As Robert Canup writes, we face a particular, even monstrous, problem in our world: that most of what we know or think we know is based on plausible lies. A person who is sincere and speaks the truth really has almost no chance against a plausible liar. Yes, I know that goes against everything we have been taught from childhood in the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave,” but it is all too sadly true. We have been taught that "the Truth will always win" and that "anybody who believes a lie about you wasn’t your friend to begin with", and a whole host of other platitudes that actually would work in a different world: a world run by people who tell the truth!
But since our world is run by people who lie for a living, you might expect that they have set things up so that liars will always win. And that is, oh so sadly, the case.
Psychologist Anna Salter said:
“Our culture agrees on the signs of lying. Ask anyone how to tell if someone is lying and they will tell you that they can tell by “lack of eye contact, nervous shifting, or picking at one’s clothes.” Psychologist Anna Salter writes with dry humor: “This perception is so widespread I have had the fantasy that, immediately upon birth, nurses must take newborns and whisper in their ears, “Eye contact. It’s a sign of truthfulness.” [Anna C. Salter, Ph.D.]
The problem is, if there is a psychopath – or those with related characteropathies – who doesn’t know hot to keep good eye contact when lying, they haven’t been born. Eye contact is “universally known” to be a sign of truth-telling. The problem is liars will fake anything that it is possible to fake, so in reality, eye contact is absolutely NOT a sign of truth telling. Anna Salter writes:
Anna Salter said:
The man in front of me is a Southern good-ole-boy, the kind of man I grew up with and like. If anything, I have a weakness for the kind of Southern male who can “Sam Ervin” you, the Southern lawyer who wears red suspenders in court along with twenty-five-year-old cowboy boots and who turns his accent up a notch when he sees the northern expert witness coming. A “northern city slicker” on the witness stand will elicit the same kind of focused interest that a deer will in hunting season. You can have some very long days in court with men who wear red suspenders and start by telling you how smart you are and how simple and dumb they are.
I survey the man in front of me. I am not in court; I am in prison, and he is not an attorney but a sex offender, and he has bright eyes along with that slow, sweet drawl. He is a big man, slightly balding, and he has – I have to admit there is such a thing – an innocent face. …
My Southern good-ole-boy certainly knows eye contact is considered a sign of truthfulness. He describes his manner in getting away with close to 100 rapes of adults and children.
pedophile said:
The manner that I use when I was trying to convince somebody – even though I knew I was lying – I’d look them in the eye, but I wouldn’t stare at them. Staring makes people uncomfortable and that tends to turn them away, so I wouldn’t stare at them. But look at them in a manner that, you know, “look at this innocent face. How can you believe that I would do something like that?” It helps if you have a good command of the vocabulary where you can explain yourself in a way that is easily understood. Dress nice. Use fluent hand gestures that are not attacking in any way.
It’s a whole combination of things. It’s not any one thing that you can do. It’s a whole combination of things that your body gestures and things that say “Look, I’m telling you the truth, and I don’t know what these people are trying to pull. I don’t know what they’re trying to prove, but I haven’t done any of this. I don’t know why they’re doing this. You can check my records. I’ve got a good record. I’ve never been in any trouble like this. And I don’t know what’s going on. I’m confused.”…
As if reading my thoughts, he breaks off: “You don’t’ get this, Anna, do you?” he says. “You think that when I’m asked, “Did I do it?’ that’s when I lie. But I’ve been lying every day for the last twenty-five years.”
The practiced liar: a category of liar that even experts find it difficult to detect.
Problem is, even when dealing with people who are not practiced liars, such as college students who have volunteered for a research study of lying, most observers are not as good as they think in detecting deception. The research shows consistently that most people – even most professional groups such as police and psychologists – have no better than a chance ability to detect deception. Flipping a coin would serve as well.
pedophile said:
“If you want to deny something, make sure you’ve got an element of truth in it. It sounds like its true, and there are elements of it that are very true that can be checked out, and try to balance it so that it has more truth than lie, so that when it is checked out, even if the lie part does come out, there’s more truth there than lie.”
