you have ever encountered is stored. However, the contents of this attic are in constant movement, changing their relationship to everything else in the attic. Your consciousness is not very efficient at finding things in the attic. The more it tries to find something such as a person’s name the more impossible the task becomes. If your consciousness stops looking and involves itself in another task (you say ‘Jim Whatshisname’ and go on with the story you were telling), a few minutes later Jim’s surname will pop into your head, thrown there by your unconscious like a mother who always knows where your stuff is. In the same way, when we go into an exam for which we have pre pared, if we make a conscious effort to retrieve what we have learnt, all we encounter is a blank wall, but, if we sit quietly and wait for our unconscious to think about the first question on the paper, the stream of our memory will begin to flow.
Many people are very proud of their intuition. They like to think that their intuition is always right. To believe that this is true they try to forget all those times when their intuition was wrong. It is said that a group of people interviewing candidates for a job make up their minds within the first few minutes of meeting each candidate. This is simply an example of what happens to most of us most of the times when we first meet someone. It seems that on encountering a new face our unconscious scurries around in the whirling chaos of our memory, pulls something out and presents it to us. What is presented might be quite banal, such as, ‘He looks like my cousin Harry.’ This might be true. We might follow this observation with, ‘Harry was a liar’, and that might be true. But then we can make an entirely false deduction, namely, ‘Therefore this chap is a liar.’
People who place a high value on their intuition are often those people who prefer their world of fantasies to the real world in which they live. They are likely to hold the belief that ‘When scientists analyse things they destroy them. My intuition and my feelings are too precious to be destroyed in this way.’
Then there are the people who subscribe to the delusion, ‘I am objective in all the decisions I make.’ Recently, a well-known politician had made a surprising decision about his political future. I was discussing this with another member of parliament. I mentioned that some months before I had seen a television interview with the politician’s wife which suggested to me that the wife did not share any of her husband’s political ambitions. Perhaps this had played a part in the man’s decision. My friend scornfully rejected this. He said, ‘This man made his decision on purely political grounds. The state of his marriage had nothing to do with it.’
Few men my friend’s generation and older would disagree with this. When the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who in the late nineteenth century became one of the founders of modern psychiatry, wrote his memoirs (according to David Healy ‘among the most tedious books ever written’) he noted the death of his children as something of an afterthought and failed to name either his wife or his surviving children. ‘From the point of view of science, the personal details of these people were unimportant.’3 A hundred years later, I found that the psychiatrists I was working with considered that not only their feelings but the feelings of their patients had nothing to do with the practice of psychiatry. What these men were doing was to turn their fear of feelings – their own and other people’s – into a precious belief that fed their pride. They would say, ‘I am objective. I am never swayed by feelings.’
Younger generations of men brought up by mothers who were in the vanguard of Women’s Liberation tend not to be frightened of admitting that they have feelings, but they find them frightening. They know that feelings are there, but they would prefer they were never mentioned. When the Guardian decided to send their arts writers to review sport and the sports writers to review the arts, Steve Bierley, their tennis correspondent, was sent to see the exhibition of the work of the sculptor Louise Bourgeois at the Pompidou in Paris. He wrote, ‘Sport is essentially about youth, and about absolutes. Sport makes you feel elated or depressed. The works of Louise Bourgeois, 97 years old this December, make you feel unsettled, repelled… Sports writing demands, though often does not get, degrees of objectivity and balance. But how can you be objective about art? Sport has rarely spooked me. But Bourgeois did, all the time… Watch sport and you think about sport. Observe art and you discover yourself. Spirals, nests, lairs, refuges. Bourgeois leads you to dark places you are not sure you want to revisit.’4
No wonder so many men prefer sport to art!
From my observations of succeeding generations of men, it seems that, while younger generations of men live more easily beside women than older generations of men did, men still fear women because the threat is that women always see things differently from men. This is not to say that a woman’s point of view is closer to the truth than is a man’s, but simply that a woman’s point of view is always different from a man’s. The fact that women see things differently from men is a constant reminder to men of what everyone knows but rarely admits they know, namely, that there are as many truths as there are people to hold them, and all these truths are no more than approximations of what actually exists.
Scientists may have only recently unravelled the secrets of our brain’s anatomy to show how difficult it is for us to see what is there, but wise people have always known that we see not things in themselves but our interpretations of things. Writing about Francis Bacon in his book The Threat to Reason, Dan Hind said, ‘Bacon insists that we will only learn the truth about the world if we put away our preconceptions, whether they derive from our experience, or from established sources of authority.’5 Yet we cannot look at the world with eyes washed clean of all our past experience. All we can do is, first, to acknowledge that this is how we see, and then set about practising how to create alternative interpretations. An alternative interpretation might prove to be closer to the truth than the first interpretation.
How can we possibly know what is true? We cannot see reality directly but only the constructions our brain devises out of our past experience. Our brain creates a hypothesis about what is going on and builds up evidence that might increase the probability that the hypothesis is correct. Truth can be expressed only as a probability, not as a certainty. Knowledge of the past is of limited use in predicting the future. Our world and our universe are far more complex than we can comprehend. There are no fixed points in our universe. Everything is in constant change. All we have are our interpretations of the communications we receive, not the communication as it was to the sender. Most of what we know lies in our unconscious. Yet, to operate safely in the world we need to know the truth of what is going on. It is as if we are blindfolded and moving through an unknown landscape, not knowing where it is safe to put a foot, but we are impelled to keep moving on. In such a situation, finding what is true would seem to be our absolute top priority.
But it is not. For all of us there is something far more important than finding the truth.
Chapter Four Why Lying Is Necessary
‘Of course you don’t mean white lies, do you?’
This was often the response when I mentioned that I was working on a book called Why We Lie. But I did mean white lies, and black lies, and all the shades of grey in between. I had a simple definition of a lie – words or actions intended to deceive.
The key word was ‘intended’. We lie because we have reason to lie.
White lies trip easily off our tongue – ‘Good to see you’, ‘That colour suits you’, ‘No, I’m not busy’, and that all-purpose lie, a single word and the most common of lies, ‘Fine’, in response to the question, ‘How are you?’
Bud Goodall, whose father worked in the CIA, grew up in a family that was full of secrets and lies. He wrote,
If I was asked a direct question, such as, ‘How are things at home?’ my answer was always, ‘Fine’. ‘Fine’ was a code word for keeping secret how I really felt. It was at the very least a cover-up of something that could not otherwise