Female Evil Felt Columbia College Stephanie Eric

Choose one of the following prompts and write an
analytical essay. Your essay should be at least 1000 words and follow
the formatting guidelines for all our essays and papers in this course.
Any quotes or paraphrased content from the readings (or outside
research, if you choose to use it) must be properly cited in text and
with a reference list at the end of your document.

• Answer the following: Does the number of lies Stephanie Ericsson
  outlines in “The Ways We Lie” help or hurt her argument? Defend your
  position.

Essay-

STEPHANIE
ERICSSON

The Ways We Lie

A screenwriter and advertising copywriter, Stephanie Ericsson, born in
1953 and raised in San Francisco, is also an author of self-help books,
including Companion through the Darkness: Inner Dialogues on Grief
(1993). “The Ways We Lie” originally appeared in the Utne Reader.
Consider, as you read, how Ericsson breaks down the activity of lying
into the different kinds of lies we tell but also manages to pull
together the different sections of her essay to make a larger point
about the role lying plays in our lives and our culture.
The bank called today and I told them my deposit was in the mail, even
though I hadn’t written a check yet. It’d been a rough day. The baby I’m
pregnant with decided to do aerobics on my lungs for two hours, our
three-year-old daughter painted the living-room couch with lipstick, the
IRS put me on hold for an hour, and I was late to a business meeting
because I was tired.
I told my client that traffic had been bad. When my partner came home,
his haggard face told me his day hadn’t gone any better than mine, so
when he asked, “How was your day?” I said, “Oh, fine,” knowing that one
more straw might break his back. A friend called and wanted to take me
to lunch. I said I was busy. Four lies in the course of a day, none of
which I felt the least bit guilty about.
We lie. We all do. We exaggerate, we minimize, we avoid confrontation,
we spare people’s feelings, we conveniently forget, we keep secrets, we
justify lying to the big-guy institutions. Like most people, I indulge
in small falsehoods and still think of myself as an honest person. Sure I
lie, but it doesn’t hurt anything. Or does it?
I once tried going a whole week without telling a lie, and it was
paralyzing. I discovered that telling the truth all the time is nearly
impossible. It means living with some serious consequences: the bank
charges me $60 in overdraft fees, my partner keels over when I tell him
about my travails, my client fires me for telling her I didn’t feel like
being on time, and my friend takes it personally when I say I’m not
hungry.

There must be some merit to lying.
5But if I justify lying, what makes me any different from slick
politicians or the corporate robbers who raided the S&L industry?
Saying it’s okay to lie one way and not another is hedging. I cannot
seem to escape the voice deep inside me that tells me: when someone
lies, someone loses.
What far-reaching consequences will I, or others, pay as a result of my
lie? Will someone’s trust be destroyed? Will someone else pay my penance
because I ducked out? We must consider the meaning of our actions.
Deception, lies, capital crimes, and misdemeanors all carry meanings.
Webster’s definition of lie is specific:
a false statement or action especially made with the intent to
deceive;
anything that gives or is meant to give a false impression.
A definition like this implies that there are many, many ways to tell a
lie. Here are just a few.
THE WHITE LIE
A man who won’t lie to a woman has very little consideration for her
feelings.
— BERGEN EVANS
The white lie assumes that the truth will cause more damage than a
simple, harmless untruth. Telling a friend he looks great when he looks
like hell can be based on a decision that the friend needs a compliment
more than a frank opinion. But, in effect, it is the liar deciding what
is best for the lied to.

Ultimately, it is a vote of no confidence. It
is an act of subtle arrogance for anyone to decide what is best for
someone else.
Yet not all circumstances are quite so cut-and-dried. Take, for
instance, the sergeant in Vietnam who knew one of his men was killed in
action but listed him as missing so that the man’s family would receive
indefinite compensation instead of the lump-sum pittance the military
gives widows and children. His intent was honorable. Yet for twenty
years this family kept their hopes alive, unable to move on to a new
life.