This man was good enough that once he got away with stomping out of court in a huff. He was accused by his sister of raping her and molesting her daughter on the same day. He played it as a preposterous charge. His sister, he told the court, had once accused his uncle of abuse. She was well known in the family for making up crazy charges like this. He said he wasn’t going to put up with such nonsense and walked out. No one stopped him, and no one ever called him back. The charge just disappeared somehow. He now admits that both charges were true.
It is likeability and charm that he wields as weapons.
The double life is a powerful tactic. There is the pattern of socially responsible behavior in public that causes people to drop their guard, and to turn a deaf ear to disclosures. The ability to charm, to be likeable, to radiate sincerity and truthfulness, is crucial to the successful liar – and they practice assiduously.
“Niceness is a decision,” writes Gavin De Becker in “The Gift of Fear.” It is a “strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait.”
Despite the decades of research that have demonstrated that people cannot reliably tell whose lying and who isn’t, most people believe they can. There is something so fundamentally threatening about the notion that we cannot really know whether or not to trust someone that it is very difficult to get anyone – clinicians, citizens, even police – to take such results seriously.
I stare at the child’s statement in front of me. It is a report by a social worker of a four-year-old’s account of sexual abuse by her father…. [excerpts of actual report not included; read the book]
I consider the report carefully. It is filled with detail. The words are a child’s words, the description exact. It is clear this child knows what oral sex is. It shows no signs of coaching. But why was this report sent to me with all the personal names and identifying information removed?
This report, I learn, surfaced in the middle of a custody fight. Dad was a wealthy businessman, successful, well respected, and well liked. Mom was an inpatient in a drug unit. My heart sinks. It does not matter how realistic this report is, how many signs of credibility, how few signs of coaching: In our system of justice, lawyers are for sale. Dad’s money is going to buy some very good lawyers indeed. It isn’t clear that Mom has either the money or the will to oppose him. And the child: she’ll be lucky to be represented at all.
I’ve thought many times that if I were accused of a crime, I’d rather have the better lawyer than be innocent.
But it seems that the court responds appropriately and appoints two independent psychologists to make a recommendation. Two independent chances to get it right. Two people who are not beholden to either side and who can ask for any test, even a polygraph, as part of their decision-making. Two people whose job it is to know something about deception and to sort out the true from the false.
But both psychologists opt instead for what is termed and “interactional assessment.” They simply watch the father interact with his daughter, looking for signs of bonding or, conversely, fear. They believe if he abused her, she will be afraid of him; if she loves him, he is innocent. [Anna C. Salter, Ph.D., Predators, Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders]
There is no research or theory to support this approach. Sex offenders are notorious for bonding with a child and using that relationship to manipulate the child into having sex with them. In addition, a child might be afraid for very different reasons; the man may have struck her mother, but never laid a hand on her, sexually or otherwise. What justification is there for believing that one can tell from the interaction between child and alleged perpetrator whether the abuse has occurred or no?
Anna Salter stood up at a conference to challenge the “interactional assessment” approach and was silenced.
In this child’s case, the alleged perpetrator is her father. Surely she loves him, even if he did what she has disclosed. He has not used violence. She does not know that there is anything wrong with what he is doing. She is four years old.
One of the evaluators notes: “Observations of father and daughter indicate a very happy, spontaneous and positive relationship.”
Anna Salter said:
I sigh. As if that had anything to do with anything. The fact that she loves him doesn’t mean that he’s innocent or guilty. Then I find something in the case file that makes me sit up straight. “Of concern are the admissions by Mr. Jones that earlier in his life he had engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior with three children… These were the children of the woman he was living with at the time.
