Born Liars (15 page)

Luckily, Marion knew just who to speak to about this. She had met Dr Armstrong at the local flying saucer club, where local people met to discuss the possibility of alien visitations. As soon as Marion told Dr Armstrong about her message, he understood the gravity of the situation. They agreed to tell the others from the club and to make preparations for the alien landing. Within a week or two they had gathered a group of around thirty believers, including several undercover social scientists.

In the weeks leading up to the flood date, Festinger and his colleagues were impressed by the solidarity and commitment of the group, which only seemed to grow stronger the more they were criticised or ridiculed by outsiders. The members endured fallings-out with family and friends, and threats from their neighbours to have them declared legally insane. Dr Armstrong was fired from his post; his sister filed a motion to take away his two children. One cult member sold her house and moved in with her infant daughter to Mrs Keech's home. Others quit their jobs and threw away their belongings. What did it matter if the whole world was against them when the whole world was about to be swept away?

Festinger noted that the group didn't proselytise. Although it issued one press release, announcing the news of the apocalypse, it did surprisingly little to spread the word of The Guardians or to recruit new members. As the day itself approached, dozens of requests for interviews with local newspapers and TV stations were ignored or refused by Marion, and every other member of the group. The researchers later remarked that the group behaved towards the outside world ‘with an almost superior indifference'.

* * *

After listening to Sabbatai Zevi explain why he had come, Nathan told him he didn't need curing – that he was indeed the Messiah, whose arrival on earth signalled the End of Days and the salvation of the Jews. Zevi, who was used to derision, laughed uneasily at the young man's joke, but Nathan made it clear he was serious. The two spent the next few hours engaged in intense theological discussion, at the end of which Zevi accepted his messianic mission.

Zevi began to feel intensely, manically happy. He rode around Gaza on horseback, announcing to its inhabitants that he was the Chosen One. He had done this before, of course, in other towns. But now Nathan was at his side, exuding conviction and providing learned disquisitions on why God had picked this moment for the Messiah to arrive, and why he had chosen Zevi to save His people. Gaza's rabbis joined in the acclamation. Zevi, dispensing charm and regal condescension in equal measure, appointed ambassadors to summon the tribes of Jerusalem.

This was just the beginning. Over the next six months, Nathan wrote long, closely argued letters to Jewish communities all over the world, bringing news of the Messiah and explaining that a new phase of history was starting. For everything that Zevi did, Nathan provided elaborate rationalisations, acting as the interpreter module to Zevi's impulsive
id
. Zevi set off on a roadshow, starting in Jerusalem and heading northwards to Smyrna and Aleppo. Everywhere he went, he was hailed as the Messiah.

In previous decades the Jews had endured one of the worst periods of expulsions and pogroms in their history. They desperately wanted to believe that better times were at hand. Excited that their saviour had finally arrived, they turned out in vast numbers to see him, but rabbinical communities were split. Younger ones tended enthusiastically to embrace Zevi and Nathan's ideas; the more conservative rabbis held their peace and hedged their bets.

Zevi now started to act with his old, wild extravagance: blaspheming, eating pork, and urging others to break the law. If a rabbi protested, Zevi would lead a mob to threaten his home. In Smyrna, he took an axe to the door of a synagogue that refused to recognise him, forcing his way in. Once inside, he announced the date of Redemption: 18 June 1666.

* * *

In Lake City, Chicago, the night of the Great Event arrived. At Marion Keech's house, squeezing into her living room, the groups' members gathered: college students, housewives, a publisher, a hardware-store clerk and his mother, and Dr Armstrong. Everyone awaited new messages from Sanander and his assistants; nobody was sure what form they would take, or what exactly was about to happen – The Guardians were frustratingly vague on the precise details of the pick-up.

That evening, everything was laden with significance. When the phone rang and a sharp, sardonic voice said, ‘Hey, there's a flood in my bathroom, wanna come over and celebrate?' the group expressed delight at what was clearly a coded communication from The Guardians. The members rehearsed the passwords they had been given, in call-and-response with the group leaders: ‘I left my hat at home', ‘I am my own porter'. . . When a tiny scrap of tin was discovered on the living-room rug the group took it as a message to remove every last piece of metal from their bodies. The women frantically tore out clasps from their brassieres, and one of the men – actually one of Festinger's researchers – had to be removed to the bedroom, where a panicked Dr Armstrong used a razor blade to cut out the metal zip from his trousers.
¹⁶

As their time left on this earth became a matter of minutes, the group sat in silence, coats in laps. There was nothing left to say or do. Here is Festinger's description of the passing of midnight:

In the tense silence two clocks ticked loudly, one about ten minutes faster than the other. When the faster of the two pointed to twelve-five, one of the observers remarked aloud on the fact. A chorus of people replied that midnight had not yet come. Bob Eastman affirmed that the slower clock was correct; he had set it himself only that afternoon. It showed only four minutes before midnight.

