Diogenes and Unnatural Acts

Diogenes is still looking for an honest man. He’s been at it for centuries.  He carries a lantern because honest people are hard to see and if you find one, you need a good look to be sure they’re the real thing.

When I was a schoolboy I saw a pen I liked in the cloakroom and took it. The teacher recognized the pen and asked me where I’d found it. I flushed pure red while I insisted resolutely that the pen was mine. I wove a convoluted tale to convince her but she didn’t buy it, the pen was returned and justice done. Lying is a universal phenomenon and while it seems natural, in truth, it’s an unnatural act.

The way lie detectors work demonstrates this.

Lying disturbs my natural biological functions; the electric discharges on the surface of my skin change, while my heart and breathing rhythms fluctuate.  A flushed face may occur, as was my case in school. The lie detector documents these aberrations. God clearly set our default position to honesty. Lying may fool everyone but not our bodies; they don’t like it. The lie detector knows we’re lying because our bodies rat on us.     

Not so for animals and plants. They lie as if their lives depended on it. In fact they do.

Trust a Venus flytrap? Not on your life.  Her sweet invitation to insects to dinner is a ruse; she’s having them for dinner.  The cagy possum rolls over and plays dead because he wants me to think he’s road kill and leave him alone. One bird, the killdeer, another trickster, plays on my sympathies to fend me off, limping along as though crippled, luring me away from her homestead. Plants and animals will ace any lie detector test even while making their con. For them, lying is a natural act.

           

Since human bodies react negatively to lying, could chronic dishonesty debilitate me, not only physically but also psychologically and spiritually as well?  I know the debilitating effects of lies in a dysfunctional family can imprison people in a hopeless world. Some undiagnosed complaints plaguing some people may relate to living lies: lower back pain, headaches, listlessness, bad moods, and some forms of depression.  Our own lies victimize us as well as others.

We arrange falsehoods in a hierarchy the way priests categorize venal and mortal sins. Dirty rotten lies on top, then whoppers, next white lies and then fibs. Ever hear anything true spoken in a political speech?  Still the crowds smile, cheer, clap and throw hats in the air. Some people prefer lies.

For all that, fabrications are not necessarily a bad thing at all.

For marriages, certain strategic equivocations are necessary for the common good: I think of the husband whose wife asks him if he’s noticed that she’s lost weight. He says yes but he really hasn’t. Or the wife who assures her husband she doesn’t mind him watching Monday night football on TV drinking beer with his buddies. Truth be told, she hates it.

What parent would, when a child shows the picture she drew of you – red face, green hair, your legs like sticks, your nose like a cucumber and ears like Dumbo’s would say anything but, Oh sweetheart, it’s beautiful.

I can’t believe Diogenes has any problems with this.