I stare at the note. This psychologist knew he’d done it before – in identical circumstances. It is a damning admission and surely means the psychologist should take this latest disclosure seriously. But he does not. Mr. Jones, it seems, is too charming, too rich, too respected. Despite knowing he is an admitted child-molester, both psychologists recommend that full custody go to Dad.
And there the story ends – in most cases.
But, in this case, the father’s attorney, so convinced that his client was innocent, sent him to a polygrapher. I know he thought he was innocent because he sent him to a very good polygrapher, not the one to whom an attorney would knowingly send a guilty client. This polygrapher is an unusually good interrogator and has a 98 % confession rate. He tells his clients:
Now the problem with the polygraph is that it can’t tell the difference between a big lie and a little lie and I would hate, I would truly hate for you to mess up your polygraph with something little that don’t amount to a hill of beans. So if there is anything, anything at all that you want to tell me before the polygraph, now’s the time so we can get it out of the way.
Under these instructions, the polygrapher found that Mr. Jones had quite a few things to say:
[I’m not including most of the confessions of this man, just selected and highly edited excerpts.]
polygrapher's report said:
They shower together and fondle one another. Sometimes he masturbates while they are in the shower and he encourages the child to “assist,” saying that this is “educational” for her. They sleep nude together and “sometimes things happen.” This man bought a vibrator for his four-year-old daughter. And so on.
All of these confessions were made BEFORE the polygraph. What is astonishing is that he fails the polygraph because he was withholding information on oral sex with his daughter.
I find a handwritten note from the polygrapher in the file. He faxed the report to the attorney for the father. It was a private polygraph, after all, requested by the father’s attorney and not one required by either of the independent evaluators (though they COULD have asked for it.] Within five minutes of faxing the report, the phone rang, “I’ve worked with you for twenty years,” the attorney said to him. “I hope I don’t have to remind you what privileged communication means.”
What privileged communication means is that this report fell under attorney-client privilege and therefore was suppressed. What is means is that the father’s attorney was under no requirement whatsoever to release the report to the court, and, by law, the polygrapher could not. …
What it means is that the only reports the court saw in this case were by the two psychologists who thought they could tell whether the father way lying by interviewing him and that they could tell if the child was abused by seeing if she loved her father. What it means is that, in 1996, full custody of this child went to her father where it has remained ever since.
The polygrapher, anguished by the outcome, sent the case to me after removing the real names, with the hope that I can use it for “educational purposes.”
Mr. Jones was a well-respected member of the community with a crazy wife. And he was so sincere. Clearly, the child loved him dearly. Such a man is hardly likely to be a child molester, now is he? [Anna C. Salter]
Another similar case has a report about the father:
report quoted by Anna Salter said:
Since the father denied the allegations, it is difficult to determine the identity of the perpetrator. In support of the father’s truthfulness… he was very forthright during the interview and testing procedures. For example, he acknowledged having difficulty in his sexual relations at time, and he openly admitted that he had a possible drinking problem …
Because he admitted some problems, the psychologist concluded that he would not lie about other, more serious problems! Because he admitted problems that were legal, she concluded he would not lie about activity that was illegal! That is just rationalization; the truth is that the psychologist just simply believed the lies.
One clinical evaluator noted in a report about a sexual predator that he “stayed back to close one of the doors, a very solicitous gesture that, as it turned out, is consistent with his general pattern of behavior.” The report went on to describe him as “kind, thoughtful, and considerate, a person who seemed to take pleasure in helping and caring.”
Instead of concluding that the man was good at creating a front, the psychologist concluded that the man was not a brutal, violent, serial rapist. Fortunately, there was considerable evidence that he was, and he was convicted. In this case, the court got it right even if the psychologist was out to lunch.
