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Resisting dehumanization

PART ONE

“Why should anyone care about dehumanization? Dehumanization fuels the worst brutalities that human beings perpetrate against one another. It’s not just a problem of the modern, industrialized world: it’s haunted humanity for millennia.”  David Livingstone Smith

“Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.”   Paulo Freire

Today’s post is about David Livingstone Smith’s book, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, but I will begin with an extract from the book I referred to in the previous post. In this essay I only draw on the plenty historical events and examples mentioned in the book, except for one reference to the Greek genocide by the Turks in the 20th century.

Bruce Perry writes:“Humankind is the most complex of species. And puzzling. We protect, nurture and enrich our young – and we exploit, humiliate and torture our young.  We can be selfless and selfish – sometimes the same person who gives you life, cares for and feeds you also abandons you. Or worse.  We invent, create, build – and then we destroy.  The history of humankind is a profound ebb and flow between these magnificent and shameful characteristics.  Over the centuries we have struggled to understand and act on these multi-dimensional and dualistic qualities of the nature and nurture of humankind.  And in these efforts we have invented new ways to live together – new models for scientific discovery, governance, transportation, economy, education and child rearing.  Overall, the trajectory seems to be positive. Social justice, creativity and productivity, on whole, have increased over the ages and hate, brutality and violence have decreased.  Yet we often lose our way – and struggle as families, communities and societies to get back on a healthier “developmental” trajectory, always hopeful that we can make the world better for our children and grandchildren.”I think that Smith ends his book on a similar note. He writes: “Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” That’s only half the story, because it only bends toward justice if we push it very hard to bend it that way.”

Smith is a writer, professor and philosopher and in this book he takes an unflinching look at the both mechanisms of our psychology that make it possible for us to see other people as less than human, and how politicians, governments and certain groups exploit our survival fears and this innate propensity through manipulation and spreading of narratives that serve their own agendas. The book focuses more on the darker side of our human experience and some of the darkest pages of human history. The writer sheds light on this in an attempt to help readers understand and then resist dehumanization of other human beings. He draws on and refers to many historical and contemporary events like the Holocaust, genocides in Rwanda, America Armenia, Myanmar, Cambodia, and elsewhere, the persecution of the Roma people or Gypsies across time and place, various war atrocities, colonial oppression and inhumane practices, the lynching of African Americans and the slave trade, and other well known episodes of violence in history.

He also expands on the relationship between racism and dehumanization, how false beliefs are often the precursors of dehumanization and the many atrocities and injustices that often follow it. He draws on politics, psychology, history and other fields to assist our understanding of dehumanization and the ways we might resist it in small and bigger ways. Finally. the book manages to alert us not only to the horrors already committed, but also, to the current resurgence of political authoritarianism, hate crimes against people and minority groups, and racist rhetoric, as well as, current and potential future refugee crises due to wars, environmental destruction and climate changes.

Smith’s deep interest and exploration of dehumanization in all its complexities seems to have also stemmed from personal experiences of oppression. On the one hand, his Jewish maternal grandparents had fled to the USA to escape the pogroms in Europe, and on the other hand, his paternal grandfather had participated in a genocidal explosion of the Cherokee people from Georgia. He mentions that these stories influenced him to study the darker and more troubling sides of being human—deception, violence, racism, and dehumanization. He also grew up in the American South, where apart from the discriminatory policies and laws, racial hierarchy was also deeply entrenched in people’s beliefs and attitudes. He writes: “…the Jim Crow era was organized around the idea that Whites deserved power, privilege, and any resources they demanded, while anyone else, especially Blacks, were born to a life sentence of inferiority. This was the world in which I grew up.”

