Daniel Klein
Daniel Klein is professor of economics and JIN Chair at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he leads a program in Adam Smith.
Some things signal untruthfulness. One sign of untruthfulness is, of course, the uttering of untrue statements. Sometimes you know about the matter in question, and the statement disagrees with your understanding. You then suspect the speaker is untruthful.
But, putting that aside: What are the leading signs of untruthfulness in a speaker? After all, often we do not know about the matter well enough to judge whether the speaker’s statements are true.
Let’s first clarify what we mean by untruthfulness in the speaker or writer.
Untruthfulness in a Speaker
A speaker is untruthful if he is not sincere in trying to make his statements true. A speaker may be sincerely mistaken but not be untruthful.
A statement carries with it natural presuppositions about importance or pertinence. What if a statement is true but only about a matter that is unimportant and hence distracts from what is important? Even if we consider the statement true, the speaker is being untruthful in seeking to distract from the important matter. Truthfulness involves mindfulness about the most important things. Untruthfulness lacks that upwardness.
In speaking or writing, one carries presuppositions of sincerity and due diligence. One who lacks sincerity and due diligence is untruthful even if everything he writes is superficially true – “Blah, blah, blah,” says the White House source.
Is a reporter lying when he talks to liars and reports their statements without saying they are probably lies? We might not say the reporter is lying, but he is being untruthful.
Salad Talk
In the Gospels, Jesus says that what defiles a person is not what goes into the person’s mouth but what comes out of it. Bad discourse rots one’s soul.
One sort of bad discourse is word salad. In a salad, vegetables are mixed up without a sense of order. In word salad, phrases and words are thrown together haphazardly, making the statement meaningless. Not only are words jumbled in this way, but their meanings are often jumbled or upended. People use words in ways that depart from conventional understandings of the word.
People obfuscate, purposely making their meaning unintelligible, and thereby dodging accountability and committing to nothing. Salad talk is a charade of honest discourse.
A Lack of Real Engagement
Another sign of untruthfulness is representing one’s intellectual adversary with a strawman. The adversary is called an anti-vaxxer, a climate-denier, an apologist, a racist, or a sexist. Strawmanning often takes the form of exaggerating a feature of the adversary to the point of caricature and misrepresenting what the adversary says. The untruthful speaker then slays the strawman.
Another sign is nonengagement, as when posed a question, replying with a nonanswer. This again is a sort of distraction. When asked your position on a certain policy issue, explain: “I come from a middle-class family, OK.”
The soul is defiled not only by what comes out of one’s mouth. One can also be defiled by what does not come out of one’s mouth. Edmund Burke wrote : “There are times and circumstances, in which not to speak out is at least to connive.” Being too cowardly to speak out, many a soul winds up in untruthfulness.
Nonengagement may take the form of stonewalling. Adam Smith wrote: “Reserve and concealment…call forth diffidence. We are afraid to follow the man who is going we do not know where.”
Another form of nonengagement is simply hiding. I edit a journal that publishes critical commentaries of academic research, and we always invite commented-on authors to reply. Many make no reply at all. Some of those who failed to reply are listed in a feature called The Sounds of Silence. “The silence of these writers is dreadfully expressive,” as Edmund Burke once wrote. Dodging debate and serious criticism is a sign of untruthfulness.
Owning up
Another sign of untruthfulness is not owning up to having made statements that have proved untrue. When called on a statement, it does not help to say, “I’m a knucklehead sometimes.” The question is: Are you a knucklehead always?
Untruthfulness is a character trait. Adam Smith wrote: “The most notorious liar…tells the fair truth at least 20 times for once that he seriously and deliberately lies.” The untruthful character is bad news not because everything he says is untrue but because he cannot be relied upon to be truthful when it really counts.
More generally, a sign of untruthfulness is negligence toward one’s past statements, a desertion of one’s past untrue statements. Rather than owning them and overcoming bad judgment, the self-deluded person will, said Smith, “purposely turn away” his “view from those circumstances which might render” an unfavorable assessment of his character. The untruthful speaker shows a lack of seriousness about improving his own judgment and character.
The Surest Sign of Untruthfulness
Sometimes the speaker connives for his adversaries to be censored. It is like when a business gets the government to shut down competing businesses. It is a form of protectionism or what economists call ‘rent-seeking.’ Rather than competing freely and fairly in the marketplace of ideas, some voices want competing voices shut down and shut up. That is a confession of intellectual vulnerability and the surest sign of untruthfulness.
This article was originally published by the Brownstone Institute.
