The Pain of Deception

Many years ago, the Saturday Evening Post had a Norman Rockwell painting on the cover showing a woman buying a Thanksgiving turkey. The butcher stood behind the counter while the customer, a lady in her 60s, intently watched the turkey weigh-in. Each had a pleased look on their face as if they knew something of a secret. Looking closer, Rockwell revealed the secret by showing us their hands. The butcher was pressing down on the scales with a thumb while the woman was pushing up with her finger. Both would resent being called thieves, but neither saw anything wrong with a bit of deception.  

 Unfortunately, we laugh at such a scene. It is like what happens to us every day when we shop or exchange money. If we pay too much and catch it, we complain and wonder about the deception. When we are undercharged or receive too much change, we blame the clerk’s stupidity and consider taking the money and running. The first scenario has pain, while the second is justified. Even though we live in a postmodern society with a growing tendency to make relative decisions, most of us would admit that both examples are wrong. In either case, we are experiencing deception. It should come as no surprise to us that deceptive thinking and behavior breeds deceptive thinking and behavior and that it is never justified, no matter the reasoning to the contrary. Even while keeping this in mind, some people go to great lengths to cover up or put a “spin” on their chicanery.  

 I once read a story about a woman who acquired wealth and decided to have a book written about her genealogy. The well-known author she engaged for the assignment discovered that one of her grandfathers was electrocuted in Sing Sing prison, which he said must be included in the book. Dismayed, she pleaded for a way of saying it that would hide the truth. When the book appeared, it read as follows: “One of her grandfathers occupied the chair of applied electricity in one of America’s best-known institutions. He was very much attached to his position and literally died in the harness.”

 On a more serious note, deception is decided in one’s private world. It starts with unsound and misleading reasoning and results in acts of deliberate deceiving to cover up the truth. It begins small and slowly through repeated lying and stretching the truth to fit one’s circumstances. The mind has an interesting capability to justify, rationalize, and or spiritualize to continue the deception and medicate the guilt. We become blinded by our thinking until we lose our moral mooring and drift into the sea of “what’s good for me.”  Many of us could recount the false stories we have heard to cover up stealing, lying, cheating, and adultery. Sooner or later, deceptive thinking and behavior will be discovered. It leaves a trail for one to follow, a sad trail of hurting others with the realization that our integrity is damaged the most. We often deceive ourselves because we believe “we deserve it” or “we are innocent victims.” 

The author Oscar Wilde admittedly paid little attention to his private world. William Barclay quotes Wilde’s confession: “The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease...Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in search of new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber, one has some day to cry aloud from the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.” 

 The web of deception is spun one strand at a time until the perception of the web is shimmering and beautiful. The pain of the web lives on in the lives of those who come into contact with it as well as in the hearts of those who spin it. The pain and process of deception are best summarized in the line from Sir Walter Scott, “O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

© Daniel W. Trathen Ph.D.