live a lie regarding her past. It was only when she was 80 years old, and had lived through the anguish of a BBC “Mystery” TV series about her parents, that she could at last acknowledge publicly her parents, discuss the doubts that had arisen about her father’s guilt, and disclose the stratagem she used in self-defense — without the slightest fear of being stigmatized.
What about the question of whether some practices of deceit are, not only more excusable but more justifiable, say on grounds of self-defense or national security? On this score, there is great disagreement; but I see no problem in defending openly a policy such as that of lying to persecutors searching for their victims. Likewise, in times of war, there clearly is a place for stratagems and deceits, just as violence may be called for, most legitimately in cases of national self-defense. But the rationale of self-defense, individual as well as collective, and the broader one of national security has been invoked for a vast panoply of lies and other forms of deceit that, because they cannot be openly defended, tend to be shrouded in secrecy.
When official lies intended to deceive adversaries on grounds of national security are found to have misled the domestic public as well, the damage to trust can be especially great. For example, take what President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke of as his greatest regret, in looking back at his years in office –“the lie we told about the U-2” in May 1960” as quoted by David Wise in The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power.
At first, when an American U-2 plane was shot down 1,300 miles inside the Soviet Union, while on an intelligence mission, Eisenhower authorized a State Department spokesman to insist that the plane had been on a weather mission; but when Nikita Khruschev made public the photo of the CIA pilot, Francis Gary Powers, Eisenhower had to admit that this claim had been false, and that the US had been conducting spy flights over the Soviet Union.
As the country reeled from this exposure, President Eisenhower considered resigning. His sense of burden was both personal – of having been shamed publicly – and for his administration, seeing the Paris Summit Conference that he had worked so hard to bring about break up as Khruschev dramatically stormed out after lacerating the US. Looking back, the President later said that he had “not realized how high a price we would pay for that lie.” After that, according to Tom Wicker’s book Dwight D. Eisenhower, he saw nothing worthwhile left for him to do as president:
Thus passed the best hope and opportunity, until then, for a comprehensive test ban treaty as the centerpiece of disarmament between hostile superpowers. . . . The nuclear arms race and the Cold War, the vast expenditures to sustain both with tensions only occasionally lessened and never removed would continue for nearly thirty years, through seven more administrations, into the 1980’s.
The War in Vietnam offers another example for which national security was invoked in defense of a multitude of deceitful actions and practices, as when President Lyndon Johnson concealed plans to escalate the war in Vietnam during the election campaign of 1964, pointing to the risks that Senator Barry Goldwater might bomb North Vietnam if elected — actions that Johnson himself undertook after he had been reelected. The thorough historical documentation of these practices, beginning with the Pentagon Papers, offers unique insight into the practices themselves, and their interaction with ignorance, self-deception, and secrecy. In turn, there is much to be learned from this documentation about the ways in which what I have called the burden of deceit can compound the burden of death and disability.
When it comes to the War in Iraq, the questions of whether there were lies in the first place or of whether, and if so when, other forms of deceit were used, are precisely what is under dispute today. Defenders of the Administration’s war policies reject all imputations of deceit. True, some among them acknowledge, their predictions turned out to be wrong; true, they may have relied on faulty intelligence or untrustworthy informants. But they spoke in error, they insist, never to intending to mislead.
A great many people have concluded, however, that the Administration misled them intentionally. By what means, if not through deceit, they ask, did we find ourselves mired in this war that has come to exact such great human sacrifice and such vast financial outlays? Increasing numbers now question whether intelligence was simply erroneous or whether it was twisted, “cherry-picked,” to mislead the public. They are skeptical about the sincerity of those who claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and who issued warnings such as that “the smoking gun that could turn into a mushroom cloud” or who claimed to know that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Quaeda.
Even among those who hold such sharply discordant views, however, there are two areas of agreement. First, most people now agree that the President and other public officials presented arguments to support going to war that relied on evidence later found to be false.
Second, most also agree that the burden of death, disability, and suffering resulting from the invasion is far greater than the proponents of going to war had predicted.
Such agreement can serve as the beginning of a careful sorting through – one that will surely take time — of the different statements made on all sides during the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq. This process will require inquiring into which claims might have been based on error, at least at first; which ones stemmed from overconfidence in poor documentation and unreliable sources; on ignorance or sheer naïveté; and which other ones give every indication of having been intended to mislead the public.
For this purpose, it will be indispensable to look back at past experience, as in the examples I have cited from earlier presidencies, in the light of the burden that practices of deceit impose on public life. It will also be helpful to ask what we can learn from public health efforts to combat and overcome the burden of disease, by assessing risk factors, comparing preventive measures, and stressing rehabilitative measures, and to consider how the two burdens can interact, in order to d etermine what choices are open to government officials, journalists, and all of us as members of the public to work together to alleviate the both burdens.
But it is important for people on all sides of this as of other controversies involving charges of deceit not to rush to judgment, to give opponents the benefit of the doubt. For false accusations of lying and cheating can add to the burden of deceit in a society as well, and to the loss of trust, as can claims that critics lack patriotism and the general free-for-alls about lying that I have qualified as shouting-matches.
Here again, it helps to compare our present challenges with those of public health and assessing the burden of disease. We are surely aware of all the damage done when false rumors are spread about what causes diseases and what protects from them — as when fears of vaccination risk delay the eradication of polio or when warnings about contaminated drinking water are dismissed as propaganda.
Few decisions in a democracy can be more crucial than that of whether or not to go to war. The burden of disease – of death and disability — for a democracy of having done so based on mistakes, misjudgments, and faulty information is already great; but if deceit was involved in presenting it or in exaggerating the need for haste in acting before the information could be checked, it endangers the very essence of democracy – the informed consent of the governed.
As Thomas Jefferson, said, insisting that citizens have a right to full information about the possibility of a war, “It is their sweat which is to earn all the expenses of the war, and their blood which is to flow in expiation of the causes of it.”
