We prefer to be fooled than hear the truth, and opportunists take note

Doctors find that patients much prefer the version of themselves that’s lighter than the one weighing down the scales in the surgery

You have to wonder if Ireland is the only country in the world where one of the most feared organs of the State unashamedly rewards people for lying and penalises people who insist on dealing only with facts and truth.

That’s what the Revenue Commissioners do, and far from glossing over it or sweeping it under the carpet we used to have back in the day, we keep it out in the open and positively admire it, so we do. We know that if you produce a novel (which, we must remember, is a sustained lie told about stuff that never actually happened) and if the Revenue deem that novel to be of artistic merit, you’re sucking diesel on the pig’s back and the job’s OXO. You’ll get a massive tax break on the royalties of the book.

If, in contrast, you’re a facts man or woman, and you therefore produce a work of non-fiction, the Revenue take a quite different view of you. Oh, you may say to them, my book helps people get out of debt or teaches them how to grow food in their back garden or prevent their children appearing in dominatrix clothes (or lack of same) on Facebook.

Therefore, you may plead, it is inescapable that my work has merit. It’s good for the nation that it got published. Not to mention, you go on, that it’s also bloody well-written, so of course you’re going to give me a tax break on it, right? Wrong? Huh. Always knew you for what you are...

Some of our favourite people tell lies about fictional people for a living. The odd thing is how iffy we get when we find out that they have told lies about themselves. Just take one example.

We’ll buy Patrick O’Brian’s historical novels — such as the one that gave rise to the Russell Crowe’s movie Master and Commander, but we don’t approve at all when we find out that he made up his own autobiography. One is legitimised lying, the other isn’t. According to Robert Trivers, an academic who has studied the lying thing, O’Brian wouldn’t have been exceptional in the level of his personal deceit.

“We are thoroughgoing liars, even to ourselves,” Trivers says. “Our most prized possession — language — not only strengthens our ability to lie but greatly extends its range. We can lie about events distant in space and time, the details and meaning of the behaviour of others, our innermost thoughts and desires, and so on. But why, why, self-deception? Why do we possess marvellous sense organs to detect information only to distort it after arrival?”

Seems pretty bleeding obvious to me. We lie about ourselves because we prefer the version we make up to the one we grew up with. Doctors find that patients much prefer the version of themselves that’s lighter than the one weighing down the scales in the surgery. Toupées and hair replacement surgery sell to men who prefer the version of themselves from 20 years ago than the one facing them in the bathroom mirror today.

The most law-abiding and tax-compliant people lie out of vanity and hope. But lies, for some people, are primarily stimulated not by a desire to live on cloud 9, but by a desire to stay out of prison. Coco Chanel lied her way out of post-war suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis, although she had done much worse than collaborate. Her preferred lover during the war years was a Nazi spy whose association with her allowed him to hob-nob with the influential, knowledgeable and powerful, picking up whatever crumbs might turn out to be useful to the Third Reich. Chanel lied about her past, her present, and her business contracts and lived to a safe, cherished, and wealthy old age on the proceeds.

A new book puts “the little sparrow” Edith Piaf right up there beside Chanel as a woman who could, and did, lie like a rug.

“Piaf’s duplicity was without limits,” says Roger Belleret, the book’s author. Having gone through contemporaneous documentation, Belleret maintains the singer liked lying so much that she even fibbed about where she was born, claiming that her mother gave birth to her in a Paris street whereas she was in fact born — like almost everybody else — in a hospital. It’s the “like almost everybody else” bit that matters here. Piaf’s confected life was much more interesting to herself and to others than her real life, even though that, too, was impelling in its squalor. Earlier biographers have suggested that the washing of clothing held no charm for Piaf. She bought clothes — underwear and outerwear — when it struck her to do so, and then wore the garments until they became too disgusting even for her to continue in them, at which point she threw them away and bought replacements.

Although she may not have been as ruthlessly exploitative of war time possibilities as was Churchill’s friend CoCo, Edith Piaf nonetheless had a grubby war, living over a brothel patronised by Nazi VIPs. Her war was grubby but suspiciously well-fed, which fact landed her in front of one of the investigations set up to identify collaborators. A collaborator? Moi? Well, of course she was, but she sold the investigators a yarn about her fearlessly helping hundreds of prisoners to escape occupied France. None of the hundreds who owed their lives to her ever came forward during or after her lifetime to thank her for it. Funny, that.

One function of biography these days seems to be that of exposing just how good at lying famous figures could be, and how lamentably bad their contemporaries were when it came to catching them at it. This seems to point, first of all, to the “halo effect” generated by fame. Chanel and Piaf, in their own lifetimes, were seen as French national treasures, and it’s much easier to believe those you venerate than it may be to believe complete strangers. Each, as well, had a difficult childhood, albeit perhaps not as difficult as they painted it in adulthood. People tend to make allowances for those who have come through cruelty or deprivation, and believe their stories as if the very incoherence of those stories was in itself a proof of their veracity.

The real reason they got away with it, however, is a simple fact: Human beings are lousy at spotting lies, and they complicate this deficit by kidding themselves to the contrary. Most people believe they’re good at spotting when others are lying. Journalists and cops are convinced they’re fantastic at it. Delusions of grandeur. Stan Walters, “the lie guy” who trains US cops and FBI agents in interrogation, says that his experiments show that police officers are only as good as the average person at spotting untruths.

Yet people who are prepared to spend a fortune on training courses to help them manage change or time or presentations never think of going on a course that would train them to spot those telling porkies. It should be regarded as a basic life skill, but it isn’t. We prefer to be fooled and to kid ourselves that we’re not being fooled.