Weighing up when a lie is needed, or when a lie isn’t needed but just feels right, is a life skill we have to pick up pretty quickly. In fact, deciding to lie is one of the building blocks of maturity; “children need to learn how to lie before they can really tell the truth,” being something my mother (a retired school teacher – one who was lied to a lot) stood by during her time listening to children make up absolute tosh. Most of us start lying at two. We build to white lies at three. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing – because how can you get to “I can’t come out today because my guts are water,” as an adult if you hadn’t tried out “I didn’t leave the class hamster hutch open yesterday and it wasn’t my fault Bonnie and Clyde escaped last night,” as a child?
Lies are occasionally required for school, work, relationships … sometimes they’re necessary for calling off a football game because a member of the team is out of the country. Ballybrack FC’s issue with Fernando Nuno La-Fuente not being around for a match against Arklow Town might have been easier solved with a bad-guts gambit. It’s not a pretty lie, but certainly better than going straight to “uh … he’s dead”.
You don’t go straight to death – that’s a golden rule for lying to hide something. Practised liars have to learn that along the way (Ballybrack FC know that now, for sure). There’s a whole spectrum of lesser nonsense you go to first – think of the recklessness of the office liar archetype, who kills off their whole family over the course of a year because they want more time off. What lie can they go to next time they want to stay in and watch Bullseye repeats all day? Their great-uncle can’t die twice. Though … actually, sometimes people do die twice, according to the research. It’s an epidemic, particularly among those with relatives who don’t want to go to work, so be careful out there.
Why do people tell stupid lies? Lies so stupid they’re bound to be found out as false? They don’t all come from compulsive or pathological liars who just can’t help it. One of the most interesting liars to have reached public scrutiny over the last decade, for me, was the Hipster Grifter, who allegedly (if you missed out on Gawker’s coverage of her story back in 2009) used a placement at Vice to score free Flight of the Conchords DVDs, and told boyfriends she had cancer to score … who knows. Cancer lies don’t get DVDs, credit cards, or concert tickets (another of her reported fixations). They do get ill-earned sympathy, though, and a bit more tolerance for acting like a bit of a plank. But it doesn’t last forever – especially if you keep returning to the same well. An easily-Google-able police record doesn’t help, either.
But even grifting for tickets to see hipster bands is small change in the stupidity stakes in comparison with, say, Oprah Winfrey tickets – boy, the lies a person could tell for those. Tickets for the finale of The Oprah Winfrey Show were so prized in 2011 that Robert Spearing (another legend of extreme lying) faked a mugging to hide the fact he hadn’t managed to get them for his wife. “But I don’t like Oprah Winfrey and I don’t want to go,” wouldn’t have been convincing either, but easier than pretending to be attacked on the street and getting the police involved.
People lie. Not all in extreme or stupid ways. Sometimes we lie to save those we care about from being hurt. Sometimes we lie to cover up things that embarrass us. Then there are those of us who lie because we like it, or we’re arseholes. Some of us are better at it than others, sticking to smaller realistic untruths when we really need them, rather than constructing grandiose Keyser Soze-level plots to screw others over. Mainly, we do it because we don’t want to disappoint people. Which can be a mature, natural and even noble thing, when the untruths are well-intended white lies that don’t hurt people. And just involve a bad stomach. And aren’t “he’s dead”.
• Phoebe-Jane Boyd is a content editor for an online media company