In another case, a very well known psychologist evaluated a three month old infant with bite marks all over him. Only two people had the opportunity to inflict the bite marks in the specific time frame, and they were the parents. Suspicion centered on the father. The psychologist who was asked to evaluate him reported how tenderly he wiped the infant’s nose in the evaluation, how carefully he held the baby. Based on the man’s behavior in the interview, she exonerated him and recommended custody remain with the parents. Two years later, he killed the infant. [From
Predators, Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders by Anna C. Salter]
This is an issue that will never die. It seems impossible to convince people that private behavior cannot be predicted from public behavior. Kind, nonviolent individuals behave well in public, but so do predators, rapists, murderers, pedophiles and COINTELPRO agents who help to shape the culture in which we live. No, they weren't always called COINTELPRO, but the principle is the same. It has been used since time immemorial. The earliest written records we have are of "clappers" in the audiences of theaters in ancient Greece. What do you think the term "Greek Chorus" means? We have exactly that in the present day in the form of the mainstream media. Did you think that, with the power of the internet to reach millions of people that the "powers that be" would have ignored the necessity of installing a "Greek Chorus" on the net? "The chorus offered background and summary information to help the audience follow the performance, commented on main themes, and showed how an ideal audience might react to the drama as it was presented. They also represent the general populace of any particular story." Discussion boards are ideal formats for "Greek Choruses" as they can be vectored to "show how the ideal audience ought to react," and to "represent the general populace." In this way, the illusion can be created of a concensus when, in fact, such a concensus may not exist.
Polls are another example of Greek Choruses or Clappers.
Consider our legal system. Here you first have to ask yourself just what kind of people were in charge of the creation and shaping of our “social norms.” Now sure, everybody will agree with the sayings that “you can’t trust a politician,” or “power corrupts” and so on, but have you ever really stopped to think about that and what it must really mean?
Robert Canup said:
Most people have heard of Ted Bundy; the serial killer who was executed in Florida several years ago. Not many people are aware of the fact that Bundy was studying to become a prosecutor, and that eventually he hoped to become a judge. Those that do know that fact see it as some strangely ironic twist - an inexplicable quirk in Bundy's bizarre makeup. It never seems to occur to most people that the perfect place for a psychopathic serial killer to hide in society is as a prosecutor or a judge; but I assure you that it occurs to the Psychopaths of the world. I would estimate that about 10% of the prosecutors and judges in the United States are in fact, S.A.Ps. The ONLY difference between them and Ted Bundy is that they were able to control outward signs of their Psychopathy until they achieved their goal of being in a position of authority. [...]
John had one overriding dream; to become a judge. Here was the greatest reward possible for a psychopath: to put on the royal robes of the judiciary - to become a demigod - to have others plead to Him and beg His indulgence, to have everyone rise in awe and respect when He entered the room, for His word to literally be law, to be able to create an almost endless amount of human misery, just because He could, to punish summarily anyone who, quite correctly, displayed contempt for Him, to have the power of life and death over people, to be granted the only royal title available in the United States: "Your Honor".
How brilliant of his predecessors to slip that one past the watchful eyes of the founding fathers - who sought to establish an egalitarian society free of the mental disease of royalty. There are, he reflected, no "Your Majesties" or "Your Excellencies" in this country, but we quietly fooled everyone into accepting "Your Honors".
'John House slept soundly. In his dreams he and his kind had finally succeeded in reshaping the world into the image they wanted: the dark ages had returned. Once more the plague swept unchallenged over the country side. John could hear the voice crying out in the mud street in front of his hovel: "Bring out your dead!"
John was in his glory. This was life the way it was supposed to be. He was the new Torquemada: randomly selecting anyone who was unscarred by smallpox for a session on the rack; since anyone who had escaped disfigurement had obviously signed a pact with the devil. Here at last was an era where John and his kind could feel good by comparison: with so much misery around him John knew he was better off than those he could see dying in squalor and ignorance. John reveled in the suffering of all about him. He did what he could to make that suffering worse; no agony was so great that John House could not add to it.'
