A Chronic Liar
by Joseph Rowlands

A friend once told me about a girl who had lied to him. Lying was bad enough, but there was no point to it. The lie had no purpose. When he found out about the one lie, he started checking some of the other things she had told him, and eventually found that she had lied about almost everything. And all of it was equally pointless. She was lying for the sake of lying. She was a chronic liar.

Eventually I had the opportunity to meet her during a dinner. It was a very strange experience. Whenever she spoke, I would immediately assume that what she was saying was probably a lie. Even innocuous statements, like whether she enjoyed the potato dish, raised a red flag. Her lips were moving, but nothing was being communicated.

We take for granted a certain amount of trust when we talk to people. We recognize that there may be times that people will lie, but most of the time they are genuinely trying to communicate. When someone says that something is true, and we have no reason to suspect a motive to lie, we assume that it is true. Our conversations are an exchange of facts and ideas. Without an assumption of truth, even the most basic of exchanges is impossible.

And during the dinner, that's how the conversation went. Whenever she said anything, it was as if there was a barrier between us that words couldn't transmit through. Communication seemed impossible. The attempt at a conversation seemed pointless. It also seemed troubling. Pretending to go along with the conversation, to pretend that there is an actual exchange of thoughts, felt dangerous. It felt like it would be easy to go along with it and lose track of the fact that nothing is true.

One interesting point for me was how much of what we say to one another is a communication of facts. It's not something you notice until the facts are all viewed with suspicion. Much of what we say to one another is a communication of the facts that we know provided to someone else. Whether it is gossip, or discussing the days events, or describing your likes and dislikes, or even telling funny stories.

Communication is a transfer of knowledge from one person to another. We each have our own perspective of the world. We see different things throughout the day. We know different people. And making different identifications. The differences are not just because we have different experiences. We all have our own base of knowledge, and we can make unique connections based on that. And when we communicate these facts to others, they gain from the new information or perspective.

Much of what we know, we learn from others. Our own experience in the world is small compared to the massive amount of information we gain from others. Our lives benefit significantly from this sharing of knowledge. And because of this enormous benefit, there is a default position of trust.

We expect communication to be accurate, unless there are specific reasons to have doubts. We assume that people are trying to genuinely communicate information to us, just as we try to communicate genuinely to others. This is the normal situation. It is entirely abnormal to find someone where the assumption is reversed. And when it does happen, it is easy to want to slip back into the normal assumption.

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