So Just How Skilled at Lying Do We Americans Want Our President to Be? Some Thoughts from the Front Lines of Falsehood.

On the one hand, scientific proof is growing that George W. Bush is a very intelligent man. The argument centers on knowledge that has become so widespread that it’s something of a worldwide joke: the president is so good at, so at home with, so nonchalant about . . . lying. And, on the other … well, let’s reflect for a moment on the issue of leaders and lying.

Salon.com’s Tom Grieve gave us an example of wherefores of recent presidential lies earlier this month as he revisited Bush pronouncements in the past five years on how he feels about Osama bin Laden. Bush has said, variously:

Sept. 17, 2001: George W. Bush is asked if he wants Osama bin Laden dead. "I want justice," he says. "There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'"

March 13, 2002: At a press conference, Bush says that he doesn't know if bin Laden is dead or alive. "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him. . . . And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

Oct. 13, 2004: "Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations."

Jan. 31, 2006: "Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder -- and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously."

May 25, 2006: "I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner -- you know, 'Wanted dead or alive,' that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that."

July 4, 2006: The New York Times reports that the CIA last year disbanded a secret unit assigned to track down bin Laden and his top lieutenants in an effort to focus on "regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals."

July 7, 2006: At a press conference in Chicago, Bush calls the Times report "just an incorrect story." "I mean, we got a -- we're -- we got a lot of assets looking for Osama bin Laden. So whatever you want to read in that story, it's just not true, period." Asked if he's still on the hunt for bin Laden, the president says: "Absolutely. No ands, ifs or buts. And in my judgment, it's just a matter of time, unless we stop looking. And we're not going to stop looking so long as I'm the president." Bush said he had announced regret over the "dead or alive" comment only because "my wife got on me for talking that way."

But let’s be fair about this. President Bill Clinton wasn’t called Slick Willie because of his hair gel. In her Feb. 5, 2006, cover story on lying in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, science writer Robin Henig recalled watching a videotape of Clinton at a presidential news conference in early 1998. These were the early days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. You probably remember the scene as well as I do, when the Prez shook his finger at the collective us and said, “I want you to listen to me. I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

With Henig as she viewed the tape was Dr. Paul Ekman, retired from the psych faculty at UCSan Francisco, creator of the Facial Action Coding System and author of the book, Telling Lies. Among the clues Ekman counsels us to look for in watching for the lie are (1) demeanor that is different from a person’s usual demeanor (2) “distancing language,” like referring to others more in the third person, and (3) “verbal hedges,” useful in buying time to figure out how to phrase the lie.

It’s all there in Mr. Clinton’s denial, Ekman told Henig. “I want you to listen to me.” Verbal hedge (like the shark in the cartoon, standing in the courtroom looking up at the judge and saying “Define ‘frenzy.’”). “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Distancing language. And there was, noted Ekman, an almost imperceptible softening of the president’s voice at the end of the “that woman” sentence. Demeanor departure. Ekman leaves the impression that a trained human lie-detector can only conclude that “That man did something nefarious with that woman." In fact, said Ekman, the moment the press conference ended, he started getting calls from people he has trained, saying, “The President is lying!”

And yet the experts that Henig interviewed seem to be pretty unanimous that you wouldn’t want a president who couldn’t lie. Ekman is one of those. He ticks off three qualities needed to tell a lie: (1) the ability to think and plan moves ahead of time—that is, to think strategically. (2) to observe others therapeutically—to put yourself in their shoes. (3) to act like a grown-up—to manage your emotions.

Two Scottish primatologists have devised the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis. It contends that the bigger the neocortex, the better a creature is at deception. And the better the deception, the more social the species. The more social the species, the greater the intelligence. Which may be why, as Henig reports, researchers at the U of Southern California found that pathological liars have more white matters in their prefrontal cortexes that nonliars. Another researcher, Sean Spence at the U. of Sheffield, notes, “White matter is pivotal to the connectivity and cognitive function of the human brain.”

So are we verging on “what a liar you are” becoming not only a compliment but also a reason why a person might make a good president?

