I AM A woman who deals in lies for a living.
There are all sorts of lies. Big lies. Little lies. The lies that people tell casually every day with little thought or remorse: fibbing about sticking to a diet, calling in sick for work to go to a ballgame, or fudging a few numbers on an income tax return. The bigger lies that politicians and real estate brokers and used car salesmen tell to get us to buy whatever they’re selling. And then there are the lies so breathtaking in their scope and audaciousness that most of us could never fathom resorting to them no matter how desperate we were.
My job at Channel 10 News—the TV station where I work as the news director—is to catch people in their lies and expose these lies to the world. Of course, I make a lot of enemies that way. But I tell them, “Hey, if you don’t want to see yourself on the evening news, then don’t do it.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic these days. Lying, that is. It was Adolf Hitler who once famously said that the bigger the lie, the easier it was to tell. “People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one,” Hitler boasted. I’m not sure I agree though. I believe it is sometimes the little lie, the insidious lie we might not even be aware of until it’s too late, that can be the most dangerous and damaging and disturbing. Not only because it is so difficult to detect. But because once you find out a person has lied—no matter how small that lie is—you immediately begin to wonder what else they’re not telling you the truth about. I mean, if someone lies about one thing that you know about, the odds are pretty good he or she is also lying about a lot of other stuff that you don’t know. And so—before we even realize it—we find ourselves caught up in an endless cycle of dishonesty and deception.
A lie is a little bit like murder, I suppose. They say killing someone for the first time is extremely difficult because of all the moral and ethical and religious taboos that have been ingrained in us throughout our lives. The second time you kill is supposed to be easier. And then after that … well, murdering another human being becomes almost as casual as swatting a fly.
I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make here.
About lying.
And about murder.
They both get easier the more you do them.
Not that I would have any firsthand knowledge of either one, of course. I’ve never murdered anyone. And I never lie. Maybe that’s a residual effect of my work, being around people who lie so much. Maybe it’s the moral values I grew up with and have held onto all of my life. Or maybe it’s because I’ve seen up close all the damage and heartbreak and tragedy that lies—even the seemingly innocuous ones—can bring about in this world.
But the bottom line that you need to understand about me is I am all about the truth. I believe in the truth. I tell the truth myself at all times. I expose anyone who doesn’t tell the truth. Yep, it’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth for me. That’s the credo I follow in my career as a journalist—and in my life, too—above everything else.
Clare Carlson has a lot of faults—believe me, you’ll find that out about me soon enough—but lying is not one of them.
Now see what I just did there. I lied to you.
Because everyone lies. Including me. Nothing is what it seems to be in this life. And no one is either.
Well, almost no one.
There’s only one person I’ve ever met who always told the truth—the hard, cold, absolute truth—no matter what the circumstances.
As far as I know, the man never told a lie in his entire life.
And yet, I didn’t believe him the last time we talked.