Instant Genius - Marcel Danesi: Why do we want to believe lies?

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

We all love a good story, and sometimes a lie is more interesting to hear than the truth, but there is more to it than spinning a good yarn. According to Marcel Danesi, linguist and author of the book The Art of the Lie (£11.95, Prometheus Books), throughout history certain ‘Liar Princes’ have perfected the art of lying to gain fame, fortune and notoriety. In this week’s podcast, he explains what makes them so effective at this so-called ‘Machiavellian intelligence’, what happens in the brain when we twist the truth, and why we’re all liars in one way or another. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Dean Burnett: What’s going on in the teenage brain? Gretchen McCulloch: How has the internet affected how we communicate? Lewis Dartnell: How geology can influence elections Jamie Susskind: How technology is changing politics Jack Lewis: Sin and why we do the things we shouldn't Trevor Cox: To become Prime Minister, change your voice Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials,

delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com. to learn more. Why do we believe in these things? Well, we always believe stories. I mean, honestly, you and I have heard stories from a childhood.

We read them. They're called fiction. And yet, because they represent life in a way that it is very similar, that is based in very similitude, they gain truth. Now, what is truth? Who knows? You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print, and in several digital

formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, this is Alexander McNamara, and I can assure you that I'm telling you the truth when I say that I am the online editor of BBC Science Focus. However, were I to tell you that I was a Premier League footballer or an Oscar-winning movie star, you would probably quite rightly guess that I was telling you Porkies. We all love a good story, and sometimes a lie is more interesting to hear than the truth, but there is plenty more to it than spinning a good yarn. According to linguist Marcel Deneci, throughout history, certain liar princes have perfected the art of lying to gain fame, fortune and notoriety. In this week's podcast, he explains what

makes them so effective at this so-called Machiavellian intelligence, what happens in the brain when we twist the truth and why we're all liars in one way or another. He starts by explaining to our online assistant Sarah Rigby what a liar prince is and why they are so good at manipulating the truth. Yes, the name comes from Machiavellis, the prince, which is, as far as I can tell, the first ever manifesto, or at least treatise on the art of lying. Now, you do have before that philosophers and certainly religious people who have dealt with lying. I think all you have to do is go back to the Bible, right? Lucifer is the first great deceiver who brought down humanity with a lie. You have St. Augustine, the fourth century.

Christian theologian who wrote an actual mini treatise on the types of lying. But never before in history has had a manifest as far as I can tell, being written in which aspects of lying and how to deceive people, why they should be deceived, how easily duped people are by what later on Hitler called the big lie. There's never anything like it. So I use the term liar prince because we're all liar. I mean, we all lie for whatever reason it is. But there are some people who are masters of the lie, those who have a particular talent and who hone it and develop it and use it as a constant discourse strategy.

That's who the liar prince is. So it comes out of Machiaveni. So what might a liar prince use their skills to try to achieve? In my own book, I go actually through that. 200 pages to show historically how this is done. So there's a long answer, which I'm sure nobody wants to listen to. But there's a short one. We all know what lies do.

What the liar prince also knows as well as we do that, they can harm. We don't want to really harm. And, you know, little white lies, it's for us to avoid, you know, some consequence. So if I say to my wife, you know, oh, heck, I didn't mail or I didn't mail the letter and then I hadn't. And I know I would do it the next day. It's to avoid, you know, a temporary infelicity of interaction. However, if I wanted systematically to, I don't know, I'm envious of a colleague, I wanted that colleague to be, to fail, then I would start a, in mythology, a story.

They call them conspiracy theories. The more appropriate term is confabulation and build on it and build on it until some effect will happen. Machia really knew that if I do this constantly, not everybody will be affected by it, but a lot of people will. So it's a matter of situation, the context. A lie could be truth in a number. other context. And the audience, the people to whom you aim the lie and the others whom you want

to affect. That's the liar prince. The strategies are enormous. Deception, dissemblance, making up stories, BS, and on and on and on. In my own book, I actually go through historical examples of how these have affected history. In my own view, we rarely take into account that lies, deceptions, have affected history probably more than truth. And it's the attack on truth and the quest for truth that finally determines historical outcomes. Now, you start with Odysseus. You know, Homer absolutely knew that liars get things done for the better or for the worse. So can you give some examples of these historical liar princes? Well, you know, before Machiavelli, there were mythical creatures,

mythical figures, I should say, and some historical figures. Machiavelli himself gives the examples of several popes who were very strategic at using the mendacity. I'll call it the Machiavellian art, because it is a Machiavellian art. But if you go, you know, mythical phyllis. figures, Dolos, the mythical figure of ancient Greece, who got ahead by lying and eventually by faking thing. By the way, there were fake news in antiquity as well. In other words, creating myths that were not true but believable because they had some very similitude in it. But the most

salient examples are from modern history. Think of the Orwellian states, starting with Stalin and the Soviet Union, working your way through Hitler in Germany and Mussolini and Italy. And they were founded on lies. Hitler's lie was that of the Aryan myth. Everyone says there must have been an Aryan race. There was not. I'm a linguist. And what there was was an Aryan dialect of an Indian language related.

it to Sanskrit. And people in the 19th century, the early linguist, the so-called philologists, knew that this was a dialect, but it did not constitute a separate race or certainly a separate state. And in fact, one of the linguists of that era, his name was Friedrich Mueller, not making his name out, wrote that anybody who says that Aryans were a race is a liar. And there you go. And in fact, it is not coincidental that Hitler and the Nazis use the swastika, which is a sacred symbol of that area. So they tapped into a confabulated mythological history, created it and made it believable. Guess what? People still believe it to this day.