FAÇADES
Et tu, Brute?
— CAESAR
10We all put up façades to one degree or another. When I put on a suit
to go to see a client, I feel as though I am putting on another face,
obeying the expectation that serious businesspeople wear suits rather
than sweatpants. But I’m a writer. Normally, I get up, get the kid off
to school, and sit at my computer in my pajamas until four in the
afternoon. When I answer the phone, the caller thinks I’m wearing a suit
(though the UPS man knows better).
But façades can be destructive because they are used to seduce others
into an illusion. For instance, I recently realized that a former friend
was a liar. He presented himself with all the right looks and the right
words and offered lots of new consciousness theories, fabulous books to
read, and fascinating insights. Then I did some business with him, and
the time came for him to pay me. He turned out to be all talk and no
walk. I heard a plethora of reasonable excuses, including in-depth
descriptions of the big break around the corner. In six months of work, I
saw less than a hundred bucks. When I confronted him, he raised both
eyebrows and tried to convince me that I’d heard him wrong, that he’d
made no commitment to me. A simple investigation into his past revealed a
crowded graveyard of disenchanted former friends.
IGNORING THE PLAIN FACTS
Well, you must understand that Father Porter is only human.

— A MASSACHUSETTS PRIEST
In the ’60s, the Catholic Church in Massachusetts began hearing
complaints that Father James Porter was sexually molesting children.
Rather than relieving him of his duties, the ecclesiastical authorities
simply moved him from one parish to another between 1960 and 1967,
actually providing him with a fresh supply of unsuspecting families and
innocent children to abuse. After treatment in 1967 for pedophilia, he
went back to work, this time in Minnesota. The new diocese was aware of
Father Porter’s obsession with children, but they needed priests and
recklessly believed treatment had cured him. More children were abused
until he was relieved of his duties a year later. By his own admission,
Porter may have abused as many as a hundred children.
Ignoring the facts may not in and of itself be a form of lying, but
consider the context of this situation. If a lie is a false action done
with the intent to deceive, then the Catholic Church’s conscious
covering for Porter created irreparable consequences. The church became a
co-perpetrator with Porter.
DEFLECTING
When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.
— CICERO
I’ve discovered that I can keep anyone from seeing the true me by being
selectively blatant. I set a precedent of being up-front about intimate
issues, but I never bring up the things I truly want to hide; I just let
people assume I’m revealing everything. It’s an effective way of
hiding.
15Any good liar knows that the way to perpetuate an untruth is to
deflect attention from it. When Clarence Thomas exploded with
accusations that the Senate hearings were a “high-tech lynching,” he
simply switched the focus from a highly charged subject to a radioactive
subject. Rather than defending himself, he took the offensive and
accused the country of racism. It was a brilliant maneuver. Racism is
now politically incorrect in official circles — unlike sexual
harassment, which still rewards those who can get away with it.
Some of the most skilled deflectors are passive-aggressive people who,
when accused of inappropriate behavior, refuse to respond to the
accusations. This you-don’t-exist stance infuriates the accuser, who,
understandably, screams something obscene out of frustration. The trap
is sprung and the act of deflection successful, because now the
passive-aggressive person can indignantly say, “Who can talk to someone
as unreasonable as you?”