These four minutes passed in complete silence except for a single utterance. When the [slower] clock on the mantel showed only one minute remaining before the guide to the saucer was due, Marion exclaimed in a strained, high-pitched voice, ‘And not a plan has gone astray!' The clock chimed twelve, each stroke painfully clear in the expectant hush. The believers sat motionless.

Nobody said anything at first, but over the next minutes, and then hours, ‘an atmosphere of despair and confusion settled over the group'. Dr Armstrong and Mrs Keech exhorted everyone to keep faith, but as the group offered, then discarded, explanation after explanation for what had just failed to happen, they started to lose their composure. In Festinger's words, ‘The group seemed near dissolution.' At 4.45 a.m., Marion Keech's hand shook into action and wrote out a message from above: ‘The little group, sitting alone all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from Destruction.' It was an elegant explanation, but it didn't quite break the gloom; one group member silently rose, put on his hat and coat, and left.

Throughout the winter of 1665–6, the Jewish world was in turmoil. From Frankfurt to Amsterdam, Prague to Constantinople, Jews prayed and fasted and took constant ritual baths in preparation for the End of Days. Many sold their possessions and went on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, hoping to catch a glimpse of Zevi. Poems were written, books printed, public processions organised. Something approaching mass hysteria broke out across the European continent. In Poland, there were riots in every major city.

Next, Zevi took his biggest step yet: he ventured to Turkey where, it was announced by Nathan, he would take the crown and make the Sultan his servant. His ship reached Turkish waters in February 1666. The Turkish authorities, who had heard about the disruption caused by Zevi in Europe, were taking no chances. They promptly detained Zevi's ship, put him in chains, and brought him ashore, where he was held in honourable captivity and allowed to receive visitors. Nathan rationalised this potentially embarrassing development to fit his theory, explaining that the Messiah's imprisonment was symbolic of his inward struggle with evil forces. Zevi maintained his pretensions from his prison in Gallipoli, convincing delegations of Constantinople Jews that the date he had set still stood.

June 18 1666 came and passed. In September, Zevi was summoned before the Council of Constantinople in the presence of the Sultan, who listened to the proceedings while hidden in a latticed alcove. Zevi was given a simple choice: convert to Islam, or die. He immediately opted for the former. He wore a turban, assumed the name of Aziz Mehmed Effendi and accepted the title ‘Keeper of the Palace Gates', which came with a small government pension.

* * *

Marion received another missive from above, asking her to publicise the explanation. She called a local newspaper, and told them she had an urgent message. The whole group followed Marion's lead. They took turns to telephone the press and wire services, radio stations and magazines to spread their explanation of why the flood never came. This continued in the days that followed. Having shunned all attention prior to the appointed hour of The Great Event, the group now energetically sought it out. They also started to proselytise. Whereas before, potential recruits had been dealt with casually or turned away, now all visitors were enthusiastically received and engaged in discussion. The conspirators had become missionaries.

It was a strange paradox. Only when the group's dogma had been exposed to maximum ridicule – when the whole basis of their commitment to the cult proved to be an illusion – did they want to tell the world about it. Only when they had been proved indisputably wrong did they want to make arguments. It sounds crazy, but Leon Festinger didn't think the Lake City cultists were mad; he thought they were human.

Festinger published an account of his fieldwork in a book entitled
When Prophecy Fails
,
¹⁷
in which he argued that the more difficulty, embarrassment or pain people go through to get something, the more determined they will be to cherish it. The Lake City group had gone too far out along the branch, suffered too much scorn, and surrendered too much of their previous lives to retreat. Four hours after the flood had failed to come, Dr Armstrong told one of the researchers, ‘I've had to go a long way. I've given up just about everything. I've cut every tie. I've burned every bridge. I've turned my back on the world. I can't afford to doubt. I have to believe.' He and the others knew that they weren't the kind of people to do things like this without good reason. So now reasons would be found. Reasons, and affirmation: to assuage their doubts, the cultists suddenly needed to see their beliefs reflected in other people. At the end of
When Prophecy Fails
Festinger concludes that it is precisely when the strongly held beliefs of a group have been challenged that it most feels the need to stick together, and to search for psychological reinforcement in numbers. He points out that the Christians' Messiah was not supposed to suffer pain. When Jesus cried out from the Cross his followers must have felt distressed, and perhaps suffered a momentary shock of doubt – before setting out to spread the word. At midnight on 21 December 1954, no spacecraft came down to Lake City. The Atlantic sea did not rise up, nor did the heavens open. Denied affirmation by callous reality, the Lake City cultists sought it elsewhere – in other people.

