Chat: They Know You're Lying

we evolved to evade murder

This is the first in a series where I adapt rants I inflict on my friends in my group chat into public posts.

I want to make a case that in general no one can hide anything of any degree of significance. This is because everyone can read everyone else really well, especially if you’re around perceptive people, which one probably wants to be.

Basically, I think we all habitually go around reading other people really really well, but in general most people a) don’t consciously realize how much they’re inferring from body language, omissions, triangulations of gossip, and every other cognitive technology we developed as primates over millions of years to avoid getting murdered in our sleep, and b) people also don’t then generalize that level of default readability to themselves.

This is kind of a niche position, and I think the consequences of believing it are kind of radical. Those consequences are that it’s actually totally a waste of time to live inauthentically/lie, not only because it blocks you from intimacy, and may be, according to your own beliefs, immoral, but because you’re not even achieving your stated goal. When you withhold things or misrepresent your true beliefs or opinions, you’re not slick. Everyone can sense whether you actually like them, whether you actually liked their friend’s play, and if you have a complicated relationship with your parents. You’re not changing reality with your deceptions. You’re just choosing to be seen as someone who’s cagey/hiding things, rather than reaping whatever benefits you might get from being honest.

However! I don’t want to flog this too hard with respect to something as big as being public about things you might not want to be public about. I think there are definitely worse things than “that person seems a bit mysterious.”

In fact I think some amount of deception and withholding can exist within a loving relationship. I’m thinking of when I was a teenager and I thought I was being really slick stealing alcohol from one of my parents’ parties. I thought at the time I was getting away with it, but it later turned out I really hadn’t been. But it’s not like my deception made my parents hate me—I’m sure it was closer to, “aw he thinks he’s getting away with something, isn’t that cute. Well he’ll be honest with us when he’s ready.”