The real issue is forgotten and the sins of the
original victim become the focus. Feeling guilty of name-calling, the
victim is fully tamed and crawls into a hole, ashamed. I have watched
this fighting technique work thousands of times in disputes between men
and women, and what I’ve learned is that the real culprit is not
necessarily the one who swears the loudest.
OMISSION
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
— R. L. STEVENSON
Omission involves telling most of the truth minus one or two key facts
whose absence changes the story completely. You break a pair of glasses
that are guaranteed under normal use and get a new pair, without
mentioning that the first pair broke during a rowdy game of basketball.
Who hasn’t tried something like that? But what about omission of
information that could make a difference in how a person lives his or
her life?
For instance, one day I found out that rabbinical legends tell of
another woman in the Garden of Eden before Eve. I was stunned. The
omission of the Sumerian goddess Lilith from Genesis — as well as her
demonization by ancient misogynists as an embodiment of female evil —
felt like spiritual robbery. I felt like I’d just found out my mother
was really my stepmother. To take seriously the tradition that Adam was
created out of the same mud as his equal counterpart, Lilith, redefines
all of Judeo-Christian history.
Some renegade Catholic feminists introduced me to a view of Lilith that
had been suppressed during the many centuries when this strong goddess
was seen only as a spirit of evil. Lilith was a proud goddess who defied
Adam’s need to control her, attempted negotiations, and when this
failed, said adios and left the Garden of Eden.
20This omission of Lilith from the Bible was a patriarchal strategy to
keep women weak. Omitting the strong-woman archetype of Lilith from
Western religions and starting the story with Eve the Rib has helped
keep Christian and Jewish women believing they were the lesser sex for
thousands of years.

STEREOTYPES AND CLICHÉS
Where opinion does not exist, the status quo becomes stereotyped and
all originality is discouraged.
— BERTRAND RUSSELL
Stereotype and cliché serve a purpose as a form of shorthand. Our need
for vast amounts of information in nanoseconds has made the stereotype
vital to modern communication. Unfortunately, it often shuts down
original thinking, giving those hungry for the truth a candy bar of
misinformation instead of a balanced meal. The stereotype explains a
situation with just enough truth to seem unquestionable.
All the “isms” — racism, sexism, ageism, et al. — are founded on and
fueled by the stereotype and the cliché, which are lies of exaggeration,
omission, and ignorance. They are always dangerous. They take a single
tree and make it a landscape. They destroy curiosity. They close minds
and separate people. The single mother on welfare is assumed to be
cheating. Any black male could tell you how much of his identity is
obliterated daily by stereotypes. Fat people, ugly people, beautiful
people, old people, large-breasted women, short men, the mentally ill,
and the homeless all could tell you how much more they are like us than
we want to think. I once admitted to a group of people that I had a
mouth like a truck driver. Much to my surprise, a man stood up and said,
“I’m a truck driver, and I never cuss.” Needless to say, I was humbled.
GROUPTHINK
Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark, or the man afraid
of the light?
— MAURICE FREEHILL
Irving Janis, in Victims of Group Think, defines this sort of lie as a
psychological phenomenon within decision-making groups in which loyalty
to the group has become more important than any other value, with the
result that dissent and the appraisal of alternatives are suppressed. If
you’ve ever worked on a committee or in a corporation, you’ve
encountered group think.

It requires a combination of other forms of
lying — ignoring facts, selective memory, omission, and denial, to name a
few.
The textbook example of groupthink came on December 7, 1941. From as
early as the fall of 1941, the warnings came in, one after another, that
Japan was preparing for a massive military operation. The navy command
in Hawaii assumed Pearl Harbor was invulnerable — the Japanese weren’t
stupid enough to attack the United States’ most important base. On the
other hand, racist stereotypes said the Japanese weren’t smart enough to
invent a torpedo effective in less than 60 feet of water (the fleet was
docked in 30 feet); after all, US technology hadn’t been able to do it.
25On Friday, December 5, normal weekend leave was granted to all the
commanders at Pearl Harbor, even though the Japanese consulate in Hawaii
was busy burning papers. Within the tight, good-ole-boy cohesiveness of
the US command in Hawaii, the myth of invulnerability stayed well
entrenched. No one in the group considered the alternatives. The rest is
history.
OUT-AND-OUT LIES
The only form of lying that is beyond reproach is lying for its own
sake.

