Book Review Editorial: On Lying

Besides the socially expedient white lies we all tell, there exists a panoply of lies reflecting pathology of the mind. On the least pathological pole of this spectrum are life-saving lies (e.g., when threatened by an anti-U.S. terrorist, an American declares that he is actually Canadian), and professionally dictated lies (e.g., in the case of undercover policemen or intelligence agents). In the mid part of this spectrum reside narcissistic lies that serve to deflect shame (e.g., telling that one has read a classic book while one actually has not), psychopathic lies that intend to extract social, financial, or sexual advantage (e.g., telling a woman in a bar that one is a photographer from a famous magazine in order to seduce her), and sadistic lies that aim to hurt the one they are directed towards (e.g., wrongly telling someone that their spouse is cheating on them in order to create marital strife). Finally, there is the extreme pole of this spectrum where we encounter the syndrome of pathological lying.

This last-mentioned entity remains ill-understood. The designation “pathological lying” is often used for profusion and/or grotesqueness of lies. This is not true. The fact is that pathological lying involves not so much as lying as an irresistible inability to tell the truth. The persons afflicted with this malady conceal nothing shameful, seek no advantage, and mean no harm. They simply cannot tell the truth. As a result, upon being asked what time they left their work, they said “6:30 p.m.,” instead of the factual “6:15 p.m.,” or upon being asked where are they coming from right now, they say from the Gibbon Building instead of the correct answer of the Thompson Building, and so on. None of these lies matter in their own right. It is the intolerance of reality that does.

But what is this “reality” that such individual abhor? The answer to this is the following. Reality in this context, signifies the facts that (a) one is psychically separate from one's mother, (