[1150] Seething Is Believing

I want to talk about lying.

A couple days ago, I somewhat accidentally brain-dumped on one of my friends. I was reflecting on my efforts over the last few years, and the conclusion I came to was that I was first and foremost severely affected by lies.

If you’re a long-time listener first-time caller, you’ll know that lying was a particular pain point for my mother. She would flip the fuck out and engage in the most dramatic displays of violence or breaking my shit if she felt she was being lied to. As an adult, I can figure out that she was very poorly coping with how often she probably felt betrayed in life, but it no less left an imprint on me.

But I’m not here to talk about the past. I want to provide a framework for understanding lies. I think between lies and the truth, it’s much easier to discern lies. Often, they’re as simple as the exact opposite of whatever it is someone is telling you. Most insidiously, they’re something we “deeply believe” is the truth, only betrayed by a faint whisper that, for me, manifests in my gut.

Let’s begin.

We’re familiar with the idea of “white lies.” These are presumed moral behaviors to save someone unnecessary pain. When I was deep in my god vs. science debating, inevitably you’d get challenged on whether or not you’d lie to your dying grandmother if she professed that she would see you in heaven. Are you, atheist cunt, so devout in your lack of belief you’d stamp on your grandmother’s sentiment? It’s an absurd scenario that most remotely human people would navigate without issue, white-lying because not believing in something doesn’t give you license to be a dick.

We have what I call “political lies.” These are the kinds of lies you literally have to tell to occupy certain positions of leadership, or any time you’re speaking to more than 1 person. It’s a fool’s errand to blame a politician for “tacking to the middle” for this reason. It’s in the job description to compromise. It’s the nature of democracy and new information. You’re going to be lying, but it’s not even your fault more than it’s the nature of the incredibly complex arena we’ve constructed to mitigate our differences.

Modernity has hopefully shed some light on the distinction between these kinds of lies and the next batch, “operative lies.” These are lies that work. Work for what? Work for you. They can be about anything, for anything, as long as you feel they are keeping you safe. That’s their primary function, to keep you locked in mentally to “wherever you are” that you deem is where you need to be. Any arena can be abused for your purpose, be it national politics, your family, your job, or your artfully cultivated circle that might even only contain you and your pets.

Operative lies are the important ones to parse further. An operative lie becomes pathological when most outside observers would judge you to be self-destructing along normative metrics. This is where addiction falls. The sense of “this is where I’m safe” bar gets set too low, so all of the operative lies you employ end up servicing destruction to your relationships, finances, and health. This is part of the reason I am professionally suspicious of literally anything my clients tell me. Addiction shuffles your whole self-concept and what constitutes lying.

Here’s where it gets even trickier and scarier. Operative lies are how we house a collective and cooperative society. It’s not just out of the mouths of our campaigners and would-be leaders. We’re each baked into “normative lies” that operate to keep things copacetic.

This feels almost “too obvious” to speak to, except we confuse how to relate to these different levels of lying all the time. I can also personally attest to how often I’m punished for violations of these normative lies, and it’s no small part of why I’m choosing to explore now.

One of the biggest normative lies I’ve been at the mercy of was an implicit understanding after explicit commentary about the inevitability of my successful future. It’s the “go to college, get a good job, you’ll be set” lie. It wasn’t said maliciously. They weren’t saying it to a kid who was flunking school or unmotivated. But it was a normal expectation bred from incomplete information. I’m certainly one of millions who’ve been through that rough awakening.

For my generation, it seemed to be the start of a major transition away from functional operative lying guiding fair-enough norms of society, into the chaos of pathological lies that only serviced the operations of those with power. The bar got set too low. We collectively began shifting our language around self-destructive new norms to operate at this unsustainable level.

In this new jungle of habitual pathological lying, every playbook for success has a sort of standing refutation built into the brain of everyone you might engage. And they don’t even realize it! Because the self-destruction doesn’t look like an overdose. It doesn’t look like self-harm that needs hospitalization.

What does it look like?

It looks like my time at DCS, where a catch-phrase like, “I care about the children” placates over aggressive, illegal, and policy-violating behavior, while the state massively under-pays and under-trains those tasked with keeping them safe. People who do care and behave as they should get punished and chased away. The underlying shameful cheeky sick satisfaction of those who embody Mean Girl bullshit are ultimately steering the ship.

