September 15, 2020

I've been thinking about conscious lying, prevarication, cheating, organized thievery, fake news, fiction espoused as fact, legal forensic subterfuge in court, through documents, and even associated with our recent impeachment trial, etc. 

Lying involves deliberate untruthful behavior and speech. Recent psychological research on toddlers, adolescents, and adults reveal that lying is prevalent and that we are easily subject to deception. Toddlers told not to look at a toy  while the researcher leaves the room for a short period of time often look. When asked if they did they lie. The smarter they are on some testing the more they lie. When asked to give their word that they would tell the truth more told the truth. A teenager packs his bed with cloths to appear like he is there sleeping leaves for a party then returns early next morning claiming he just returned from jogging.The parent acknowledges that he is lying, tells him that he is grounded for a time, and if this behavior persists he will not be allowed to apply for his drivers license. This parent tells him that she is concerned for his safety, wants him to have more freedom in the future, and wants to build trust in their communication. I had a forensic case of a woman who became pregnant while living in a very traditional family where out of wedlock sexual activity and pregnancy was anathema. She managed to carry the pregnancy to delivery in the bathroom. The baby was viable but she buried it (infanticide) and later her crime was discovered. She lied to the police, family, and me forensic examiner about her behaviors. A woman recently unemployed due to the pandemic is approached on line by a recruitment agency to work reboxing items such as Apple Watches to be shipped overseas. She gets the job and goies to work. Finally suspecting some wrong doing she reports this to the legal authorities. She unwittingly became a money mule deceived for a time by crooks moving stolen property. 

The prevalence of lying is high. There are many studies about this subject in the  psychological and forensic literature. There are even now studies reporting the prevalence of falsified data and published scientific articles in the literature (i.e.    https://www.livescience.com/64353-top-retracted-papers-2018.html). In the mental health field we have various instruments used to assess whether the observed and reported behaviors and symptoms of an individual are consistent with a mental illness or are fabricated by the individual (i.e. SIRS:Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms by Richard Rogers Ph.D.). In the mental health, forensic, and classified work fields (i.e. CIA)  the lie detector test and variants are still used though their findings are usually not accepted in court. I used to work with an expert examiner and provider of services for pedophiles then released into the community. He often used the traditional lie detector tests on his clients since they often attempt further pedophile behaviors and lie about this unless very closely monitored. He thought that his periodic use was justified since they appeared to inhibited their urges better.  

A large part of my later career in forensic psychiatry involved examining defendants and court sanctioned people incarcerated, hospitalized, on parole, and released for questions as to their ability to understand the charges and assist their attorney, questions concerning their cognitive and volitional capacity to conform their behavior to the requirements of the law, and their risk of dangerous behaviors if released to a lower level of care or in the community. I spoke with many people who prevaricate symptoms and behavior to convince me of mental illness and lied and falsified previous behavior and future intents to commit further crimes. I got pretty good at it where in one health department study my predictions of future violence was 90% accurate. But sometimes I was fooled into thinking the person was seriously disturbed when they were just good actors. 

During a good part of my time in private practice as a psychiatrist I became interested in people who seemed to suffer from a dissociative personality illness (multiple personality disorder).The cases I came in contact with fit the observations of others that these people appeared to have very unusual often horrific repeated traumatic childhood events perpetrated by primary care parents and relative. Coupled with these experiences they had another characteristic in which they were easily hypnotizable. My experiences with hypnosis was upsetting since as a teenager I read about how to hypnotize and learned some of the ways to induce trance in willing subjects. Unfortunately my girlfriend who I had a very hot relationship with (I was a teenager in lust) was a good subject. I quickly realized that all the trance like characteristics such as induced post hypnotic commands, amnesia, negative hallucinations, etc. could be induced so I rapidly gave it up and was afraid to venture back into using hypnosis in my practice.  However, the literature and teachers I consulted at that time when I was struggling to understand and be of assistance to patients who appeared to have a dissociative disorder recommended the therapeutic use of hypnosis to explore and assist the patients in some sort of recovery. So then I took courses in hypnosis and consulted with experts while working with these patients. At that time Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was one of the psychiatric disorders associated with our wars.  These problems that victims experiences had some characteristics of the dissociative disordered people I saw. You experience a severe shock involving your very survival and other horrific things happening. You want to escape and if you can easily dissociate you do. The experience then is not processed in your conscious mind but remains somewhat hidden though you do have strong emotions and strange flashback type behaviors you can not understand. If victimized repeatedly during childhood you may be able to dissociate and create another you maybe with another name who experiences and lives out the victim while you now dissociated into another seem to escape the trauma. I'll leave off here for now to continue my original discussion.

Gurus and charlatans may have similar characteristics in that they portray themselves as having a narrative in which they have special powers which you as an acolyte can join in by living with or closely associating with therefore sharing these special powers. Maybe you have characteristic of the highly hypnotizable. Some research has identified people who are highly hypnotizable who are then prone to listen and follow advice from more charismatic charatans. A simple example, the high hypnotizable is on the line with his favorite stock broker who  has manipulated his relationship so that the victims now is investing in stock put and calls, buying and selling stock to generate commissions for this broker's benefit. Can politicians be in this category. This idea may explain to me how very smart people can have such unusual beliefs including conspiracy theories that to me are so outlandish. 

