Lying isn't so bad if it makes you
feel good
By John Leo
Sun Jan 22, 8:37 PM ET
Yahoo!News
Of course Oprah took the side of veracity-challenged author
James Frey, author of "A Million Little Pieces." She is in the feelings
business, and you don't succeed in her line of work by favoring facts
over deeply felt but untrue stories. The tears that she and her
staffers shed while reading Frey's largely concocted tale of crime and
addiction made the book important to her.
When Frey appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live," Oprah made things worse
by phoning in to say, "The underlying message of redemption in James
Frey's memoir still resonates with me." Apparently this meant that she
was so moved by the book that she doesn't care that it contains many
untruths. Resonance makes lying defensible.
She has a lot of company. Bill Bastone, the talented investigative
reporter whose Web site, The Smoking Gun, broke the news about Frey,
says 40 percent of e-mail consists of "How dare you" messages defending
Frey. Patti Davis, President Reagan's daughter, expressed sympathy for
Frey, and some bloggers have abandoned coherence in order to come down
on Frey's side. ("I believe that much of his fabrications are
collective memories, splintered memories and probably recovered
memories," one wrote.)
Various publishing types help justify the fraud by arguing that memoirs
are never 100 percent accurate and almost all autobiographies contain
evasions and lies. Doubleday pointed to the "overall reading
experience" of Frey's work, which is probably better than saying, "It's
a pack of lies and you'll love it." In 1972 the writer Clifford Irving
went to prison for creating and selling a fake autobiography of Howard
Hughes. Now Oprah and his publisher might defend him as an emotional
truth-teller.
The willingness to accept "emotional truth," even when packaged in
lies, is hardly new. What's new is that those who insist on factual
truth are now on the defensive, pictured as fuddy-duddies who don't
understand that the self recognizes the highest truth in feelings.
College speech codes have long been written in feelings language. Hurt
feelings are evidence of an offense. These codes reflect, and
reinforce, the rise of feelings over facts and standards. The emotional
impact is what counts. Brown University, for instance, banned "verbal
behavior" that "produces feelings of impotence, anger or
disenfranchisement," whether "intentional or unintentional." In other
words, you can't say anything that makes anybody feel really bad.
The many hoaxes on colleges campuses, mostly involving untrue reports
of rapes and racial attacks, often turn out to be teaching instruments
of a sort, conscious lies intended to reveal broad truths about the
constant victimization of women and minorities. After the Tawana
Brawley case, an article in the Nation magazine said the faked
kidnapping and rape she reported were useful because they called
attention to the suffering of blacks, so "in cultural perspective, if
not in fact, it doesn't matter whether the crime occurred or not."
Many of the campus hoaxes owe something to the postmodern notion that
there is no literal truth, only voices and narratives. If so, who can
object if you make up a narrative that expresses the truth you feel?
This attitude seeps into therapy, often through therapists who guide
patients to the feeling that parents must have abused them. After one
California patient sued her parents, her therapist said, "I don't care
if it's true. ... What actually happened is irrelevant to me."
Certainly our culture is awash in lies -- politicians, professors,
reporters, columnists, scientists, etc., so much so that numbness has
set in. "Emotional truth" seems to take advantage of this numbness over
a culture saturated in lies. If you can't believe the literal truth
anymore, why not trust your own emotional response to stories?
Press coverage of Hurricane Katrina was loaded with stories and claims
that turned out to be wildly untrue. But the emotions stirred by TV's
often fanciful coverage were powerful, and the most emotional of the
media stars -- Brian Williams and Anderson Cooper -- strongly advanced
their careers. If emotional impact keeps advancing at the price of
truth, we will all be in trouble.