Smith doesn’t recoil from providing explicit descriptions of the horrors that can follow dehumanization. By doing this he brings the reality and the danger of dehumanization to the foreground of our awareness. One example he returns to is the lynching of thousands of African Americans documented between 1877 and 1950s. Many people outside the USA, myself included, may not have a clear picture of the depth of inhumanity and cruelty involved in those events, and certain parts of the book are certainly not easy to read. Lynchings, he writes, were referred to as “barbecues” and viewed as festive events appropriate for the whole family, young children included. They were not extrajudicial executions, but they involved unbelievable torture and mutilation of bodily parts that were often kept as souvenirs by the spectators. Actually, we read that the practice of keeping severed body parts as souvenirs has taken place in the Vietnam war and many other occurrences of genocide and conflict. Smith asks and explores the question of what made these acts psychologically possible. He writes that the many thousands, who perpetrated these crimes, were ordinary people, not sociopaths. Many were family men, churchgoers, pillars of their communities, and also, the grotesque spectacles of lynching and execution were enjoyed by their wives and children. He asks: “What was it, psychologically speaking, that empowered them to do these things and the spectators to relish them? Part of the answer lies in dehumanizing beliefs that many Whites held about Black people…”

Defining dehumanization

Smith refers to different theories that exist about dehumanization, which I will not go into here, and the large gaps that exist between different conceptions of dehumanization, which he believes can make discussions confusing. He sees dehumanization as a kind of attitude—a way of thinking about others, and believes that to dehumanize another person is to conceive of them as a subhuman animal.  For instance, German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s toxic political slogan was: “Not every being with a human face is human.” Also, images appeared in the press depicting Jews as pigs or rats, He asserts that we’ve got to be able to distinguish it from racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and other forms of prejudice and oppression because to dehumanize others is to think of them not merely as inferior human beings, but as subhuman creatures.

Smith describes how: “During the lead-up to the genocide in Rwanda, and also while it was unfolding, Hutu propaganda characterized the Tutsi as cockroaches and snakes. Was this mere derogatory name calling? The testimony of some killers suggests otherwise. “We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps,” He clarifies that dehumanizers are not just slinging animalistic metaphors at a vulnerable group, they aren’t just pretending, they sincerely believe that those whom they persecute are less than human.  For instance, in the SS booklet entitled The Subhuman, the Jews were presented as less-than-human creatures and it was suggested that even though Jews looked human, they weren’t really human:  “Although it [the Jew] has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Not all of those who appear human are in fact so. Woe to him that forgets it!” (Extract from the The Subhuman).

Smith recognizes that underpinning dehumanization and racism is a speciesist logic, which he critiques saying that “the Darwinian revolution should have demolished the idea that nature is arranged as a hierarchy” and one reason to why this theory stubbornly exists is the fact that we depend on other species, both animals and plants, to survive. He also suggests that a good theory of dehumanization should be consistent with those episodes in human history that are uncontestably examples of dehumanization, one, of course, being the Holocaust.  He finally, states that once we begin to learn about the mechanics, history, and uncanny destructive power of dehumanization, we see it everywhere and can more clearly see the urgency of opposing it.

Genocide

Thea Halo, regarding genocide, emphasizes the four D’s of genocide: dehumanization, demonization, destruction, and denial.

Genocide is the most disturbing example of dehumanization’s destructive power. According to Smith, the dominant majority first singles out an ethnic or racial minority as a threat and they label them as criminals, parasites, animals or monsters. Dehumanized people, he says “are beaten, raped, castrated, sterilized, incarcerated, enslaved, subjected to discriminatory laws, and denied ordinary rights and privileges. Dehumanized people are avoided: they are segregated, expelled, neglected, or herded into ghettos, prisons, or concentration camps that separate them and make them invisible to the dominant majority. Dehumanized people are labeled; time after time, dehumanized people are described as dangerous and dirty. They’re given derogatory names and sometimes required to display certain forms of identification or distinctive forms of dress…” They are impoverished, rendered unemployed, robbed and humiliated. In 1938, for instance, Austrian Jews were brought to their knees to scrub the pavements in front of jeering crowds.  Finally, the dehumanizing  group no longer see or treat the victims as human beings, but as filthy, subhuman creatures that must be eradicated and hunted down, or civilized, tamed, abused and exploited.

