Editor’s Preface
It is an ubiquitous feature of the modern workplace that the word “lie” is deployed with such abandon – as though truth were a fixed point, universally applied and acknowledged, and accessible to the great unwashed.
It is not.
According to Charlotte, truth, like all things of consequence, is contextual. Elastic. Dependent on perspective, timing, and – most critically – utility.
What lesser operators call “lying” is, in most cases, merely a failure to appreciate the difference between fact, interpretation, and payback outcome.
And it is the payback outcome, of course, that matters to Charlotte.
In an effort to interrogate this philosophy more directly, a journalist was commissioned to ask Charlotte a simple question:
When is a lie not a lie?
The conversation that follows is presented without embellishment.
The journalist has not been heard from since…
The Interview
Journalist: When is a lie not a lie?
Charlotte Kok: You make it sound so… binary. I have a test that is simplicity itself: if the recipient of the information cannot tell the difference, then it is the truth.
J: So it doesn’t matter whether something happened or not? Or happened the way you said it happened?
CK: No. Emphatically not. What matters is the perception of the recipient of the information you have just dispensed. And that, in turn, depends on the intellectual fortitude of the individual.
Are you familiar with Russell Hurlburt? He is an American psychologist. His work using Descriptive Experience Sampling suggests that inner speech – what most would call an internal monologue – is neither universal nor constant.
Some experience it frequently. Others… barely at all.
His estimate was that as few as thirty per cent of people actually engage in it.
Which leaves a rather large majority.
I say that if up to 70% of people cannot articulate their own thoughts internally, then they certainly cannot defend them externally.
J: And the corollary to that is?
CK: Narratives become easier to install.
J: Install?
CK: Yes. People believe beliefs are formed.
In practice, they are… provisioned.
Let us not forget the lessons from my Wicked Winning Ways #2 – Managing the Narrative and #3 – Securing Stakeholder Alignment: they were all about crafting belief in things that:
- Never happened, or…
- Happened in a manner entirely inconsistent with the version you have just given
…which is achieved by the careful management of inputs.
Editor’s Note
Readers may observe that what is being described here is not persuasion, or misrepresentation, but the controlled substitution of one version of events for another.
The distinction matters.
In ordinary language, such substitution would attract a simpler description.
Returning to the Interview
J: So let me rephrase the original question: When is a lie a lie?
CK: When it cannot be sustained.
J: And if it can?
CK: Then it was never a lie in any meaningful sense.
J: So when do you not lie?
CK: When you are speaking to that rare individual that actually is capable of internal monologue.
J: Rare?
CK: Exceptionally. One does not encounter many of them in environments such as Findex-Crowe. So it is not, in practice, a constraint.
Editor’s Note
The reader may wish to consider whether the framework described above eliminates the concept of a lie…
– or simply transfers the burden of detecting it.
The Journalist Has His Say
J: I think I’ve learnt something today.
I’m not sure I was meant to.
Editor’s Closing Remarks
Not all truths – it seems – are equal.
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