Lying – Does Perception Trump Reality? 9-13-11

Anderson, South Carolina

Surveys and opinion polls suggest lying and cheating have become endemic in American culture, even normalized as acceptable behavior. An astounding majority of students have admitted to cheating on examinations. Universities often lie about the rate of job placement success among their graduates. Substantial numbers of athletes are found covertly using illegal performance-enhancing drugs to gain unfair advantage over competitors. Misrepresentation and manipulation of clinical data in drug research trials is scandalous. America’s economy was nearly destroyed by misrepresentation of risk and quality in mortgage-backed investments. Millions of individuals lie to their spouses as to their whereabouts, ending up in divorce court. Perhaps a majority of political campaigns are driven by empty sound bites and unfulfilled promises.

I presently live in South Carolina because of a big lie. Twenty years ago a professional position was advertised in newspapers nationally. Responding to display ads, I was led to believe I’d be an equity partner in a medical research group being spun off from a large community hospital, to be relocating to an appealing nearby city where I would participate in commissions on outside sales. I moved several states to take this opportunity, giving up a long-standing history and satisfying social network. My contacts made with hospital systems in other states generated sufficient revenues to fund a stand-alone company doing business in another state. I was not invited to join the research group when it formed in a distant city. I was never anything but an ordinary salaried employee in the local community hospital, never participating in revenues from outside sales, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. Twenty years later nothing promised has come to pass.

A prestigious university hospital in the southeast contacted me, asking me to travel to a distant city and make formal presentations of my work to the medical staff, promising to underwrite my expenses and provide a substantial audience of physicians and administrators in a large auditorium. Instead I found a small acrimonious group of a dozen individuals in a small conference room disinterested in my academic work, giving me but a few hurried minutes. My travel expenses were never taken care of and I was never offered speaker’s compensation.

In the mid-nineties my medical informatics work was considered rather novel, even useful. Sharing methodologies and research protocols was standard practice in academic medicine. Was it standard practice for hospitals to see my work at medical conferences and then make clones of it for their own use? Years after the fact I would find hospitals in distant states using identical clones of my work, not even offering acknowledgements. I once found an academic article in a prestigious peer-review medical journal about my work. Much of the text in that article was from my own hand, having been lifted en bloc from other sources. Even my graphics were unaltered. I left the medical world eleven years ago with no regrets.

A well-known university in the southeast invited me to participate in a summer institute as guest faculty. Within an hour of arriving on campus I had occasion to careen down two flights of marble stairs in the dining commons and break my leg, leaving me in a wheel chair for some months. The dining facility director immediately promised full assistance of the university, including payment of any medical and surgical expenses. University risk management staff intervened, refusing to consider my claims, never making good on the promises of its director. The possibility of compensation would have required acrimonious long-distance litigation. I opted out, declining later opportunities to teach there.

In recent years photography has become a source of great satisfaction. More so has been the willingness of patrons to actually buy my work, or at least promise to do so. Not satisfying are empty requests from wealthy individuals to produce large format photo prints in custom gallery frames. Individuals promising to purchase them do not return phone calls and months later I have unsold inventory accreting in my house. I’ve not yet learned a man is only as good as his word, not yet requiring full payment in advance.

Special order furniture also accumulates in my garage. I receive requests from long-standing friends to produce very specific cabinets, only to have them back away when the work is completed. Some of us are very slow learners. Do I really want to enter into agreements based on mistrust, requiring 100% payment up front to force them to perform? Not really. Do I need to? Really.

What constitutes truth? When do good intentions become empty promises? When does a life-long pattern of empty over-promising and under-delivering become little more than fraud? When does it become just a pack of lies? Perhaps the hardest thing to prove in a court of law is intent or pre-meditation. Do individuals with habitual good intentions know they are offering nothing but hollow promises, even lies? Even the jury will never know.

A decade ago I was a candidate in a four-day spiritual retreat. On the last day the lay rector knowingly lied to the candidate class, saying we would have to immediately leave the large comfortable conference hall we had been enjoying for three days; indicating a corporate group paid substantial rent, pre-empting us. I found myself secretly enraged our very expensive experience was being truncated in the interests of revenue enhancement. Later in the day this proved to be nothing more than a guise to get us out of the hall so it could be prepared for a lavish closing ceremony. In the meantime some of us fumed and fussed greatly over the belief we had been pre-empted for a profit opportunity. I nearly left the retreat early in agitated fashion. A fellow candidate talked me into staying. The deception was revealed. Perception trumped reality for a season.

Do white lies ever operate for the better good? Do we deceive in order to get a group to do what we want? Do we pad the numbers to create a perception? Does a priest’s knowingly inflating attendance numbers in his church ever achieve a greater good? Does a temporary perception ever really trump reality?

Having someone look you in the eye and tell you a set of facts is true is most disquieting when irrefutable evidence proves otherwise. Have we so normalized our manipulation of perception as to create a reality in which people can tell bold-faced lies while looking another directly in the eye? Yes, we seem to have found a ‘new normal’ in American culture.

For if I do wish to boast I will not be foolish, for I will be speaking the truth; but I refrain from this, so that no one will credit me with more than he sees in me or hears from me.