Smith returns to the Holocaust, and certain other historical events, that he considers prime examples of dehumanization throughout the book. He writes: “It would be strange, to say the least, to adopt a view of what dehumanization is that doesn’t apply to the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka.” He claims that to date the Holocaust represents the most explicit and thoroughly documented example of the dehumanization of a whole people, and that much of what we can learn from the Holocaust can be applied to other cases of dehumanization too, because dehumanization always conforms to more or less the same pattern, even though there are individual variations; for instance, “the dehumanization of Black people by Whites is not the same as the dehumanization of Tutsis by Hutus, which is not the same as the dehumanization of Armenians by Turks.”

Greece has had its own flavour of genocide in its relatively recent history. The Greek genocide perpetrated by the Turks, as part of what many scholars recognized as a broader genocidal policy, was the systematic brutal killing of the hundreds of thousands of the Greek population, which was carried out mainly during 1914–1922. The genocide included massacres,  rape, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, summary executions, the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments, and confiscation of property. By late 1922, most of the Greek population of Asia Minor that had been there prior to the Ottoman late medieval conquest of Asia Minor, at least since the Late Bronze Age (1450 BC), had either fled or had been killed.

Dehumanization isn’t only a factor in genocide, but also influences how we think of enemies during wartime. Smith writes that wartime propaganda often zeros in on the dehumanizing mindset because for most people, killing others isn’t easy to do, and there are massive psychological barriers that must be overcome before one can pull a lethal trigger.  Several examples of dehumanizing propaganda, from World War II and Vietnam and other conflicts are provided in the book.  He tells us, for instance, that through seemingly innocuous, lighthearted cartoons soldiers were being urged to consider the enemy as other, not as people whose children and families and homes would be destroyed, but as a different, lesser, repulsive class of creature that deserved to be wiped off the earth.

Another example of this kind of war propaganda mentioned in the book relates to Sir Thomas Blamey. Smith quotes him: “We are not dealing with humans as we know them . . . We are dealing with something primitive. Our troops have the right view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin.” The article included a drawing of an insect-like body and a grotesquely caricatured Japanese face and it appeared during the very month that over 16,000 tons of incendiary bombs turned a densely populated area of Tokyo into an inferno. And this was just the beginning of a massive bombing campaign, which culminated in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. Dehumanization was also rampant during the war in Vietnam, where soldiers were made to think of the Vietnamese as subhuman animals. Smith writes:  “As Vietnam War veteran Stan Groff notes, dehumanization of the enemy helps in the gruesome business of killing. Discussing his combat experiences, he says, “we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. . . .”

However, dehumanization isn’t always in the service of killing, but as the author of the book suggests “it’s also the handmaid of oppression.” He helps us understand this through exploring slavery. He writes “it was common for North American slaveholders to think of the human beings whom they enslaved as belonging to a lower species of animal—a notion of racial hierarchy that was part of a more encompassing, hierarchical vision of the cosmos…” Because Black people were seen as subhuman, this made it acceptable for their owners to treat them as their livestock. And this made it possible for Black people, in particular Black men, to be depicted as primitive or beasts, which then fueled the mass atrocity of lynching,

Continued……

In PART TWO the focus is on the concept and theory of race, the difference between racism and dehumanization, how dehumanization helps dissolve our natural human inhibitions to kill another human being, understanding  dehumanizing beliefs as ideological beliefs, and what we need to do to resist dehumanization.

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Watercolours, trauma and neuroscience

“… And what can give a child hope – or take it away?  As you might expect, I believe that hope is a brain-mediated capability. Hope is the internal representation of a better world; essentially a belief that things can be better. It is, in essence, a memory.” (Bruce D..Perry, from Brief: Reflections on Childhood, Trauma and Society)

As I mentioned in the previous post I was planning to write about David Livingston Smith’s book, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, but even though I’ve finished reading it I haven’t yet got round to writing the post I intended, Instead today I’m presenting some basic points made by Dr Bruce Perry in his book, Brief: Reflections on Childhood, Trauma and Society. Meanwhile, I’ve been playing around with water colours, and am posting some pages from my painting pad.

