It is a chilly Sunday and I am unkempt, disheveled and Geschlimt. Geschlimt is an ancient German word that I've just invented.
You know the Liars Paradox?
It's someone who tells you every single sentence I say is a lie.
Well, there are two options, of course.
Either he is telling the truth and then he is lying about lying all the time.
Or he has just lied and this sentence is true, which means that he always lies and this sentence is a lie.
So this is known as the Liars Paradox. It was invented in ancient Greece. I encourage you to go online and have a look.
It gave rise to numerous developments in mathematics, arithmetics, logical systems and so on and so forth.
Lies. This is today's topic.
There are 11 types of lies and this is the truth.
Well, you know what I mean.
Let's start with the first two types of pseudo lies or quasi lies.
I don't think these are actually lies.
I think there are only nine types of pure unadulterated lies.
And these two behaviors, which I'm about to expound on, masquerade as lying but they are actually not lying.
Let's start with gaslighting.
Gaslighting is a strategy.
It's a strategy intended to make you doubt your own perception of reality, on judgment.
It's premeditated, it's cunning, it's orchestrated, it's carried out mostly by psychopaths, not by narcissists, not by narcissists, my fellow pseudo experts, but by psychopaths.
Gaslighting is about disorienting you, disorientation, dislocation, inability to tell apart, internal and external reality, confusion as to what is really happening, an impairment of reality testing.
Gaslighting is the construction of alternative realities or an alternative reality, which on the face of it appears to be palatable, reasonable and voracious.
But in reality, it's not reality.
It's the psychopath's reality.
And the aim is to make you doubt yourself to the point that you will substitute the psychopath's judgment and perception of reality to your own.
This is gaslighting.
Gaslighting uses lies, leverages lying as one of the elements in the strategy, but it's not actually the dominant element.
Still, some of the types of lies that I'm about to describe are used in gaslighting.
Now, the second type of behavior known as confabulation is common in psychotic disorders and in narcissism, pathological narcissism, according to many scholars, starting with Könberg, according to many scholars, psychological narcissism is indistinguishable from psychosis or on the border, the verge of psychosis.
Confabulation is a desperate attempt to breach memory gaps and memory lapses.
Narcissists are highly dissociative.
They construct reasonable narratives as to what might have happened during the period that they failed to remember.
So they say to themselves, I remember point A and I remember point B, but how did I get from A to B?
Well, this must have happened.
And this is confabulation, construction of plausible narratives, plausible storylines and scripts, which somehow flimsily bridge gaps in memory.
Now, confabulation is not lying. There is no premeditation here. There's no planning. There's no construction of an alternative reality.
There's simply extrapolation. There's simply saying, well, I remember hitting the ball and then I remember the ball entering the golf. So I remember A and I remember B, what must have happened in the meantime, the ball traversed the air. I remember walking to my club and I remember exiting my club. I don't remember what had happened in between and so I must have sat there, drank, had some drinks and read the newspapers or surfed the internet on my smartphone. This is what I usually do when I go to the club. So this must have happened on that occasion as well.
This is confabulation. Confabulation, therefore, is not lying. Although many people misperceive it as lying, that's why narcissists are accused of lying.
Narcissists actually very rarely lie.
They either confabulate or they create a fantasy in which they are emotionally invested and which they fully believe. They believe their own fantasies. They believe their own daydreaming. They believe their own confabulations.
Narcissists are no longer with us. They have a fantasy defense gone awry or eye. They're taken over by a dreamlike state.
So narcissistic fantasy, shared fantasy, they're not forms of lying. Narcissists do not future fake, psychopaths future fake. Narcissists believe their own promises about the future. They are firmly ensconced in their fantasy. They say this is going to happen. This is going to happen for sure. I'm going to do it a million percent. There's no doubt in my mind that I'm committed to this course of action.
Psychopath, of course, knowingly and intentionally, misleads you.
Psychopath is goal-oriented. He wants something from you. So he fakes the future. He wants your money, for example. He tells you he's going to marry because he wants your money. Or he wants to have sex with you. So he promises you a relationship. He's goal-oriented.
And because of the goal orientation, everything he does is Machiavellian and cunning and skimming.
The narcissist is simply deluded, deluded beyond reason and beyond measure. He inhabits a paracosm, a fantastic space that is akin to augmented or alternative reality. And he firmly believes the narcissist that he is really there and that you belong there as well.
So there's no lying when it comes to...
Well, of course, everyone lies, but there's no lying as a strategy when it comes to narcissists.
In addition to this, there are nine types of lies that all of us, without a single exception, engage in in daily life.
And here are the nine types.
Number one, utilitarian lie. That's a lie that is intended to accomplish something.
A lie that is goal-oriented, a lie whose structure and content are planned to promote or inspire changes conducive to the furtherance of the liar's aims and aspirations.
Instrumental utilitarian lies.
The next type is the smokescreen lie, a lie whose purpose is to obscure, conceal, hide or remove true information.
And this way mislead other people.
This is common in the military, in espionage, in commando operations. smokescreen lies are intended to avoid facing, humiliating, shameful or dangerous truth.
Number three, the compassionate lie, a lie that is geared towards sparing other people's feelings, catering to other people's sensitivities and vulnerabilities and allowing other people to save face and to avoid shame and embarrassment.
Most white lies are compassionate and empathic.
Number four, the ceremonial lie. Lies and dissimulations whose function is to establish a hierarchy, a pecking order by demonstrating reverence and glossing over facts and behaviors that inconveniently contravene the accepted hierarchy.
Manners etiquette these highly elaborate forms of ceremonial lying.
Number five, the compensatory lie, lies that are used in order to disguise the often humiliating fact that we do not know the truth or cannot remember it. Lies of this type amount to fiction, but with most of the interlocutors being unaware of it.
Number six, the confabulatory lie. These are intricate lies that weave a fabric of alternate reality, which is frequently an exaggerated form of the liar's traits, conduct and personal history.
Though of course, confabulatory lies can be completely unrelated to anything real in the confabulator's lie.
Number seven, the inferential lie. These are fallacious conclusions for extrapolations based on true assumptions of statements.
Most logical fallacies are inferential lies. And finally, the hybrid lie.
Hybrid lies contain markers of an occult hidden truth or pathways to true information. They allow the recipients to read between the lines.
People in communist countries used to do it when they were consuming the official media. And today when you consume mainstream media, you will tend to do this.
Hybrid lies are common in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes or when there is a monopoly of groupthink and individuals are not allowed to think for themselves. Pathological lying is a pernicious phenomenon, regrettably all too common.
We need to accept that with the emergence of mass media and especially social media, lying has been legitimized as a form of art.
And so maybe we need to add a ninth type of lie, the artistic lie, the self-fashioning lie, the self-reinvention lie, the "I wish I were like that" lie, the fantasy type lie, the lies that are common on social media, lies which reflect, suppress wishes, frustrations, hopes, and the sadness and tragedy of coming short.
Thank you.