Bad Advice by Dr. Venus Nicolino

Author:Dr. Venus Nicolino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

6

Honesty Is the Best Policy

Really? With this shit? Can you read it through your Valencia filter and fake news feed? If you’re a human being, it’s a given that you’ve been lied to and that you’ve lied to people. The same goes for me and every other person who has ever walked the Earth. Honesty Is the Best Policy is #BadAdvice. It’s preachy. It’s judgy. It’s dishonest, because the world is full of deception.

In the few seconds that passed since you began reading this chapter, the following lies were told: A kid in Zurich told his mom he didn’t eat the candy bar he just ate. A data systems analyst in Santa Monica told a homeless dude she didn’t have any spare change. A man in Mumbai padded his résumé with bullshit. A woman in Boston just said she came. If those examples I-totally-did-not-make-up-on-the-spot-just-now didn’t convince you, I have something else that will . . . science, bitchez!!

A study from the 1970s suggested that the average person lies around two hundred times a day. But that was the seventies, so everyone was coked up and talking shit at the disco. We don’t lie that much in the twenty-first century, right? Wrong. Recent data show people lie once every ten minutes in conversation with each other. Other research has found that when we’re chatting online, we lie an average of every fifteen minutes. (It must take longer to type out bullshit.) The data vary, but they don’t lie: We do.

So if everyone’s lying so much, why isn’t Honesty Is the Best Policy the #GoodAdvice everyone should heed? Because lying isn’t a defect in human nature. Lying is nature. Lying is an act of deception, and deception is an evolutionary response to life-or-death situations. And when it comes to deception, humans are not a solo act.

It’s Truth AND Deception That Hold Us Together

To either eat or avoid being eaten, animals play dead, pretend to be injured, pretend to be more or less dangerous than they really are, or try to make themselves appear a different size. When a butterfly’s wings work together to create an illusion of a “false face” to confuse a predator, you don’t call the butterfly a dirty fucking liar. It’s a beautiful butterfly! You snap a pic and Instagram that shit (#ButterfliesOfInstagram). When the mimic octopus changes its shape and color to look like a deadly sea snake, we all say Oooooo!, not Fuck you, you fucking phony! Gorillas, fish, birds, even orchids engage in deception. Remember Koko, the famous gorilla who learned sign language? And remember how Koko cared for a kitten like it was her own baby? Koko once used sign language to blame that kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall. Koko was a brilliant ape, but she was a poor liar and a questionable parent. But why does Koko’s deception seem shitty compared with those other examples? Because deception is a valid response to mortal peril, but it’s not valid for covering your ass.

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