It is difficult to believe that huge parts of society have been built with the guidance of the mentally ill; but they have been. The average person is heavily invested in doing things the way Psychopaths want them done, and is unaware that the things that the S.A.Ps have them doing are psychopathic. [Robert Canup, The Socially Adept Psychopath]
So, consider the idea that the ideas behind our social and cultural systems – including the legal system – were created by people whose agenda was to control society so that they could stay on top. And think about all the many ways they might go about doing that.
These are the same people who set up the legal system so that people would “get what they deserved”
Now, just think about that for a moment.
Imagine that you are a person at the top of the heap who knows that if you really set up a system where people got what they really deserved, you, yourself, would be instantly replaced - out the door in an instant! And so, if you are not just intent on staying on top and holding power, but cunning also, you will do everything in your power to insure that you and your kind are in charge of setting up that system, and that you remain in charge of it. You would make certain that evil was blended into the social and cultural concepts so seamlessly that nobody would ever notice.
And that is, quite literally, what happened. The individuals “at the top of the heap,” who had gotten there by being the most vile and rapacious, then set about figuring out ways to deceive the masses all the while keeping their favor and adulation. They knew they had to make laws to keep order, and they knew they had to make those laws seem fair and reasonable to the masses of people or they would lose control. Losing control was the thing to be feared as anyone who has read The Prince by Machiavelli realizes.
And so, Machiavellian manipulators at the top of the heap were deeply involved in the formation of our cultural and social norms, including our legal system.
In the earliest days of this “legal system” there was a form of “justice” called “trial by ordeal”. An example of trial by ordeal was holding a red hot iron to a defendant's tongue. The plausible lie used to justify this behavior was: if the defendant was telling a lie they would have a dry mouth and would be burned by the iron - while a truthful person would have a moist mouth and would be protected.
The fact is a NORMAL person who is telling the truth would most definitely have a dry mouth from fear, while a psychopath, who is incapable of feeling fear, would be the one with the moist mouth!!!
Now, just think about that for a few minutes.
Now, our current legal system is descended from “trial by ordeal” - and really isn't much different though it is much cleverer and simply not as obviously evil as that one was. You have already read a few examples above of just how the system works. As Anna Salter said, if she was accused of a crime, she would rather have a good lawyer than be innocent. That is a truly sad statement on our reality. Here’s a simple way to understand our legal system, adapted from the writings of Robert Canup:
Suppose that you are on a team that is engaged in a game and you discover that:
The other team gets to make up the rules.
The referee plays for the other team.
One of the rules is that you are not allowed to score - the other team is at no risk
Only you can be scored against.
That is precisely how our social, cultural, and legal systems operate.
The conditions of our world are designed to create the maximum chance that evil will prevail and the good people will be punished by being good and telling the truth.
Punishing normal, decent, good people involves more than just creating a social system that acts against them. The system is designed to insure that these good people are subjected to as much pain as possible for the simple fact of being good and honest. An obvious example of punishing the innocent may be found in the way the victim in a rape case is treated; their reputations are dragged through the dirt - all in the name of justice of course. Note the case quoted above, of the fellow who raped his sister and her daughter and walked out of court after accusing her of being a mental case.
The system that controls our thinking is set up like the legal system. People are taught to assume that, in any conflict, one side is lying one way, and the other is lying the other way, and people can just form opinions about which side is telling the truth. They are taught that the truth will lie somewhere between two extremes.
That is a wonderfully plausible lie.
Canup suggests that, to see the evil behind that plausible lie, we must make a different assumption: let us assume that in such cases, one side is innocent, honest, and tells the truth. It is obvious that lying does an innocent defendant no good; what lie can he tell? If he is innocent, the only lie he can tell is to falsely confess "I did it."
On the other hand, lying is nothing but good for the liar. He can declare that “I didn't do it” and accuse another of doing it; all the while the innocent person is saying “I didn't do it” and is telling the truth.