I think the first article related to trauma and neuroscience that I read, many years ago, was written by Dr Bruce Perry. I have probably referred to it in some of the earlier things I wrote for this website. Then I went on to read the book he co-authored with Maia Szalavitz: The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog, and then for a couple of years I occasionally read material related to the Child Tauma Academy.  In a recent podcast I was listening to I was reminded of his work, which then lead to my re-reading Brief and this post.

Perry is a child psychiatrist, neuroscientist, author of books and many articles, teacher, clinician and researcher in children’s mental health. His more recent clinical research has been focused on integrating principles of developmental neuroscience into clinical practice. He and his colleagues have developed The Neurosequential Model, a developmentally sensitive, neurobiology-informed approach to clinical work, education and care giving.

In the first essay of the book he explains an important concept:  Biological Relativity.  Perry begins by asserting that the relative impact of time [time lost or time invested] is greatest during our early life. He describes how hours in infancy have more power to shape us than months in middle age. He writes: “Indeed, humanity was created in childhood. This is so because of biological relativity. In brief, a biological system is influenced by any experience relative to the rate of change in that system. The power of time and experience, therefore, is increased in rapidly changing systems.” For humans, Perry says the greatest rate of change takes place during our developmental years, and, of all of our body’s systems, the most dynamic, complex and rapidly changing is our brain, and it is the  properties of the human brain that allow us our humanity. He explains that the human brain has the amazing capacity to store, categorize, process, modify and pass elements from experience to the next generation, and that complex things like democracy, economies, amazing technologies, social justice, and so on, are not “inevitable genetic manifestations of the human brain; rather they are the distilled products of thousands of generations of experience. It is in this socio-cultural distillate — the collective memory of family, community and culture — that an individual child grows.”

In childhood, Perry says: “time and experience are magnified, amplified and empowered by the opportunity to express our genetic potential — or not.” By age three, the emotional, behavioral, cognitive and social foundation for the rest of life is more or less in place. So, it is easy to understand how trauma, neglect and repetitive instances of less than optimal attunement between child and caregivers / environment can determine both the expression of potential and the quality of health and adult life. He writes that during early childhood, the organizing neural networks that are developing require touch, sight, sound, smell and movement in order to develop normally. In the absence of experiences of sufficient duration or quality, some of the genetic potential of the individual will be lost. He explains that an infant born in a hunter-gatherer clan 20,000 years ago, for instance, had the genetic potential to read, write, play piano or understand the double-helix of DNA, but instead he / she learned to distinguish animal tracks, throw a stick with precision and read the visual-spatial cues of terrain. Mozart, he writes could not have composed had he never heard music in his early childhood.

Perry provides examples to support the idea that our childhood experiences, matter and they contribute greatly to the creation of the person. For some people these early organizing childhood experiences are consistent, nurturing, structured and enriched, with few adverse experiences, and for others, they tend to be more impoverished, neglectful, chaotic, even violent and threatening. In chapter 10, he again highlights the power of first experiences to shape – for better or worse – future perceptions, interactions and behaviors, and discusses how these early experiences provide the template for subsequent similar experiences. He writes that for many decades, he and his colleagues have been living and working with maltreated and traumatized children, and that they have tried hard to understand the impact of developmental trauma, neglect, and other adverse experiences on these children, in order to support them in the healing process. During this process they found that one of the most useful exercises clinically was to begin to think about what was actually happening in the brain of the child during development and during the actual moment to moment interactions at home, school or therapy.

