INTRODUCTION
The Currency of Living
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY
Why do you believe what you believe?
You’ve been lied to. Probably a lot. Maybe you knew, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you found out later. The thing is, when we realize we’ve been deceived, we’re always stunned. We can’t believe we were taken in: What was I thinking? How could I have believed that?
We always wonder why we believed the lie. But have you ever wondered why you believe the truth? People tell you the truth all the time, and you believe them; and if, at some later point, you’re confronted with evidence that the story you believed was indeed true, you never wonder why you believed it in the first place.
But maybe you should have.
Facts are just that which continue to exist, whether or not you believe them. But there’s nothing special about a fact. A fact doesn’t sound different from a falsehood. The truth isn’t written in italics. So why do we believe we can tell the difference?
The Truth About Lies is a book about famous swindles that endeavors to give a telescopic vision of society through the phenomena and mechanics of belief: why we lie, why we believe, and how, if at all, the acts differ.
In just the same way that there are only a handful of actual original stories in the collective human consciousness upon which all other stories are only variations, so too are there only so many unique, primal lies. From those few original lies, all the others are derived, endlessly iterated, and polished for new audiences. As the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his book The Age of Uncertainty, “The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud.” Ultimately, as original as the lie may seem in the moment, there are only so many ways to deceive. The Truth About Lies looks at nine basic cons from several angles, among those: the swindlers who worked them, the lies they told, and the people who were taken in.
Each chapter tells the outrageous story of a classic con and illustrates the mechanism by which it works, using both contemporary and historical examples. From the story of a fake Martian invasion that started a very real riot, twice, to the modern madness of Twitter; from a Wild West diamond scam so vast it made fools (and in some cases criminals) of the well-heeled investors of 1872 (including Charles Tiffany) to the tale of that same bait-and-switch scam dressed up in a new investment opportunity called mortgage-backed securities, which nearly toppled the world banking system in 2008.
This book examines the Pyramid Schemes you’ve heard of, the ones you haven’t, and the ones we’ve all bought into without even realizing.
More important, each chapter examines mechanisms of belief and the persistent—and maybe fundamental—role that too-good-to-be-true and faith-based deals have played in human history. Is the twisted tale of selling Snake Oil, which started the craze for so-called patent medicines and led to America’s first Victorian opioid crisis and the subsequent crackdown by the newly formed FDA, really about gullibility, or does the strange science of placebos tell us more about the biology of belief than we realize?
Organized in three parts: Lies We Tell Each Other, Lies We Tell Ourselves, and Lies We All Agree to Believe, The Truth About Lies examines the relationship of truth to lie, belief to faith, and deception to propaganda using neurological, historical, sociological, and psychological insights and examples. It will propose that some of our most cherished institutions are essentially massive versions of those self-same, very old cons and also complicate the vision we have of both the habitual liar and the classic “sucker.”
My first book, Stoned, was ostensibly a book about jewelry, but at its heart Stoned sought to answer a single question: Why do people value what they value? The more I thought about it, the more I began to see something else in those stories. I realized that nearly every story in Stoned, whether about a scandal surrounding a stolen necklace, an island bought with glass beads, or the invention of the diamond engagement ring, had a lie right at its center. That revelation, in combination with the conclusions I had come to in Stoned, led me directly to The Truth About Lies and to its core question: Why do people believe what they believe?
Ask yourself: What are you sure of? We can start simple; let’s just talk about basic facts. How many facts are you certain you know? Quite a few of them, probably. You know your ABCs, you know state capitals, you know water molecules are composed of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom.
You know that the earth is round, right?
Are you sure? How did you come by this certainty? Surely you didn’t do the calculations yourself. The odds are, if you tried to right now, you wouldn’t be able to, because you don’t even know exactly which geometric calculations were used, thousands of years ago, to determine that fact in the first place. And even if you did know what they were, your math skills probably aren’t that strong. My point is not to convince you that the earth is flat—of course it’s not. My point is to show you how many truths you accept without ever considering why you believe them to be true. I don’t want you to question whether or not the earth is round; I just want you to realize that you never really did.
We blindly trust certain facts: things we’re taught, things we can observe or reason. And once we “know” these things, we never really question them again. But often we also believe things to be fact simply because we’re presented with them. Neurologists refer to this tendency as an honesty bias. It’s how we know almost everything that we know: someone else told us. Or someone showed us, or we read it in a book. And though honesty bias may sound too stupid to be true,* in a strange, roundabout way, it’s what makes us all—as a group—so formidably intelligent.
Without this tendency to trust, to assume, to simply believe, every human on earth would be born starting from scratch, unable to benefit from the knowledge of the collective. This bias toward simple belief in the truth of what we are told or shown has allowed humans to build higher, see farther and through shared collective intelligence, become the dominant species on Earth. And yet this vital ability, this necessity to stand on the shoulders of giants and accept secondhand information as truth, is also the very flaw that allows us to be deceived.
Duplicity and credulity are not opposites; they’re just two sides of the same very old coin, and can’t be spent separately. Could it be that at the ancient and tattered heart of humanity, what drives civilization is the capacity in each of us for both deception and belief—and that without this complex duality, there would also be no progress, no social cohesion, no trust, and no ability to collaborate?
Is it possible, perhaps, that you must believe certain lies in order to believe anything at all?
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THE OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK
Credulity, Duplicity, and How to Tell a Really Big Lie
The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.
—DOUGLAS ADAMS
The great mass of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.
—ADOLF HITLER1
THE BIG LIE
As cons go, this one’s got training wheels. The Big Lie is accomplished by making an outrageously unbelievable claim with total confidence. It is, very simply, the telling of a great big whopper. Strangely enough, people actually are more likely to believe you if you lie about owning an island than if you lie about owning a boat. And don’t worry about the possibility that your mark isn’t completely brain-dead—you want some healthy skepticism. The Big Lie works in tandem with our belief in truth, rather than in opposition to it: its success is reliant on people’s understanding of, and faith in, shared objective reality.
Starting Small
The Big Lie is actually the simplest kind of swindle. All you have to do is tell—and preferably sell—a really outrageously Big Lie. Think: “I own land on Mars and I’m selling time-shares.” You don’t need to actually have the thing or even evidence that you do; the deception works entirely based on the fact that no reasonable person can believe that another seemingly normal, reasonable person would brazenly lie about something so enormous. As suspicious as the story itself may be, it seems more unbelievable that someone would make a story like that up and expect other people to believe it. But more often than not, they do believe it.
Copyright © 2021 by Aja Raden
