Dorothy Rowe - Why We Lie - The Source of our Disasters

The universal and most popular lie we tell ourselves is, ‘I am superior to other people.’ Many people claim this superiority because they hold certain beliefs about their religion, race, nationality, class or gender, while others claim their superiority simply because they were born into a certain family. All feel that this superiority entitles them to patronize, denigrate, ignore, cheat, or harm those whom they see as their inferiors. In clinging to this lie, they deny the similarities we all share. Our species varies very little genetically, and we have the same needs, desires and fears. We all want to be recognized for being the person that we are, to have a respected role in our society, and to enjoy good relationships with others.

All the immense problems we face today – a global financial crisis, climate change along with the pollution and despoiling of the planet – derive from the way certain people have told themselves that they are superior to the people they are harming, and therefore entitled to do what they do. When the British, Germans, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese established their empires, they told themselves that they were rescuing those they colonized from their ignorance and degradation, and they were saving their souls, when the truth was that these empire builders were engaged in theft on a massive scale. Believing that merely having a religious faith is sufficient to show that you are both virtuous and superior has allowed vast numbers of people to harm others and feel no shame. Lying to ourselves is very easy, and we can always think of a lie that seems to allow us to do what we do.

As religious leaders have demonstrated down the centuries, exhortations to be virtuous rarely change people’s ideas about how they should behave. It is always easy to deplore other people’s behaviour, but we are not inclined to change our own behaviour at the behest of those who see themselves as having moral authority. Threats of punishment by the law can lead us to appear to change, but we simply keep our ideas to ourselves. Under Communist rule many people made an ‘inner emigration’ and lived an unpolitical life. 9People change their ideas when they voluntarily examine their own ideas and the consequences of their ideas, and decide to change.

In the course of my work I have seen many individuals decide to change how they saw themselves and their world so that they now live a much more satisfactory life. In Germany there have been some profound changes in ideas. Many countries with pasts that many of their inhabitants want to forget or deny have tried to deal with their legacy by holding some kind of inquiry, but the Germans dealt with life under Communist rule with Germanic thoroughness. Garton Ash wrote, ‘Germany has had trials and purges and truth commissions and has systematically opened the secret police files to each and every individual who wants to know what was done to him or her – or what he or she did to others. This is unique.’ 10In his conclusion written in 2009, Garton Ash pointed out that, since 1997, the technological revolution has put into the hands of the British and American governments, and into the hands of private security firms the means of spying on individuals that are far beyond what Nazi and Communist leaders could ever have imagined. He wrote, ‘East Germans today have their privacy better protected by the state than we do in Britain. Precisely because lawmakers and judges know what it was like to live in a Stasi state, and before that a Nazi one, they have guarded these things more jealously than we, the British, who take them for granted. You value health most when you have been sick.’ 11

In 2009 when the BBC correspondent Mark Mardell was leaving his post in Europe, he wrote what he called a final essay on Europe. There he said, ‘Germany is still the most important economic and political power in Europe, but with a sense of responsibility, an ability to reflect upon its past, a horror of war, that is I think unique and little short of a miracle, an outcome few historians studying the aftermath of past conflicts could even have dared to predict. It’s probably the most grown-up country in the world today.’ 12

Another change in how people think began in the 1970s with what then was called self-help. People with problems such as poor housing or chronic illness lost patience with the experts who were supposed to be helping them, and got together with others suffering in the same way to solve the problem they shared. Some of these self-help groups became movements, many of which effected the changes they sought. In her book The Wisdom of Whores the extraordinarily truthful epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, writing about AIDS, said, ‘It wasn’t doctors who kick-started the response to this infectious disease, it was gay men. With a flair for dramatic presentation and an inside knowledge of what makes the communications industry tick, they battered down the doors of the medical establishment, assaulted the pharmaceutical industry, took the press by storm. They gave AIDS a political face.’ 13

The Internet and the World Wide Web revolutionized how people communicate with one another. Politicians, media moguls and the police have been forced to adapt themselves, though not without complaint, to the power of disparate groups of people all around the world. Here in London the police might have changed from using force to a softly softly approach with the people in the Climate Change movement, but whether they understand and accept what the Climate Change people are doing is another matter.

Unfortunately, many of those who organize for a cause have not learned from history. Neither exhortations nor the presentations of facts will force people to change how they think. To get people to change, you have to understand how they see themselves and their world. You must never assume that you know how another person thinks and feels. The only way to discover this is to ask that person and, if he trusts you, he will tell you.

The greatest change in ideas that I have witnessed is in how parents see their children. This was not a world-wide revolution, and the majority of children are still in servitude to their parents who see them as possessions to be used as they see fit, but a significant number of parents changed their views about how children should be raised, and this changed the society in which they lived.

The revolution that led people to question the power of parents began in the 1950s when an American paediatrician, Benjamin Spock, put forward the dangerous idea that parents should not punish children three years or younger for failing to do something that was physiologically impossible for them to do, that is, have voluntary control over their bladder and bowels. Children need to learn how to do this in their own good time. Hard on the heels of Dr Spock came T-groups, consciousness-raising groups and a plethora of therapies. All these activities gave the participants permission to break the Fifth Commandment, ‘Honour thy father and mother, so that your days be long in the land.’ Criticize your parents and you’re dead. This led these people to wonder whether, since they had suffered at the hands of their parents, they should now think hard about how they should raise their own children. Now, when I see a child doing something that would have earned me as a child a hard slap or worse from my mother, and instead the child’s mother engages the child in conversation or distracts the child, I want to tell her how wonderful she is. I refrain from doing this in case I embarrass her. After all, she was simply doing what her mother had done when she was a child.

We could decide to change our ideas and thus solve the problems we are facing, both privately and publicly. However, as Elizabeth Pisani said, ‘We can’t solve a problem that we won’t describe honestly.’ 14Are you prepared to give up lying?