It looks like the dozens of people who advertise themselves as having the specific set of skills you’re looking for, and 2 of them proving capable of doing what they advertise. Yet, they get paid, get reviews, and leave you feeling incredibly confused by how they command such a high hourly rate to not help you accomplish what they said they could.

It looks like friends who devolve into acquaintances and then into memories. There used to be a village. There used to be friends you held on to your whole life. The bar for engaging or working together got set somewhere in the story of the sanctity of your individual dreams and capacity, and we’ve slowly eroded the meaning of belonging to anything bigger than ourselves. We don’t think we exist past whatever is in our head, and don’t bother being shaped by influences vastly different, but vital to illuminating our depths.

It looks like the thousand and one “I’ve got a secret!” Instagram ads about making money, reaching the “next level” of whatever your hobby, and any commercial that’s telling how you must spend more money and acquire more things.

The thing I believe cuts through all the noise is inside us all.

Maybe you think my broader and somewhat hastily conceived categories are confusing and woefully incomplete. That’s fine, I literally just made them up based on my operating instincts. What I do in response to each of the categories is what makes them easier to understand. I listen to my body in how it feels to try and believe in one of the lies at each level.

Let’s go back to dying grandma. “I believe you’ll disappear into nothing and there is no god, let alone heaven!” If you can say that, full-throated, and not recoil, okay, you, psychopath, there is no deeper truth for you than seeking the consequences of that behavior in that moment. A normal person is going to feel like they’re lying. They’ll pull back. They’ll feel “off.” The truth is illuminated, how much they care about grandma, in shutting up and playing along.

Take an extra moment and think about the truth being illuminated from the lie. How you manifest your care for grandma is through silence or nodding along.

Let’s look at political lies. “I’m anti-fracking!” There’s too many competing and convoluted truths to be revealed. Is it true you care about the environment then? Is it true you’re concerned about corrupt corporate capture of energy? Is it true you need to align your views with the party? Is it true based on information today, or information that might be changing faster than we can process? The only truth that can be reliably revealed is that the person saying it thinks it helps more than hurts their chance to get elected.

How about these personally operative lies? What do you need to tell yourself to get by every day? Some of my classics are about being smart and still decent-looking. I point to the stuff I own, interests, work I do around the house or stuff I make. I talk about the struggle to create and stay cheerleading for unknown possible positive outcomes. These things aren’t lies, but taken as a whole, can give me pause and a reason to reflect on if that day, in that moment, I’m living up to the story or including enough humbling detail. I know when I don’t feel like a champ, king, or boss no matter how well I eat that day, how many shows I’m headed to that week, or storied my accomplishments on an instrument or weed whacker.

That said, whatever my personal failings to find focus, motivation, or the ability to account for a consequential detail, I’m not less embedded in a deeply sick and delusionally lying era. At this rate, I’m probably not going to be much richer than I am now, but you’ll hear routinely how “the average American” still suffers from the complex of being a “temporarily embarrassed millionaire.” We’re still teetering on full-blown, albeit incredibly stupid, fascism. We’re praying for a long and jovial ride on renewed “hope,” as a nice substitute for investment, sacrifice, and accountability.

To me, we’re still stuck at the misplaced bar. We’re still addicted. We’re operating under lies that tear us apart, little by little, and then all at once, as they infect each new thing we care about or took for granted. And it feels impossible to combat because we don’t even listen to ourselves. We’re getting super-charged algorithmic ways to play someone else’s game and learn someone else’s language. It’s self-reinforcing through the lies underneath pretension, gate-keeping, language-policing, and every instance of cliche insecure lashing out.

The truth of my circumstances has come out through my genuine adoption and beliefs in the lies. I keep learning the hard way. I keep putting my time, my money (credit card debt), my energy, and my future in the hands of people and systems who can’t understand how to hear the truth of themselves, let alone me.

I’m constantly looking for a way to establish a true and persistent “floor.” A place I can work from and believe in that isn’t riddled with the kinds of lies that tear down what they profess to build. I’m leaning deliberately towards my friends and family that haven’t played on what I got conditioned to feel was normal. I’m every ounce of every hopeful, forward-thinking, genuinely believing in himself asshole who has appeared on 1,150 blogs over 21 years. I won’t let myself forget how to recognize a lie.

I swear, on everything, I’m trying. Nothing about me recoils over that.