If you put things in the form of a narrative, and that narrative seems to tap into a belief or a hidden belief that you have, including our resentment or some kind of bias, then you will believe it. Why is it that you would say that we are so susceptible to these grand lies given to us by these lia princes? If I knew that answer, I would be a rich man because I could find the serum, the antidote to it. I do have some ideas. Our brain is a strange brain. It's got the neocortex, logic, language, mathematics, art. aesthetics, it's all there. But below it is the limbic system. And there is one theory called the

theory of Machiavellian intelligence. I didn't make this one up either. That says that a line, when lying emerged in our species and in other primate species, it did show a survival strategy because those who were the better liars, I'm reducing it somewhat, were better able to survive in their territory because they outwitted it. Competitors for food, for procreation and so on. Okay. So it's probably built into our brain, but it's not a logical what the Greeks call logos. The Greeks beautifully divided cognition into two areas. Logos, which is where language, reasoning, argumentation, etc., reside. It could be, it could correspond to the left hemisphere of the brain. I'm not completely convinced. And then mythos, where we

imagine things, where we try to connect ourselves in a kind of metaphysical drama in the world. Once you tap into mythos, and that's what I point out, for example, in the case of a Hitler or even of a Trump, once you tap into it, there's almost no way out. The example I'd like to give is a childhood. I was told that Santa Claus was real. You know, I believed it. I had. I had a child. I was a child that. I I absolutely believed it. When I was then told that it wasn't and I grew up and figured it out, I was so disappointed. To avoid the disappointment, I came up with various strategies. The psychologists call it dissonance, cognitive dissonance.

But eventually, I caught on, of course. Now, apply that same model of reasoning into big lies, mythological histories like the Aryan myth. Once you tap in and someone will tell you it's not true or you have evidence before you, it creates dissonance. We do not like that. We will do anything possible to resolve that dissonance coming up with excuses and even finally the evidence against it as evidence for it. That seems to be the structure of our brain. It could well be in our limbic system. It could well be that beliefs are the strongest things we have.

You know, popular culture has come up with figures like Dr. Spock, you know, in the Star Trek series, or Sheldon Cooper in the Big Bang Theory sitcom. This is, if we could eliminate that aspect of the emotional system that can lead to deception, we would be much better on. Actually, we wouldn't because a famous semi-tician, Umbertoeco, good friend who passed away a couple of years ago, said that without lies, without deception, we probably wouldn't even have art, which is itself a huge lie, but makes us understand the truth. So if we want to understand the truth about what happened, for example, in Nazi Germany, we have to understand the lies behind the way it was created

and generated. I was really interested to read in your book about the power of confabulation. Yes. And I was quite surprised by the story about how confabulation helps the mafia to develop and gain power in Sicily. So could you tell us a bit about that, please? Yeah. If I can give a little bit of a background, I was co-opted by an anti-mafia journalist, who's my co-author of a book called Made Men, his name is Antonio Nica Azo. I didn't want to do it at first because I had enough. But then I started to realize how interesting it is.

If you belong to a street gang and join it, and it's made on the spa, you need something to distinguish yourself from other gangs. One way to do it is to develop a system of rituals and of symbols that says that's us, a language, a kind of criminal code that says we speak to each other. It's kind of a walk, the talk, and the look. If, however, the criminal organization is steeped deeply in a society, as were the three Italian mafias, the Sicilian mafia, the Calabrian mafia named the Andrangeta, and the Neapolitan mafia named the Camoran. I'm using these three because this is where the confabulation comes in. The story is told, made up completely, that these three versions of the mafia, they are, rustic chevalric organization.

Cavaleria rusticana. It's even an opera. It's actually a short story by Giovanni Verga becoming an opera, and it starts off the third episode of the Godfather series. They weren't noble chevalric knights. They were rustic. They came from the people. In fact, it was said in one of their tales,

which has then been enshrined in legends, urban tales that are told about the mafia, even songs, is that there were three knights, three brothers, who saved, I could get this a little bit off because my memory is starting to fade on this thing that I did a few years ago, but it goes somewhat like this. They saved, I think it was their sister, from being raped, they got imprisoned by a nobleman, they got imprisoned, and when they escaped these chivalric knights, one went to Sicily, another one went to Calabria, and a third one went to Naples to form these chivalric, these honorable societies, and they've developed a code, a code of honor. After the word is omerta, which is both honor and virility and masculinity. In other words, they distinguish themselves from common street thugs with this code and this historical confabulation of who they are from whom they've descended. They're not the only ones. The yakuza in Japan, and the triads in China and other organizations do exactly the same thing.