I very much like the perspective that Jeremy Campbell’s gray matter offered on all this in his book, The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood:

The irony… is that lying cannot hope to succeed in its aim unless truth is the normal practice of a society. In the nineteenth century there was a sense that democracy, more than other forms of government, needed truthfulness if it was to increase and flourish, that mendacity in a politician was more to be deplored than another category of offense. The converse of that view is that in a system which draws much of its strength from candor, lies are all the more effective, all the more insidious. For that reason, so this argument goes, they will never be removed from our type of democratic community. But if lying becomes the norm, on the thesis that it softens the “cruelty” of life, it defeats its own purpose. Truth might then become more powerful than untruth, as in George Orwell’s bureaucratic nightmare, 1984, where a person who dared to speak the truth was so dangerous to the state as to be in urgent need of liquidation.”

I think this may be what I want in a president: a person immensely skilled at telling a whopper but who never does so without agonizing over the damage the telling nearly always does to the fabric of our shared social character.

I'm 99.9% convinced that Mr. Bush doesn't meet my qualifications, and Mr. Clinton may not have either. Of course, we’ll probably never know. Mr. Clinton was a much more skilled liar than Mr. Bush has proven to be.

_
Tom Grieve’s item is here: “Dead or alive, more or less”

Robin Henig’s article is here: “Looking for the Lie” [You will need to register with The New York Times, but it’s free.]

Jeremy Campbell’s book can be ordered here: The Liar's Tale: A History of Falsehood

Posted on July 31, 2006

All We Need to Do to Avoid Watching the Current Madness on the Evening News Is Change the Channel to Something Inane and Fatuous. But Now's No Time for Consoling Fictions.

Watching the evening news these days is almost more than I can stomach, maybe even bear. Probably you too. I feel diminished almost to the point of questioning my ability to stay sane and at the same time continue to stay abreast of current events as I watch footage of Lebanese ambulances strafed and set afire by Israeli warplanes and screaming Israeli children terrorized by the sounds of air raid sirens and Hezbollah rockets.

It sent me reaching for my copy of geographer Yi-fu Tuan’s remarkable book, Landscapes of Fear. I have never forgotten his closing observations after two hundred pages of recounting of humanity’s often painful journey to these postmodern moments. It will take a bit of space but here are Professor Tuan’s final thoughts on the topic:

[The] critical mind unweighted by tradition deprives modern man and woman of many beliefs that once gave comfort. Human beings are fragile, their sojourn on earth is subject to chance. Accidents, not suffering, are our most authentic memento mori, says Iris Murdock. They remind us of our contingency. Anytime, my dear and familiar ways and life itself can be terminated by something totally unexpected and horrible—a fortuitous concurrence of events. I walk along the sidewalk whistling a tune; a flowerpot slips off the windowsill and falls on my head, killing me or reducing me to a vegetable. Human beings have always been aware of this element of fortuitousness, and have sought to guard against it with beliefs and devices that are as pathetic as they are ingenious, ranging from rabbit’s foot to astrology. The critical person, who finds no haven in such beliefs, must learn to live in statistical uncertainty. As to death itself, it is well known that most people cannot face it except under the wraps of consoling fiction. We know the rewards of seeing clearly and well. The cost is the possibility of despair. Yet, such is the human paradox that even the refusal to be consoled by false images can become a source of comfort and strength.

And so we must continue to watch the evening news, lest we begin to see less clearly and well and be robbed of the opportunity to find comfort and strength in all that is there to see.

Posted on July 24, 2006

After This Harvard Psychologist Explains What We Humans Do That No Other Animal Does, He Then Explains What Our Brain's Greatest Achievement Is. Tip: It's Not the Great Pyramid of Giza, the International Space Station or the Golden Gate Bridge

While goofing off on the Internet—and wondering what ever happened to Sunday strolls—I chanced across one of those Puppy Dog sales come-ons for an e-book. (Puppy Dog come-ons were invented or at least popularized by car salespeople who are forever begging you to take their shiny model home and drive it for the weekend, knowing full well that, like a puppy dog, once you’ve had it for a weekend, you are going to be tempted to keep it much longer, at least until you get Puppy Dogged yet again.) I have to admit that this author, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, had me hooked from the get-go with the first two paragraphs to his new book, Stumbling on Happiness.

You can see if your anti-Puppy Dog filter works any better than mine by reading these paragraphs for yourself:

O, that a man might know The end of this day’s business ere it come!—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. Priests vow to remain celibate, physicians vow to do no harm, and letter carriers vow to swiftly complete their appointed rounds despite snow, sleet, and split infinitives. Few people realize that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter, or at least an article that contains this sentence: “The human being is the only animal that . . .” We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, of course, but it has to start with those eight words. Most of us wait until relatively late in our careers to fulfill this solemn obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remember us mainly for how we finished The Sentence. We also know that the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those psychologists who finished The Sentence with “can use language” were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs. And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild use sticks to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash one another over the head now and then), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing address of every psychologist who had ever finished The Sentence with “uses tools.” So it is for good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they just might die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.

