173: Three Kinds of Deception
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There's a scene in a book I glove about a boy by Nicolean B. This situation in the scene is this. There's this very well-meaning guy who's decided that a good way to meet women would be to join a group for single parents. He's not a single parent himself, has no children at all. But this guy, whose name is Will, goes to a meeting and gets caught up in conversations, finds himself making up all sorts of things about his non-existent child and non-existent ex-wife. There's a tall bond woman named Susie at the meeting. She's nerdy looking. She's beautiful. They chat. They make plans to meet at a picnic for kids and parents. And comes the day of, Will calls Susie to tell her that his son, Ned, will not be there. And Ned will not be there because Ned does not exist. But Will tells Susie that Ned won't be there because his mom has taken him for the day. At the last minute, Susie tells Will that Will needs to stand up to his non-existent ex-wife a little more firmly. And then there's this passage, which I'm going to read. It was much more confusing than Will had imagined, making people up. And he was beginning to realize that he hadn't thought it through properly at all. How could he carry it through? How many times could Ned reasonably be whisked away by his mother, or maternal grandmother, or international terrorists? What reasons could he give for not inviting Susie round to his flat? Whether we're no toys, or cribs, or diapers, or bowls, or whether there is no second bedroom even. Could he kill Ned off with some awful disease, a car crash, tragic, tragic life goes on? Maybe not. Parents got pretty cut up about kids dying, and he'd find the requisite years of grief a real drain when his Thespian resources. No, disaster was approaching, and there was nothing he can do about it. Best pull at now. Walk away. But walking away wasn't Will's style. He always felt something would turn up, even though nothing ever did, or even could, most of the time. Once, years ago, when he was a kid, he told a school friend, having first ascertained that this friend was not a C.S. Lewis fan, that it was possible to walk through the back of his wardrobe into a different world, and invited him around to explore. He could have canceled. He could have told him anything. But he was not prepared to suffer a moment's mild embarrassment if there was no immediate need to do so. And so, the two of them scrabbled around among the coat hangers for several minutes, until Will mumbles something about the world being closed on Saturday afternoons. Everything was, he could still remember feeling genuinely hopeful, right up to the last minute. Maybe there will be something here, he had thought. Maybe I won't lose face. There wasn't. And he did. Loads of it. A whole head full of face. But he hadn't learned a thing from the experience. If anything, it seemed to have left him with the feeling that he was bound to be lucky next time. As this scene makes clear, there are different kinds of deception. And the line between deceiving others and deceiving yourself can get kind of hazy, especially when hope comes into play. Today in our program, the three kinds of deception, at least we're claiming that there are only three for the purposes of this radio show, the three kinds of deception and how any one of them so easily turns into any one of the others. At one of our program, self-deception, the story of an ex-con who not only told himself a lot of things that were untrue, he created a sort of web of unreality around himself. So the dozens of people in a small town started kidding themselves about what was real and what was not real. And then all of them together decided to make a feature film. At two deceiving others, an African-American lawyer and a fancy Manhattan firm decides that he wants to see what life is like in the exclusive country clubs that his colleagues go to. So he enters one, the only way that they would let a black man like him in, Act 3, accidental deception. American tourists in Paris accidentally mistake writer David Sedaris for a French pickpocket. At first it makes him mad. And then he starts to kind of like it. From W.B.E.Z. Chicago and Public Radio International, it's this American life, Amira Glass, stay with us. Act 1, self-deception. It's a truism that a great salesman has to actually believe the lies he tells to make the sale, the way a great actor has to believe
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