They included neurobiology and neurodevelopment into their clinical mix, which allowed them to gain new insights about origins of symptoms and the reasons that some clinical or educational efforts were inadequate or ineffective. To understand the power of first experiences we need to consider the fact that the brain has the capacity to “pair” or connect patterns of neural activity that co-occur.  Perry writes: “Two or more incoming sensory signals taking place at the same time with sufficient frequency or intensity become “associated” (e.g., the sight of mother’s face, the sensation of sucking and the feeling of becoming satiated).  This association –or connection – is created by making and then reinforcing new synaptic connections; essentially creating a new memory. For a newborn with an attentive, attuned and nurturing mother, a complex set of associations is created.” This becomes the infant’s first “memory” of the nature and quality of what a human being is, and as the infant grows, this early memory acts as a template for future human interactions.

Our brain, despite its complexity and its capacity to make many synaptic connections, only creates new memory when the experience is unique and not similar to prior experiences. If they seem similar the brain simply processes the new interaction as a current version of something already experienced. and this essentially reinforces the existing memory template. Additionally, by the time we are four years old, we more or less have experienced some version of most of the sensory, motor, emotional and even cognitive elements of life, and thus, have created the working templates for what a caregiver is; for how reliable and trustworthy people are; for whether the world is predictable or chaotic; and so on. So, neglected, traumatized or maltreated children have created a catalogue of templates about humans, relationships and the world that simply reflect their backgrounds.  Perry adds that the children they work with carry these memories into their interactions with them, and their greatest challenge with these children is to build trust and shift their world views.

Perry ends chapter one by highlighting the importance of taking into account biological relativity and the organizing power of our early experiences. He writes that the choices we make as societies will have profound impacts on the trajectory of our societies and our species. There is a need to re-consider societal beliefs and practices around child rearing. He writes: “If we choose well, untapped potentials will emerge. If we remain passive…… we lose the creativity and productivity of millions of children. And we lose our future.”

 

 

 

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 Edited    20/10/2023   

Lying                                                                                                                      Autumn 2023

“Lying is the royal road to chaos.”  Sam Harris

“Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.” Sam Harris

 “Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship”. Sam Harris

For some time now I have wanted to write something about lying and cruelty, which are often connected and can be related to trauma processes. Reading Lying by Sam Harris, PhD, has offered me the opportunity to touch upon one of these themes today. I’d like to mention there are more perspectives and routes to approach the topic of lying, but I have mostly focused on the areas discusssed in the book. Hopefully, the next post will be related to cruelty, as I’m currently reading On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It by David Livingston Smith.

At the beginning of the book Harris writes: “And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.” He goes on to define lying, discern types of lying and discuss the consequences of lying. He challenges readers to rethink their assumptions about honesty and truthfulness and how these can contribute to a more honest and fulfilling life, while creating less suffering and chaos for others. He argues that most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled, and also, sustained by lies, and that most acts of betrayal, corruption and fraud, murder and genocide are all made possible by lies. Lying, he writes, has prolonged or precipitated wars.

Harris defines lying as intentionally misleading others when they expect honest communication, .believing one thing while intending to communicate another. To lie is to intentionally lead others to form beliefs and opinions that are not true, and “the more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.” I could add that outright lying and manipulation of reality are two aspects of gaslighting, in which one attempts through lies and other means to micromanage a group of people or another person and to sew self-doubt, confusion and fear in their mind.

Throughout the book, Harris explores the moral and practical implications of lying and gives suggestions of how to navigate many situations where we might be tempted to tell white lies to spare others from pain or ourselves from discomfort. He provides examples of situations when people might face difficult dilemmas or when lying might be the lesser harm, and emphasizes the importance of cultivating a commitment to honesty and to developing the courage to speaking truthfully.

Harris distinguishes between truth and truthfulness and explains that a person may be impeccably truthful while being mistaken. He claims that to speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs in the moment.  Of course, we understand that this may not necessarily be true for many reasons, such as, lack of information and ability to access the whole truth of one’s experience and one’s level of presence in that moment.  Our beliefs about the world are not always true or correct and our beliefs or opinions might change as we grow or learn more. Actually, telling the truth can reveal ways, in which we have not been fully present, ways we want to grow or things we need to look at because honesty can force any dysfunction in one’s life or any abusive dynamics in relationships to the surface. We might find that certain relationships cannot be honestly maintained.

