For most of my life I’ve wondered why everyone else was so much more successful than me. OK, they were probably cleverer and more sociable, and certainly better looking, but even people who were even more average than me seemed to climb the corporate ladder with astonishing ease.
It wasn’t for lack of hard work. Employers, colleagues, even friends, would comment on how industrious and reliable I was. I was so dependable in my current position that it would be a shame to move on to more important tasks, as they had done. They certainly didn’t want to lose me.
Still, as I watched one marketing expert after another come in, ruin a company that I’d worked hard for, get a golden goodbye and move to an even bigger company on an even bigger salary, I couldn’t help getting this nagging feeling that I was doing something fundamentally wrong. And, despite their knowing, sympathetic looks, no one could quite bring themselves to tell me what it was.
Then, suddenly, this morning, the penny finally dropped. As I watched Boris Johnson grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat, it became so clear: I should have lied. Not just the occasional little white fib, but great big clanging whoppers. I kept worrying about being found out, about someone checking the facts, about being shamed into eternal silence.
That’s all wrong. If you get found out, just repeat the lie. Make it bigger. Ignore the facts, or better still, deny them. Accuse your accuser of dubious motives. Make up more lies about them. People don’t care, just keep telling them what they want to hear.
It works every time. Just look around you. Politicians, clergy, second hand car sellers – all the best ones lie all the time. If you start young and get really good at it you could be Pope, or PM, or President of the United States, maybe all three. There need be no limit to your ambition.
To my poor, old, long deceased parents I can only say this. Why did you cripple my chances in life by telling me not to tell lies?
Platitude of the Day 
So true. Sadly for it to work I think you’ve got to be a natural born bullshitter, which few of us are.
For decades I’ve been watching the cult of Scientology, which specialises in all the techniques you’ve outlined above. Creating and insisting on a fantasy world divorced from the truth, my expectation was that they’d crash and burn in short order. But no, they go on seemingly fireproof for decade after decade, bulldozing the truth and all who dare oppose them. Imagine my dismay to see more recently their techniques of barefaced lying and attacking the truth-teller escaping into the wild and being picked up wholesale by the leaders of the world’s major nations. Tell a lie. Tell a big lie. Double down on it when challenged. And if all else fails go and hide in a fridge until your challenger goes away.
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There’s a great line in John le Carre’s Smiley books. When asked what the purpose of all the subterfuge and spying was, Smiley would reply, “We are fighting for the survival of Reasonable Man.” This seemed to have it all – the crime of our enemies wasn’t their leftiness or their rightiness, it wasn’t their nationality or their culture, their religion or their colour, it was their lack of reasonableness. We were fighting against extremists, no matter what flavour they were.
This is where we have all gone wrong. To fight extremism, you cannot simply put negative-extremism up against it. All this does is double the amount of extremism. And yet this is exactly what we have. Would BoJo have his 70+ majority today if Labour had positioned themselves smack-bang in the centre? No, absolutely not. But by surrendering that ground without a fight, they left middle-of-the-road Brexit voters with absolutely nowhere to go but Boris.
The Democrats in the USA are currently engaged in a similar process. Having lost the last election by ignoring and denigrating anyone thinking of voting for Trump, and thus enabling his victory, they now seem intent on establishing a position that many Trump voters simply cannot vote for.
THIS IS NOT THE WAY. To win, here or there, you have to walk into the opposing camp and steal their voters. You have to offer REASONABLENESS, not radicalness. You have to set up on the middle ground. This is not easy – the attacks will come at you from both the opposition and from the extreme of your own side. But it is the only way.
We now have a ridiculously right-wing government because the opposition did not offer a middle-ground alternative. It did not offer to understand and deal with the reasons behind Brexit. Instead, it offered its own ideologically-driven set of policies that almost nobody actually wanted. In that sense, they have acted like some of the religious speakers we get on TFTD. And I notice, in keeping with the doubling-down described above, they are currently burying their heads in the sand and aiming for more radicalness. Just as more religion is never the answer to sectarianism, so more radicalness is never the answer to extremism. We have to compromise. And we have to hope (because we no longer have any control) that the Brexit we get is the best we could have got. And maybe we should look at the Ken Clarke / Hillary Benn Brexit option (full customs union) that was defeated by six votes, with both the LibDems and the SNP abstaining, and maybe ask ourselves if that was the brightest piece of thinking.
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To me it’s reminiscent of some Sacks’ TftDs about getting people to unite behind a story, whether it’s true or not. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t fit the external evidence too well, , it just needs a degree of internal coherence. Once people have bought in, they’ll use confirmation bias to reject any evidence that contradicts it.
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I’ve done alright. I’ve always earned an honest living and I will shortly be retiring, not rich but comfortable. In engineering dishonesty doesn’t get you very far, reality tends to come back and bite you on the arse pretty quickly.
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Yes, I totally agree. As an engineer there is no room for dishonesty – the repercussions for self and more importantly others are far too serious. Unfortunately the ancillary players such as the sales and management “teams” do not feel so constrained. That’s why they are the ones who make all the money. Moving and shaking, networking, lying, cheating and stealing. Highly mobile, keeping one step ahead of the disasters.
I became highly specialised in my field, but in doing so I limited my options. Yes, I was very valuable to my employer, but I had nowhere else to go and they knew it. It was great when I retired and saw the trouble they had in trying to replace me. It’s nice to be able to do some contract work every now and then. It’s even better when I send them the invoice. I think it’s called gouging.
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I totally agree Stonyground – I had a career in engineering & engineering based IT. It took me a while to realise just why the engineers never got promoted to the big bucks jobs — they let honesty get in the way. I’ve numerous anecdotes (and I suspect others have too) of the chasms between sales/marketing/account management people and ‘reality’ with the engineers facing the consequences (actually the only ones worse off were the poor project managers trying to reconcile the two sides.
Sadly perception, show, spin and bullshit seem to pay more than reality and honesty; it’s a vicious circle as like recruits like and gullible purchasing people conspire (intentionally or otherwise) with their deceivers. Draw your own parallels with politicians/electorate and religious leaders/congregations.
Lest it be said that I’m praising one side only, engineering (or at least engineering management) has its own false prophets too as fads come and go, with consequent schisms and arguments (eg CMM repeatability vs Agile). Sadly these fads can be picked upon by the latest buzzword aware manager – one of my last projects was with one employer contracting to another organisation; both companies were highly bureaucratic, hierarchical, contract confrontational and risk averse to an unbelievable extent. You can guess what happened when the idea of skipping requirements clarification happened – just having a waste of time meetings each day standing up would not help, no matter what the manager’s trendy book said.
Back to the original point – it’s not just the lack of consequences when liars get caught out – it’s the lack of shame and ability to shrug it off. It’s almost as if sociopaths are drawn to political/religious/management roles — or do these occupations turn otherwise decent folk?
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I too was an engineer of 40 years service in vehicle design, test, development, project management and techinical analysis of warranty concerns. And I was armed with 5 years university education in Mech Eng and Applied Mechanics. I also held a license to handle explosives and attended dissection and anatomy classes at the medical school as part of my MSc. When I was a design manager I refused to approve a cost saving idea on a 4×4 aluminium wheel which was subsequently approved into production by my successor. Meanwhile, I had moved to warranty concern analysis management where I had the privilege of analysing the failures of the cost reduced parts approved by my successor, and inflicted upon paying customers. The failure mode caused loss of vehicle control. The recall campaign cost Euro 84,000,000. Integrity, honesty, technical skill, discipline, pessimism, and the courage to stand forthright in the face of commercial pressure and demands of higher level management are necessary attributes. From such characters atheists are made.
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