Today moral philosophers and legal thinkers make room for a wide range of falsehood, from kind fibs (“you’ve lost weight!” or “I love what you’ve done with your hair!”) to injurious criminal deceit—identity theft, for example, or pyramid schemes. Psychologists and psychotherapists for their part recognize a sliding scale of lying from the routine and mostly inconsequential (“I’m on my way” and “the check is in the mail”) to manipulative gaslighting and aversive racism.
More pernicious liars deceive deliberately. Internet scammers and phone swindlers know what they are doing as they cheat the unwary.
But others lie reflexively and compulsively. Such compulsive liars are most puzzling because they lie even when the lie reverberates to their disadvantage and when their lies are easily discoverable.
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
And this brings us to the infamous George Santos, the United States Representative whose brief, ill-starred tenure in Congress ended unusually when his exasperated colleagues engineered his expulsion.
His story was not the strangest story to come out of 2023, a very strange year, in many ways a culmination of the last seven. But Santos’ record was surely the most entertaining. (Entertaining for the moment if we can put aside the insult to his office.)
His infamy seems already to be waning as late-night comedians have moved on to other subjects and returned to others that keep on giving: the multiplying legal woes of an ex-President and his advisors, for example.
Santos’ list of fabrications, however, is so long, ingenious, persistent, brazen, and blithe that it merits some further thoughts in this “Play in Mind” piece.
To recap: He claimed to have led his college volleyball team to a championship, when in fact he held only a high school equivalency degree. He claimed to have worked on Wall Street for firms that could find no record of him. He claimed to have saved 2,500 animals while running a foundation called Friends of Pets United, but instead cashed donation checks under a pseudonym and spent the money on himself. He said that he had secured a role on the Disney sitcom Hannah Montana; and, for good measure, during his campaign he claimed, absurdly, to have produced the abandoned Broadway musical Spider Man: Turn off the Dark. (Spoiler alert: No, he didn’t.) He claimed that his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor and that his mother was in the south tower on 9/11 and later died from effects of the attack. (In fact, she was living in Brazil at the time.)
Parody Runs Close to Real Life
The congressman let loose such a steady stream of laughable justifications that two Saturday Night Live comedians, John Lovitz and Bowen Yang, regularly channeled him. Lovitz dressed as Santos to reprise his role as Tommy Flannagan the Pathological Liar. (This nerdy character had invented a romance with the glamorous soap-opera star Morgan Fairchild.) On the weekend after Santos’ ouster, Yang’s Santos-character held a press conference. “If I’m guilty of anything,” the impersonator of the impersonator said, “it’s from loving too much … slash/fraud.”
Boys Will Be Boys?
In his defense, the real Santos insisted that his assertions were cases of innocuous, no-harm-no-foul boys-will-be-boys and politicians-will-be-politicians style résumé inflation. They weren’t.
But all the same, we do reserve a special place for lovable tricksters in our popular culture; the riverboat card shark with the ace up his sleeve, the slinky cat burglar who steals from the rich and gives to the poor (herself), or the debonnaire mastermind of the art heist who plays cat-and-mouse with the stunning and brilliant insurance investigator.
Further, the trickster’s victims earn little respect. Think here of Daffy Duck and the even more hapless Elmer Fudd, who suffered the wisecracking wabbit’s tricks. Santos would seem to like to be regarded as a certain kind of non-toxic everyday liar, the amiable, playful bullshitter, the teller of tall tales.
Of course, Santos was no Bugs Bunny, and his brand of bullshit was not at all benign.
Liars vs Bullshitters
Because the subject resonates so deeply in American life now, it is worth trying to tease the liar from the bullshitter. In this connection let me recommend a slim, careful volume, On Bullshit, written by the esteemed Princeton professor of moral philosophy Harry G. Frankfurt. The philosopher contends that truth-tellers and liars accept and share a basic interest in the truth; the one to affirm it, the other to subvert it. Liars know the truth but mean or cover it up, substituting their own misrepresentations. Liars and truth-tellers, Frankfurt writes, are “playing on opposite sides of the same game.”
But to bullshit artists, the truth and nothing but the truth is much beside the point. The point is the performance. Facts become irrelevant. Bullshitters, Frankfurt writes, take advantage of “spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play.” In this respect they are more like spoilsports: They take their ball and go home, denying the truth-vs-lies game, of itself.
The risk of this kind of storytelling is that it can be easily dismissed or, as in Santos’ case, laughed off. Until, of course, it can’t.
The Trouble with Bullshit
Here is the trouble. Frankfort argues that bullshit consequentially undermines the principle of truth itself, smearing all information as unreliable opinion. If anything can be true, then anything can be false. If one claim rates as good as another, any news can be fake. A theory spun out of the overheated imaginations of liars and spread on heedless news outlets can be equally weighty to carefully gathered, meticulously-vetted, and conscientiously edited journalism. Spreading others’ lies is a form of bullshit.
Thus undermined, millions find it easier to believe a talk-radio host’s gripping fictions. Millions can fall for phony foreign propaganda or continue to trust a president’s legal advisor even after he’d admitted to concocting theories without facts. If anything can be true, then two low-level local employees can steal a national election. Or, if fired up by flimsy claims, an angry and gullible crowd can be exhorted to storm a nation’s capitol.
No, playing with the truth isn’t just playing around.
References
Hara Estrof Marano, “More Than a White Lie” Psychology Today (November 5, 2007); Chris Jozefowicz, “Understanding Compulsive Liars,” Psychology Today (June 9, 2016); Mary McNaughton-Cassill, “The George Santos Problem,” Psychology Today (February 1, 2003).
Harry G. Frankfort, On Bullshit (2005).
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