I have never before written The Sentence, but I’d like to do so now, with you as my witness. The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. Now, let me say up front that I’ve had cats, I’ve had dogs, I’ve had gerbils, mice, goldfish, and crabs (no, not that kind), and I do recognize that nonhuman animals often act as though they have the capacity to think about the future. But as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference. For example, I live in an urban neighborhood, and every autumn the squirrels in my yard (which is approximately the size of two squirrels) act as though they know that they will be unable to eat later unless they bury some food now. My city has a relatively well-educated citizenry, but as far as anyone can tell its squirrels are not particularly distinguished. Rather, they have regular squirrel brains that run food-burying programs when the amount of sunlight that enters their regular squirrel eyes decreases by a critical amount. Shortened days trigger burying behavior with no intervening contemplation of tomorrow, and the squirrel that stashes a nut in my yard “knows” about the future in approximately the same way that a falling rock “knows” about the law of gravity—which is to say, not really. Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone, or smiles as it contemplates its summer vacation, or turns down a taffy apple because it already looks too fat in shorts, I will stand by my version of The Sentence. We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.

You can read a few more paragraphs of Dr. Gilbert's work for free (in fact, you'll have to read them to find out what he thinks the human brain's greatest achievement is) and find order information here: Stumbling on Happiness

Posted on July 23, 2006

What's a Seasoned Woman Leader Used to Being Valued and Respected to Do When Surrounded by Young Sharks? Develop the Dolphin's Ruthless (When Necessary) Determination and See to Her Own Needs for a Change

She is soon to be 61 years old. You can just tell from her command of the facts, the language and the complexities that she’s a well-educated, highly experienced person with multiple interests and gifts. And that she has bountiful energies and is used to leading. At least, when she’s on top of her game. At the moment, she’s feeling angry and underutilized.

She wrote: "I was caught in a private company's downsizing that left me unemployed at sixty years of age, unattractive and disconnected from previous networks because my mentors are either dead or retired."

There was a lot more.

Before replying, I asked my wife, Sherry, to read her long e-mail note also—and we talked at length. How to respond? We felt that this individual is basically healthy. Not so much depressed as irritated. Not down for the count but just slightly discombobulated for the moment. Not stuck but in a pretty fluid frame of mind. So we decided to see if we could help her reframe the anger and feelings of injustice and abandonment. In part, I wrote her:

May I respectfully suggest:

1) You never again mention that you are 60.

2) You never again use your chronological age, inwardly or outwardly, to explain anything about your talents or your situation. What is, is. But being "that age which we won't be mentioning anymore or any age after the unmentionable age" really doesn't mean "a pitcher of warm spit" (to quote one of our famous Texas politicians") about what you do next.

3) You don't want any more "jobs"; they are crutches. But you may need to take somebody else's money for what they call a "job" while you are deciding and finding ways to do what you really want to do. Don't be too proud to take money any way you can make it right now. But understand that's it's only a means to an end and put in only the minimum needed to get your pay while devoting as much time and energy as possible to furthering your own goals.

4) Define several "platforms," not just one. Then work all your contacts to see which platform or platforms seem to have the most promise.

5) As soon as you can, improve your Web site(s). The ones you directed me to are obviously "freebies" and spend a lot more time promoting the Web site service operator's interests than yours. You need your own Web site designed by you, paid for by you and devoted solely to your own best interests. [And here I recommended my own Web site designer, Manish Sahu, and my Internet service provider and computer programmer, Madhu Lundquist, both very talented, responsible and affordable young professionals.]

6) Quit giving any more of yourself away until you get your own immediate needs met. No more volunteering. No more minimum wages. No more bailing other people out of their self-made predicaments. No more trying to save a world that looks more and more to be beyond salvation. For the immediate future, think "Linda, Linda, Linda" [not her real name] and get yourself focused and rolling. It is okay, for once, to be selfish!

I like her prospects for dolphin-thinker-hood. It’s the most difficult step so far in human development—making the leap from a proto-dolphin mindset into dolphin waters. We wish her much luck because she’s got the brainpower and the opportunity, and dolphin waters seem to be so very close for her.