They gain legitimacy. They gain honor from it, and therefore it imbues meaning in their rituals, their initiation rights, and even their lifestyles. Right. And then because people choose to believe in these histories, it sort of gives them a sense of authority. Would you say that? Yes.

Oh, absolutely. You know, you asked me before, why do we believe in this? Well, we always believe stories. I mean, honestly, you and I have heard stories from a childhood. We read them. They're called fiction. And yet, because they represent life in a way that it is very similar, that is based in very similitude, they gain truth.

Now, what is truth? Who knows? I mean, we make our own truth most of the time. One of the things that I found interesting in doing this book and actually doing work on the mafia is that I have a completely new view of history. It's a matter of interpretation. It's not just relaying information and packaging it truthfully. It's what you select, that you put it together, how it flows, and the better historians are the better storytellers. Now, I haven't to like some of the histories better than others, but that's what, that seems to be our brain

has narrative structure. I have no doubt about it. Yeah, absolutely. And another figure from history who was great at using language to influence people was P.T. Barnum. Could you please give us a brief summary of who he was and how he used language? Yeah. Now, as you know, I do devote a significant portion of my book to Trump, but not only, I do discuss Trump's art of the lie because, well, he's right there. right now, and he's a perfect example of the Machiavellian liar. But Trump is in the tradition of the huckster, the American huckster, who is half a preacher and half a circus or, you know, showman entrepreneur. Now, P.T. Barnum was both, he was both a religious person and actually a strong supporter of prohibition and other things of that nature.

also at the same time, someone who did contribute to charitable things. And also a hoaxter. I mean, the hyperbole that we hear so often, for example, in Trump speech or in advertising, really does come from the tradition of P.T. Barnum and his circus. The greatest show on earth. Come and see it, you know, spectacular events happening, all this hyperbole. Now, we all know that. In effect, that can't be, but we want it to be that way.

We like hyperbole. We like huge and big things. And in fact, the bigger, the better. All of our modern mass cultural events, as the scholars at the Frankfurt School would point out, are based on this type of subtextual hyperbole. It's always bigger. It's always better. This is particularly so in America, and it is of notion.

surprise that America has that tradition of P.T. Barnum-esque language and, you know, pitch that people make about products. You see it in advertising. It is absolutely everywhere. What has scared me in doing this research, because I'm not much of an internet user. I don't go on social media, but I go and investigate them when I do work of this kind. It is imbueuble. with this kind of discourse. I mean, it seems to me that a large portion of social media and other kinds of websites are based on hyperbole, on confabulation, and really, who cares? As long as you put it out there and people can buy it, you have sold your ideas.

And that comes right out of the tradition of P.T. Barnum. You know, it was it Herman Melville, or I think it was Hummelville, who wrote a marvelous story on the con artist who would go on a boat on the Mississippi and dupe people into doing things. And, of course, it turned out that this con artist, this master Machiavellian liar, was the devil incarnate. So from the beginning of, well, really the beginning of American history, there has been a fear. And at the same time, a worship of this figure, of this hoxter, P.T. Barnum-like figure. Trump is just the latest incarnation of that type of figure. So you've touched a bit on this already, but why do you think that right now it's important for people to be able to recognize this sort of liar prince figure? I think we should, well, throughout history, eventually, you know, lies get exposed.

There's a marvelous Italian expression. Lies have short legs. Eventually they work out on their own. However, we're living in a lie right now. You know, you have problems in Britain based on a lot of lying. And it's because of the issue of the lies are aimed at otherness. You know, I grew up as a teenager in Toronto during the early rock and roll era and then went to university during the hippie counterculture era.

The whole idea was to make the world as inclusive as possible, to ignore differences of race, of gender and of everything else that was around them. And when I first started teaching my first university, university job was actually in the United States. It was in 1972, and I was teaching during the Watergate hearings against Richard Nixon, and I was teaching a course exactly the same two courses I'm teaching, one on Machiavelli and one on language and mind. And I thought it was done. It's over. People are going to accept otherness. Differences are irrelevant, right? Are true.

Tribal instincts are gone. Well, guess what? They have not. And I felt that I needed to bring this out. All I can do is describe it. Nothing else. I'm not a prophet. I'm not a politician.

I have no solutions. I can only look at history. I can only show what has happened. And I particularly know a lot about language. Boy, did I learn a lot about how to lie with words, with metaphors, with slander. how to shape messages to make them effective. Now, having said that, if I wanted to be a Machiavellian liar, if I left this interview and said, I'm going to start doing it, I could not do it.

It's not in me. So there is a talent. Some people are born to be musicians and they have to hone it. Some people are born to be liars. And there's nothing we can do about it. There's nothing we can do about it. But I thought that it was time for me, a linguist, to take up my my shovel and unearthed what's below the surface.

That was University of Toronto Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, Marcel Dinesi, explaining the shocking truth about lies. His book, The Art of the Lie, How the Manipulation of Language affects our minds, is out now. If you're more into facts than falsehoods, the new issue of BBC science focuses out now, where we'll be revealing the surprising science of self-control. Next week's podcast is with Samantha Algar,

where we'll be talking about, well, bees. So subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and it'll buzz its way over to you as soon as it's released. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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