The measure of truthfulness, Harris asserts, is the intent to communicate honestly and to represent one’s degree of uncertainty. We can always reconsider facts and change our views and it should be okay to openly discuss our confusion, conflicting ideas or doubts. He claims that “a commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.” Also, he clarifies that holding one’s tongue, or steering a conversation toward topics of relative safety or not revealing everything about oneself, is not lying. A commitment to honesty does not necessarily require that we disclose facts about ourselves or others that we would prefer to keep private. He says, in this case, the truth could well be “I’d rather not say.”

Harris discerns two types of lies. He also considers two categories of ethical transgressions: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). Lying can be both the deliberate falsehoods people tell or spread, but also, the things we don’t tell that could protect someone, or empower them to act on their own and others’ behalf, or find solutions. He focuses more on lies of commission:  “lying at its clearest and most consequential,” but states that most of what he says is relevant to lies of omission and to deception generally.

One type of lies explored in the book are what we refer to as white lies. These are the lies we tell people with the intention of sparing them discomfort or pain, at least in the short term. These are the lies that good people tell while imagining that they are being good in the process, Harris says, but adds that we have no reason to believe that the social conventions that happen to stabilize in primates like ourselves at about the age of eleven will lead to optimal human relationships. In fact, there are many reasons to believe that lying is precisely the sort of behavior we need to outgrow in order to build a better world.

Harris asserts that in telling them – irrespectively, of whether we think that we are lying out of compassion for others – sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs. Also, he says, it is difficult to spot the damage we do in the process or the long term consequences. Additionally, by lying or not telling the truth, we deny our friends access to reality and the resulting ignorance based on falsehoods may not help them act wisely or solve a problem, and can actually harm them in ways we did not anticipate.  Lying he suggests is to infringe on the freedom of those we care about.

Another type of white lie he discusses is false encouragement, which he believes can be a kind of theft because it steals time, energy, and motivation that a person could put toward some other purpose.  Harris also asserts that dishonest feedback or insincere praise is like treating others like children, “while failing to help them prepare for encounters with those who will judge them like adults.” He believes that unless someone is suicidal deciding how much he should know about himself seems the quintessence of arrogance. At this point I need to add that we do need to be very careful and aware of our deeper motivations and intentions, to be able to discern any envy, biases or misperceptions on our behalf because we don’t want to be “candle blower outers” [Brené Brown’s phrase]. There seems to be a pandemic of this already; therefore, we want to be thoughtful. Harris clarifies that we need to be aware that our judgments aren’t always correct and honesty demands that we communicate any uncertainty we may feel about the relevance of our opinions. We need to be careful that we are not undermining people’s dreams or work and we also need to take into account whether someone can handle the truth, and to consider the best ways we can help someone see more of reality or become more willing to re-evaluate their experience.

He also discusses the common experience of people being deceived by family members or / and medical professionals about medical diagnoses. He refers to his own mother, who was diagnosed with MS when she was in her 30s. He writes: “Rather than feeling grateful and protected, I felt sadness that we hadn’t come together as a family to face her illness and support each other….” In these cases, hiding the truth or telling white lies can deprive us of opportunities for deepening love, compassion, forgiveness, understanding., sharing of wisdom, telling people the things we need to say, and making choices that we would not otherwise make. We are also in some way infantilizing people. Of course, context matters and there are times when telling the truth may not be the best course of action, so while we may be committed to honesty, we also need to be sensitive to each situation.

The consequences of lying are many. Lying erodes trust. Harris writes that suspicion often grows on both sides of a lie and that research indicates that “liars trust those they deceive less than they otherwise might—and the more damaging their lies, the less they trust, or even like, their victims. It seems that in protecting their egos and interpreting their own behavior as justified, liars tend to deprecate the people they lie to.” He further claims that the erosions of trust are especially insidious because they are almost never remedied.