Manish Sahu is at indusideas@rediffmail.com. Madhu Lundquist is at madhu@madhuprem.com There's more about the dolphin strategy here.

Posted on July 16, 2006

The Minds We Use Have Consequences in the Lives We Live. Here Are Three Telling Examples.

Here are three lives that have been in the American news recently. They are lives that, or so it seems to me, are accurate examples of the kind of lives we can expect to be produced by certain kinds of minds. The kinds of minds that at Brain Technologies Corporation we’ve styled (based substantially on the work of the late Dr. Clare Graves) as:

Mind Level No. 1.4 (the Loyalist or Absolutistic thinker).
Philip Rieff died on July 1 at age 83. He was a sociologist and expert on the writings and theories of Freud. (For eight years, he was also the husband of Susan Sontag, whom he married after a ten-day courtship when she was a 17-year-old sophomore at the University of Chicago and he was a 28-year-old teaching instructor.) As I interpret matters, Dr. Rieff didn’t care a whit for what mindsets beyond Level 1.4 have done to morality and Western culture, and he especially didn’t warm to what he believed Freud’s ideas had done. In his book, Freud: The Mind of he Moralist (1959), Rieff suggested that the Viennese’s idea of the “psychological man” had corroded Western morality and culture because it encouraged the individual to depend not on traditional communal moralities but on “himself and his own emotions.”

Seven years later, he was back at his theme with The Triumph of the Therapeutic, suggesting all the postmodern therapies aimed at “better living” were not helpful in living healthier lives. And again in 1973 in Fellow Teachers, arguing that the “psychosocialism” being taught in higher education “may destroy what remains of our received culture in order to replace it with permanent therapies.”

Mind Level No. 1.6 (the Involver or the Participative thinker).
Dr. Denice Dee Denton was a hero to many, particularly women. And she deserved to be. At one time, the only female dean at a top-tier research university, Dr. Denton kept climbing, and at her death, at age 46, was chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz. She had arrived at the campus at a controversial time in town-gown relations, since UCSC was on the grow. There was more. For example, someone had thrown a parking barrier through a plate glass window of her home last summer. “She was a gay woman who was a chancellor and an engineer,” a sister chancellor told The New York Times. “You know that she came through some pretty difficult times, as many people who are breaking down barriers did.”

Dr. Denton apparently jumped to her death from a San Francisco skyscraper. In The Mother of All Minds. I wrote this about the dangers of living from Level 1.6:

“Feelings have this positive feedback, roll-over-on-themselves quality. They can start small and keep reinforcing themselves, until suddenly they are overwhelming. High suicide rates are an all-too-real concern for Level 1.6 users. It’s easy to despair about how unfair life can be, and how little impact your ameliorations can have for those who suffer the most, yourself included.”

Mind Level 2.0 (the Choice Seeker or Beta thinker).
Arata Kochi is a public health doctor. A very visible one, since he’s head of malaria at the World Health Association. He got his current job because of his success in the 1990s as head of WHO’s tuberculosis programs and then its HIV department. At each stop, he roiled the waters of established policy and diplomacy since at both stops, he decided that established policies and diplomatic niceties were costing large numbers lives needlessly.

No surprise, then, that he immediately came to similar conclusions at the world’s malaria-fighting programs. A key conclusion was that the public health community was kowtowing to the pharmaceutical industry. So he launched a full-frontal attack on world drug makers. He wanted them to quit producing and marketing single-drug pills when pills containing multiple malaria-fighting drugs were needed. He was soon publicly castigating big companies first and then smaller companies for making monotherapy pills. And at each step along the way, he’s emerged the winner. “Things have got to be done right,” says the Japanese scientist. About the value of being diplomatic, he says, “I don’t have the patience.”

In the above-named book, I listed these qualities of the Beta thinker:
• You work with the world you find.
• You aren’t easily spooked.
• You don’t have a lot of patience for shirkers or persons who refuse to learn.
• You mostly evaluate yourself.
• You can’t be bought.
• You don’t take power trips.
• Hype, buzz and other forms of manufactured drama generally turn you off.
• You can be jarringly quick to say “no.”
• When it matters to you, you want to be in play.

From what I can see of Dr. Kochi, he’s made the leap to Beta thinking.

Posted on July 05, 2006