5

LYING

Social ego begins in a child as a buffer against a web of negative demands. Any demand that the child move outside his ego center in a unified state is “irrational” to that child and is resisted. The child adopts a “persona mask” to protect his centered existence from the abrasions of the acculturation process. Social ego is a word-built affair paralleling and imitating the earlier developed self-system much as verbal logic parallels propositional logic. The semantic context places the self as just another object to the demanding otherness of parents, teachers, peers, superiors. By adolescence the world-out-there is the only authentic, the self-in-here isolated from it and fragmented.*15

Positive reinforcement (you are a good child—generally for passivity) gains its power as a release from the possible negative (do that again and I’ll . . . generally for some action.)

Negatives are part of a child’s “training,” “good for him,” vital to his “reality adjustment.” He must, after all, live in the world with others. These “others” are trained, of course, to react to the same set of expectancies, and the expectancies based on potential threat create the need for such training to deal with their very results.

As mentioned, many negatives, even those of apparent “life and death urgency,” result from the parent’s fear of social condemnation. Actions that a parent will ignore as long as no one is around are suddenly met with agitated negatives the minute “neighbor” appears. It is neighbor’s opinion of parent that is involved, not the child’s welfare. Actions of the child are suddenly negated as neighbor appears and as suddenly ignored again when neighbor leaves. The child’s homeostatic response is unable to find the stable-sameness pattern and is confused.

The child finds that he doesn’t have to always be, think, or act as demanded. He can, instead, often “shut them up” by simple agreement. The child learns to adopt a pose of compliance with the shifting negatives.*16 In a semantic reality, gaining verbal agreement from another is the same as gaining momentary self-verification. And as any child or politician knows, one can give verbal agreement and act differently without attracting too much notice.†2 Verbal disagreement with another threatens the other’s identity or “reality placement,” since our reality is semantic.

A child pretends to comply under direct surveillance and reverts to his “true” or “secret” self the minute he is left alone. He reverts only partially to himself, however, since, once made, the pose of compliance must be sustained to some extent. The outer play of agreement requires more energy and attention as the demands for conformity increase. And these demands increase in proportion to the child’s language ability.

Lying begins as a survival ploy by the child. He attempts to keep his centered balance with the life flow intact. Pretending to be that which is demanded of him produces a “double-mindedness,” however, never fully resolved in the mind again.

This “as-if ” performance contributes to the growth of roof-brain chatter, or the “internalizing” of the semantic reality.*17 This maneuver will be seen to parallel and imitate the earlier developed object-constancy of the infant world. Roof-brain chatter substitutes the stimuli from the semantic world of others and keeps a semantic simulation of that world going at all times.

As part of language development and exploration of his world, a child “talks out his world.” He verbalizes his actions, imaginings, and play. Verbalizing is a way of identification of his newly expanding world as well as imitation.†3 Two children playing together will constantly chatter, though neither depends on or expects the other to hear or respond. They simply share the same stage of play. They find no necessity for following the same script, nor have they an audience other than themselves. (Communication with others is a different activity.)

As the child’s grasp of language increases, parents and superiors increase their demands for a language-logic response from him. Language facility is mistakenly considered a sign of verbal-logical grasp and “reasoning ability,” which it can’t be until somewhere between five and six. Conceptual response is always expected prematurely and only adds to the contradictory confusion of compliance demands.

Talking out one’s world is frowned on as the “communicative” rather than identifying aspects of language are stressed and expected. Along with a continually growing demand for conformity is a growing demand for silence unless communication is intended.

Kindergarten and schooling complete this demand and enforce it with clear negatives. So the talking out of one’s world gets internalized. The internalized language function allies with the “secret self ” operating beneath the mask of outer conformity.

The child tries to achieve homeostatic balance and rational continuity within, while coping with the irrationalities and contradictions without. Two aspects of personality must then be attended to, and a confusion of identity grows.

The child’s unified, internal world is not recognized by his parent-providers and other superiors. They have long since lost their rapport with their natural communion state and can only respond according to semantic cultural expectancies. They are automatically looking for verification of their own worldview, a performance they interpret as guiding the child’s “reality adjustment.”

The child’s outer pose of compliance is accepted as the real. The lying act is all that communicates to “out-there.” The child never “thinks any of this through”; his resulting split world simply has no stability. His homeostatic function shifts increasingly toward the semantic placement out-there since his threat syndrome increasingly must gear toward a semantic web of positives and negatives.

Little by little our internalized chatter must reflect more on the outer contradictions, as we try to make the semantic orientation stable. Talking to ourselves inside our heads finally becomes the only reality we are sure of.

Having adopted a protective mask, we eventually forget the ‘‘buffer effect” of our pretense. We forget that our lying was an insulation against the accusations and irrationalities of our culture. We finally become, or try very hard to become, our mask itself. This brings on the “will-to-power” stage, when our mode of lying becomes our accepted norm, our unique charm, or “personality.” By maturity, our semantic, logical self-system sees itself as this mask effect.

Intriguingly, this lying act, so arbitrarily brought about, is an absolute necessity for acculturation. Lying is the necessary response to and for guilting, which is the principal tool for “molding the mind.” Attending two contradictory and opposing forces produces ambiguity. In adolescence the mask effect takes over and dominates the system, and “maturity” is the label we give the final dominance of this lying act.

It is not fortuitous that the stages of cultural-logical development coincide with adolescence. The inner life of the preadolescent often coexists with his double-mindedness until genital sexuality begins. Only the “absolutely other” can meet the needs of this new drive, particularly since culture concentrates on trying to control sex in order to ensure cultural adaptation. This contributes to the pull off center. Concentration on the cultural context produces the “norm” of eccentricity. The outer pose of compliance has by then long been given the only placement grant in the semantic reality of the society.

Since lying is essential to guilting, and guilting is the central feature of the cultural process, it is this act that needs exploring. Guilting, however, depends on fear and anxiety, the twin effects of the death concept, which must be dealt with first.