By Jim Hagarty
A popular TV program in the U.S. called Nightline ran a segment a while back on how comfortable people in our modern society are becoming with the practice of lying.
ln an earlier age, deceiving others as to the truth of things was considered a pretty classless, immoral thing to do. But apparently, there has been some sort of seismic shift in the way we look at truth and facts, as though they have somehow been disconnected from any concept of honour in our modern world. Appearances now, it seems, trump reality. How easily we shrug our shoulders these days both when we ourselves tell a whopper and when the other guy lies through his teeth.
Nightline produced a few examples, such as people padding their resumés when applying for jobs and students cheating in a hundred and one ways rather than doing the work required of them by their teachers. If a bit of b.s. will push us along the path we want to go, it seems a growing number of us are perfectly OK with that. Or at least it doesn’t bother us as much as it might once have.
An amusing example of Nightline’s thesis was a survey that was done on people who can be seen talking on their cellphones in public. Apparently, and I’m not sure how such a figure could be arrived at (hopefully Nightline wasn’t lying about this or lied to by the cellphone users), something like 35 per cent of all the people we see supposedly talking on their cells are speaking to no one on the other end of the line. Those bogus conversations are all for show, so the owners of the phone can look cool, important, etc.
We all have our secrets but withholding those, as far as I’m concerned, is a lot different from lying. Those fall more into the realm of privacy and unless we’re breaking laws by withholding information, we should be allowed to hang onto a few bits without divulging all.
When I was teaching journalism to students in their late teens and early 20s, I encountered the odd bad apple who sometimes chose expediency over honesty and honour if their backs were against the wall. Typically, they’d turn in work they didn’t do themselves and in a couple of celebrated cases, these fledgling reporters went ahead and made up interviews with non-existent people. I used to check out some of these “sources” and it didn’t take long to prove how bogus they were. In one case, I phoned up a real doctor who was quoted all through a story. He told me he’d never heard of the student who had apparently interviewed him.
A bit shocking, at first, to know that some people have that much nerve, but then, I’m probably pretty naive about the ways of the world. When some politicians think nothing of playing fast and loose with the facts, it shouldn’t surprise us I guess that the ethical bar keeps getting lowered for the rest of us.
When I was a kid, I didn’t always tell the truth. Maybe that’s a kid thing. It was rare for me, however, to totally make up things. As I often hear others say about themselves, I was not a good liar. My body language would give me away too easily and although I’m a reasonably good storyteller, under pressure I’m not very good at all.
Exaggeration, however, was my forte. These days, I usually can’t be bothered to tell anything but the truth, even though I concede there are times when being totally honest is not in a person’s best interest. Nevertheless, the other day I was shocked to hear myself tell someone something that wasn’t entirely true. Where did that come from, I wondered.
But if you see me on my cellphone, I swear, there’s somebody on the other end of the line.
Somebody important, of course.
Like me.
