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Trump falsely claims he never called for Hillary Clinton to be locked up (www.washingtonpost.com)

submitted 5 months ago by ZeroCool@vger.social to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I think there are actually 3 different cases:

Knows what is true and chooses to say a falsehood. This is your normal person lying, which usually comes with subtle indications which can be spotted by the observant that they're lying, such as them turning their eyes away when lying, because the person knowingly lying feels guilty.
Couldn't care less about what is true or false when talking to other people, so say whatever benefits them most to say. This is sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists such as Trump: for them talk is just a way to get others to do what's best for them and truthfulness is irrelevant and unimportant, so they fell no guilt at all from lying since lying or telling the truth is all the same with possibly an intellectual consideration that there is no long term tisk of personal negative impact over the long run due to loss of trust when telling the truth so in that case they might refrain from telling a falsehood.
People who have visions, see things that aren't there or, more commonly, have a strong emotional binding to some tribe and have been told things, interpretations of things or conclusions by leaders of that tribe and refuse to even examine them mentally to determine their truthfulness. This is were you find the outright insane and the deeply religious, but also the members of political, national and even sports tribes. They genuinely believe that what they are saying is the truth, mostly because they didn't checked those truths for consistency or for "does the source of this stand to gain if I believe it" (I.e. cui bono). This is were you find many of the medically insane, people who believe in populist politicians, deeply religious types and people who will believe in any old bollocks from the politicians from "their" side even when they're not generally deemed populist politicians.

Anyway, my point being that the most of the lying on really important shit is coming from the 2nd group or the 3rd group, since normal people who truly know that what they would say would be a falsehood don't like how it makes them feel so tend to refrain from doing it, whilst members of the 2nd group only consider truthfulness-vs-falsehoods in purely intellectual "what's best for me to say" terms and those on the 3rd group actually believe what they're saying (hence feel no guilt in saying it) because they're unable or unwilling to examine, evaluate and judge for truthfulness statements coming from certain sources - they have no intent to deceive but they are none the less doing it because by purposefully refusing to evaluate and judge the truthfulness of certain things from certain sources they've first allowed themselves to be deceived, so when they parrot those things, in their mind they are telling the truth.

[–] EatATaco@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Lying, by definition, requires an intent to deceive. I agree with you that groups 2 and 3 are where most false statements come from, but they aren't lying, by definition.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Well, I would say that not caring about telling the truth at all (group #2) can be considered sistematically lying - they do know they're lying, they just don't care at all about something they say being true or it being false. Their intent is to convince others no matter how and if that requires deceit, outright lying is an absolutelly normal and commonly used tool in the toolbox they use for it.

It's not "intent to deceit" in a sort of per-lie way as a normal person would have - i.e. a child denying they got a cookie from the cookie jar by blaming the dog - but a far broader "intent to deceit" that's not limited to that one lie - i.e. constantly spinning stories and manging the impression and images one projects, using outright lies just as easilly as using half-truths or selective information: the whole structure is deceit. This is mainly how they differ from normal people, who are not casual users of lying when they intent to deceive hence use lies in a more purposeful way (as they have to first convince themselves to lie).

The only real difference between the likes of Trump and most mainstream politicians (such as Biden) on this is that the threshold for using lies whilst doing their story spinning and image management is a lot lower for Trump (who just straightforward lies a lot), but those using sleazy language, selective information and other forms of inducing others to reach false conclusions still have an intent to deceive even if they avoid easilly spotted lies.

I do agree that those in the third group are indeed not lying, which is why I separated them from the other 2 groups. They're not trying to deceive (hence why they react so badly when accuse of doing so) even though they are deceiving, though the "lying" in their case is done first to themselves by chosing to refrain from examinining certain things they are told.

I think the easiest to understand here are religious people: they trully believe the unproven and unprovable, mainly because they chose to not check any of it for believability - the ones amongst them who present something as as being "information" rather than "hearsay", even though they purposefully chose not to evaluate it are they ones lying, not because they knowingly are telling untruths, but because they're lying about the "informational" quality of what they're saying. (So, for exampl, somebody saying "The Bible says: X" are not lying, but the ones saying "It's X" are, not on the "X", but on the use of "is" rather than telling us they got that "truth" of their from a religious book).