— OSCAR WILDE
Of all the ways to lie, I like this one the best, probably because I get
tired of trying to figure out the real meanings behind things. At least
I can trust the bald-faced lie. I once asked my five-year-old nephew,
“Who broke the fence?” (I had seen him do it.) He answered, “The
murderers.” Who could argue?
At least when this sort of lie is told it can be easily confronted. As
the person who is lied to, I know where I stand. The bald-faced lie
doesn’t toy with my perceptions — it argues with them. It doesn’t try to
refashion reality, it tries to refute it. Read my lips…. No sleight of
hand. No guessing. If this were the only form of lying, there would be
no such things as floating anxiety or the adult-children-of-alcoholics
movement.
DISMISSAL
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! I am the Great Oz!
— THE WIZARD OF OZ
Dismissal is perhaps the slipperiest of all lies. Dismissing feelings,
perceptions, or even the raw facts of a situation ranks as a kind of lie
that can do as much damage to a person as any other kind of lie.
The roots of many mental disorders can be traced back to the dismissal
of reality. Imagine that a person is told from the time she is a tot
that her perceptions are inaccurate. “Mommy, I’m scared.” “No you’re
not, darling.” “I don’t like that man next door, he makes me feel icky.”
“Johnny, that’s a terrible thing to say, of course you like him. You go
over there right now and be nice to him.”
30I’ve often mused over the idea that madness is actually a sane
reaction to an insane world.

Psychologist R. D. Laing supports this
hypothesis in Sanity, Madness and the Family, an account of his
investigation into the families of schizophrenics. The common thread
that ran through all of the families he studied was a deliberate,
staunch dismissal of the patient’s perceptions from a very early age.
Each of the patients started out with an accurate grasp of reality,
which, through meticulous and methodical dismissal, was demolished until
the only reality the patient could trust was catatonia.
Dismissal runs the gamut. Mild dismissal can be quite handy for
forgiving the foibles of others in our day-to-day lives. Toddlers who
have just learned to manipulate their parents’ attention sometimes are
dismissed out of necessity. Absolute attention from the parents would
require so much energy that no one would get to eat dinner. But we must
be careful and attentive about how far we take our “necessary”
dismissals. Dismissal is a dangerous tool, because it’s nothing less
than a lie.
DELUSION
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

— ERIC HOFFER
I could write the book on this one. Delusion, a cousin of dismissal, is
the tendency to see excuses as facts. It’s a powerful lying tool because
it filters out information that contradicts what we want to believe.
Alcoholics who believe that the problems in their lives are legitimate
reasons for drinking rather than results of the drinking offer the
classic example of deluded thinking. Delusion uses the mind’s ability to
see things in myriad ways to support what it wants to be the truth.
But delusion is also a survival mechanism we all use. If we were to
fully contemplate the consequences of our stockpiles of nuclear weapons
or global warming, we could hardly function on a day-to-day level. We
don’t want to incorporate that much reality into our lives because to do
so would be paralyzing.
Delusion acts as an adhesive to keep the status quo intact. It
shamelessly employs dismissal, omission, and amnesia, among other sorts
of lies. Its most cunning defense is that it cannot see itself.
The liar’s punishment [ … ] is that he cannot believe anyone else.

— GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
35These are only a few of the ways we lie. Or are lied to. As I said
earlier, it’s not easy to entirely eliminate lies from our lives. No
matter how pious we may try to be, we will still embellish, hedge, and
omit to lubricate the daily machinery of living. But there is a world of
difference between telling functional lies and living a lie. Martin
Buber once said, “The lie is the spirit committing treason against
itself.” Our acceptance of lies becomes a cultural cancer that
eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes as
invisible to us as water is to a fish.
How much do we tolerate before we become sick and tired of being sick
and tired? When will we stand up and declare our right to trust? When do
we stop accepting that the real truth is in the fine print? Whose lips
do we read this year when we vote for president? When will we stop being
so reticent about making judgments? When do we stop turning over our
personal power and responsibility to liars?
Maybe if I don’t tell the bank the check’s in the mail I’ll be less
tolerant of the lies told me every day. A country song I once heard said
it all for me: “You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for
anything.

“50
Essays
A Portable Anthology”.
Fifth Edition
Edited by
SAMUEL COHEN.
University of Missouri. 2017