The truth - when twisted by good liars, can always make an innocent person look bad - especially if he is honest and admits that he has faults. If someone is telling the simple truth, and the other side is lying through their teeth, the basic assumption that the truth lies between the testimony of the two sides always shifts the advantage to the lying side and away from the side telling the truth. Under most circumstances, this shift put together with the fact that the truth is going to also be twisted in such a way as to bring detriment to the innocent person, results in the advantage always resting in the hands of liars.
Canup points out that, even the simple act of giving testimony under oath is useless. If a person is a liar, swearing an oath means nothing to that person. However, swearing an oath acts strongly on a serious, truthful witness. Again, the advantage is placed on the side of the liars.
Proof is a familiar concept to those used to conventional logical thinking. However what passes for proof in cultural, social, and even legal terms often bears only a superficial resemblance to what would be considered proof by those who really use their minds to think.
For example: in formal mathematics, proof rules are established - postulates are set out and a structure is built based on the postulates and the theorem. Mathematical proof is pretty much inarguable: once a proof is accepted as true it is added to the pool of known truths.
In legal proof there is a set of rules and a theory which the prosecution presents, and attempts to prove the theory by clever argumentation rather than facts. Truth is not the objective. Getting other people to believe the theory IS the objective. However, the prosecution's theory is whatever the prosecutor believes that he can get away with based on what is known about the case, or what he can PREVENT from being known. What legal 'proof' does is serve as a structure for convincing a group of people of the guilt of a person, about whom they know nothing.
There is another significant difference: Mathematical proofs are judged by experts in the particular case who are free to study any and all information about the case. Legal 'proof' is judged by people who are guaranteed to be ignorant of the case, who are only allowed to study the information presented during the formal trial, and who are not even allowed to consult the texts for what the rules say.
Our culture is so permeated with this “legal argument” system that it extends into our daily experience: the one who is the slickest at using the structure for convincing a group of people of something, is the one who is believed. Very few people take the time to obtain hard facts by carefully studying any and all information about a situation.
What we see something here that is set up to deceive people by presenting a familiar structure which, upon examination, is a sham. And again, the advantages fall to the hands of the liars.
As Canup points out, in a courtroom, juries are prohibited by law from knowing anyone involved in the trial. If the defendant is a good person who is being set up and framed, people who know him well and who have had much opportunity to interact with him over a long period of time and observe him would have much more trouble accepting lies told about him. If the jurors knew the prosecutor and knew him to be a bullying liar, they might have trouble believing the lies he was telling. If the jurors knew the defendant, and know him to be a trouble making villain they might be more likely to convict him.
By the same standards, if a person who is guilty is accused of a crime that he DID commit, as we have seen above, it is all too easy to get off. Corrupt lawyers, ignorant "experts," and blind judges let guilty people literally get away with murder all the time.
But, none of the conditions conducive to finding the TRUTH prevail in a courtroom even if we have been brainwashed to think that we have the "best legal system in the world." It is not much different than "Trial by Ordeal," only the hot poker has been replaced by a system that works as effectively to the advantage of liars.
Here then we see the worst feature of the law: it is designed to make the world safe for evil people. In effect the law serves to take the horns away from the bulls, while leaving the lions their teeth and claws. Massive, overwhelming, advantage is placed in the hands of liars. Indeed, without the legal system insuring their safety, the world would be a much more difficult place for evil people.
Everyone knows somewhere deep inside, that there is something not right about our world. In fact, at the present moment, it could hardly be worse. But most people spend their lives avoiding that fact at all cost. The brutal truth is that the our social, cultural, and legal systems are all about making people helpless then hammering them without mercy - all the while involving everyone in the illusion that right prevails.
This is an issue that will never die. It seems impossible to convince people that private behavior cannot be predicted from public behavior. Kind, nonviolent individuals behave well in public, but so do predators, rapists, murderers, pedophiles, and COINTELPRO agents who operate largely to shape and vector “social norms,” or “official culture.”