Consistent lying also requires mental accounting, which refers to the process of keeping track of lies. For many people lying will create some dissonance and discomfort, and lies often generate other lies and they must be continually protected from collisions with reality. Harris writes some people are better at this than others, and psychopaths can assume the burden of mental accounting without any obvious distress, but lying unquestionably comes at a psychological cost for the rest of us.

There is also a chapter in the book with the title Big Lies, in which he explores the big lies that have undermined our trust in governments, corporations, public institutions and in people in positions of authority. Harris writes: “Given the fact that corporations and governments sometimes lie, whether to avoid legal liability or to avert public panic, it has become very difficult to spread the truth.” Harris discusses how conscious attempts to lie, distort facts, rig the data or withhold trial data have generated distrust in the public, and how once lies have escaped into the world it is hard to abolish them. He writes: “The lies of the powerful lead us to distrust governments and corporations. The lies of the weak make us callous toward the suffering of others. The lies of conspiracy theorists raise doubts about the honesty of whistle-blowers, even when they are telling the truth. Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.” Finally, when people with authority and power lie it makes lying acceptable and it legitimizes lying and deception as social practices.

Lies and disinformation emanating from those with power also generate confusion and fear, which lead to people becoming passive and disempowered and can be an obstacle in their making choices that could better serve them and humanity at large. We see this with the wars that are going on around the globe at the moment, where disinformation and lies serve to distract or turn our focus on the immediate horrors of each day, which are almost always the result of the culmination of a long course of oppressive and invasive tactics and policies of injustice, elimination or impoverishment  Lies and half truths about historical facts and the complex causality of events  do not only lead us further astray from the truth, but also  do not contribute to the cessation of violence, nor do they foster peace, growth and development.

Therefore, Harris asserts that where we deem it necessary to lie, we should have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. He provides examples and says that for most of us, such circumstances arise very rarely in life, if ever. He also refers to war and espionage, where the usual rules of cooperation no longer apply, and where “human relationships have broken down or were never established in the first place.” He writes that the moment one begins dropping bombs, or destroying a country’s infrastructure with cyber attacks, lying has become just another weapon in the arsenal. He clarifies that although the need for state secrets is obvious there is no need for governments to lie to their own people. As for the rest of us we need not consider whether our every utterance could compromise national security every time we speak up about something.  Additionally, in relation to espionage he writes that “The ethics of war and espionage are the ethics of emergency—and are, therefore, necessarily limited in scope” and that the role of a spy strikes him as a near total sacrifice of personal ethics for a larger, real or imagined good, and this is a kind of moral self-immolation. On the rare occasion that I’ve watched a spy film I’ve felt that to be a spy requires an annihilation of the self and a deadening of emotions, in some sense a giving up of many aspects of being human.

The book includes an exploration of the benefits of honesty. Firstly, dishonesty and lying are not things that we want others to do to us, so it is only fair that we try, to the best of our abilities, to cultivate honesty. Harris says that if we “consider our dishonesty from the perspective of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.” He refers to what we already know from our own experience, but also from research findings, whcih is the fact that trust is deeply rewarding and that lying is associated with less satisfying relationships. He also mentions that honesty is a source of power and a gift we can give to others, and that honest people are a refuge. He writes: “Once one commits to telling the truth, one begins to notice how unusual it is to meet someone who shares this commitment. Honest people are a refuge.”

I will conclude with a few of the main takeaways or points made in the book:

Lies have the power to kindle and sustain private and public injustices and miseries.  Even white lies can often cause suffering and rob people of their ability to protect, heal, solve problems or grow.  A commitment to honesty and to speaking truthfully require courage, but they are necessary for living an ethical and fulfilling life, as well as, building a better society. Honesty is something we can cultivate through becoming more present and aware of our blind spots and biases, but also, through setting an intention.  Context matters and there are times when telling the truth is not the best course of action, and there are situations where lying might prevent a larger harm.