Lying is prepared and published in our news feeds and media. Strongly held beliefs then become supported in the media by falsifying the news. Remember "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and yellow cake uranium ore alleged to be shipped to Iraq.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries. Our political environment now is especially prone to outright lying. Just Google "Trump lies" and if looking for validation you'll get many hits reporting untruthful behaviors and lies. 

The theory of the mind simply stated is our created narrative attempts at understanding what we believe fitting our observations into a narrative story. " it tells us that behavior is the result of the joint operation of pairs of beliefs and desires. The desires are about the ways we want things to turn out in the future. The beliefs are about the way things are now. Desires and beliefs are related, roughly, as ends and means. The theory of mind turns what people do into a story with a plot by pairing up the content of beliefs and desires, what they are about" https://time.com/5418740/history-neuroscience/?amp=true. Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets things Wrong takes you on a journey of how the theory of the mind assisted us in living in groups, cooperating with each other for survival, and was involved in our generation of good stories, myths, religions, and works of art. He concludes that this narrative way of thinking arose through the processes of evolution and therefore we are hardwired to utilize this way of thinking. We are comfortable thinking through our life's issues by narrative and storytelling. Unfortunately, the world's cause and effect reality is often very different from these narratives. The scientific method with clear reasoning from data leads to how the world works. Galileo was good at making magnifying glasses and noting his observations down on paper and drawing conclusions from these observations, He wanted to publish his finding with his data for others to review, debate and build upon or refute with observation data. His journey involved scientific observations and then theories that supported the data. The Pope at the time had another viewpoint based on narrative theory of the mind. Then earth was the center of the solar system overseen and guided by Ptolemaic beliefs written down by the ancient greeks and accepted as gospel by the Pope of that time. So the Pope threatened Galileo with excommunication and torture but then had him agree to quarantine for many years in his home where he continued to experiment and discover. Galileo discovered though the use of his telescope the craters and mountains of the moon, the phases of Venus which only is possible if Venus is moving around the sun, the planet Jupiter's moons moving around Jupiter as he proposed the earth moved around the sun, the stars of the milky way showing individual stars, and the first pendulum clock. So his efforts were suppressed through the theory of the mind narrative holding sway over science and true reality. 

Climate change is a theory support by data that shows that as carbon emissions have increased since our planet has supported more and more human people who consumed energy for sustenance and now for production of goods and services through the burning of carbon to carbon dioxide the temperature of our planet has increased. Release of carbon dioxide, methane, and other substances have damaged our ozone layer and have resulted in melting of our arctic ice, the unfreezing of frozen tundra, the release of more methane form decayed vegetation buried for millennium. Our development of fracking with mining of methane and proliferation of uncapped oil and gas well, the deliberate burning of forest for use by people for farming, housing, and quick profit, etc. have accelerated these problems. Models of prediction reveal if our activities for energy production and land usage does not change the result will be catastrophic weather increases with destruction of property and flooding, coastal habitats threatened and overcome by rising sea levels, ozone depletion with attendant radiation exposure, increasing fires due to draught and severe weather patterns, rising pollution of toxic gases causing health concerns, etc. Along with these problems there is mass extinctions of animal and plant species associated with our human growth. These extinction may have dire consequences for our planet and life. 

Opposed to this scientific theory supported so far with increasing overwhelming data is the narrative that our human activity is justified since we are the dominant species and we need to pursue our happiness by utilizing the resources available for our immediate and short term goals. Since climate change is a theory why give up on our economic and personal benefits. Politician then get on that bandwagon to allege that denial of climate change will sustain economic growth and they will be reelected.  

Braham Greene in Until the End of Time writes about what we understand from science about everything. He makes a good case that we have some great understanding from science on how things started, how they evolved, and where they are going. He takes much time in describing the second law of thermodynamic better described as entropy. In effect, all matter and energy (everything) evolves into disorder eventually (billions and more of years) while from disorder (increased entropy) we can have order (stars, nuclear fusion, elementary substance (the periodic table), chemistry, biological compounds, the soup that resulted in cellular life and reproduction and evolution of life. He does discuss also quantum mechanics and associated mathematical probabilities for location rather than exact locations. He goes into the subject of the benefits of the theory of the mind and it's pitfalls for understanding how things work. As a scientist he is convinced that everything obeys the scientific laws we have come to understand through experiments, observation, peer review, and open discussion. So we as thinking feeling and living entities are subject to these laws. Our perception of free will is subject to these laws. Though I can fantasize all sort of powers and forces of nature to create fantastic stories these narrative must either obey the laws now so far discovered or else they are creations of our mind in which we can lie or dupe ourselves into believing. Greene does discuss free will in a moving way which I may leave for a later time. 

Thank you for reading and maybe commenting.

Leonard