The original meaning of confabulation is, roughly speaking, ‘to make up stories together' (it derives from Latin: con, ‘together' and fabula, ‘fable'). Implicit in Festinger's study was the idea that all religions are gigantic confabulations which spring from the biggest dissonance of all: we want to believe the world makes sense, but it doesn't make sense. Indeed, all human culture, our symbols, myths and rituals, might be seen as a way of reconciling our inherent drive towards sense-making with the randomness of birth, death, and everything in between.

Festinger's logic is powerful, though ultimately it feels a little tinny as a way of explaining – or rationalising – the grandeur, beauty and
mystery
of our rationalisations, if that's what they are; the Lake City cult is not a simple analogue for the religion that inspired Chartres cathedral or the music of Bach. Perhaps, also, the logic can be reversed. Festinger argued that people seek the affirmation of others in order to make their fragile theories about the world seem more robust, but isn't it also possible that we make up our stories as a reason to reach out to others – that our lies form pathways to love?

* * *

When the news of his meek submission to the Sultan reached them, Sabbatai's followers were devastated. The euphoria that Nathan's letters somehow managed to sustain past 18 June now evaporated, leaving embarrassment and denial; the rabbis insisted that the affair had never taken place at all. Nathan of Gaza, however, was ready with yet another finely wrought explanation: while giving the appearance of submitting to the apostates, the Messiah had merely found it necessary to sink deep enough inside the realm of evil that he might explode it from within. The shame of apostasy was his final sacrifice.

Sabbatai Zevi died in 1676, still a servant of the Sultan. Nathan, who declared Zevi's death a mere ‘occultation', died four years later. For years afterwards, Sabbatai's followers kept the faith. Unwilling to accept that their saviour had been a fraud or that the ideas they believed in so passionately were nonsense, they clung to the figure of Zevi, and to each other. They even created a new form of worship, based on the principle of pretend-apostasy. In Turkey, a Sabbatean sect called the Donmeh remained active and influential until well into the twentieth century. In public, they affiliated themselves with Islam; in private they celebrated Passover.

The benefits and the dangers of self-deception

The faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for anyone wanting to guide others.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

People can persuade themselves they're good whilst performing the worst acts imaginable. Suicide bombers kill hundreds of innocent people and yet die convinced they are going to heaven. Members of the Sicilian mafia regard themselves as good Catholic men, murdering during the week and worshipping on Sunday. (The Catania boss Nitto Santapaola was so devout he had a small chapel constructed in his villa; he also once ordered four kids to be garrotted and thrown in a well.) Even the doctors who oversaw the gas chambers at Auschwitz convinced themselves that they were remaining true to the Hippocratic Oath – that by helping to exterminate Jews they were curing the
Volk
of a malignancy.

These are rare and extreme examples, of course, but most people have a tendency to throw a flattering light on their actions. If a boss promotes an incompetent employee he happens to be attracted to, he will have little trouble reassuring himself she's the best person for the job; a middle-class socialist who sends her son to a fee-paying school will persuade herself she had no other option; a man who cheats at cards can convince himself that his opponents aren't worthy of fair play. ‘So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature,' said Benjamin Franklin, ‘since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.'

Psychologists have noticed that we often combine optimism about our own motivations with a tendency to see ourselves as slightly more capable than we really are. This is sometimes referred to as the Lake Wobegon Effect, after Garrison Keillor's vision of a town in which ‘all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.' In a survey of college students, eighty-eight percent of respondents rated themselves as in the top fifty per cent of drivers; and in a survey of college professors, ninety-five per cent declared themselves to be doing above-average work. Other studies suggest that we tend to overestimate our physical attractiveness, our intelligence, and our fairness to others. Most people in relationships believe their relationships to be better than most others and – yes – most parents think their children are smarter and nicer than other kids.

It's not that people are simply making errors. They are deceiving themselves. People do store accurate information about themselves and the world, but keep it concealed in their subconscious until needed – just as our mind screens out most of the information it receives from our senses until there's reason to pay attention to it. In an adult variation of the Peeking Game, the economists Dan Ariely and Michael Norton asked college students to complete intelligence tests, and allowed half of them surreptitious access to an answer key. Those students with the answers outperformed those without – they'd been peeking. That wasn't so surprising. What was significant was that they tricked
themselves
into believing they were as intelligent as their fraudulently achieved scores suggested. When offered a monetary incentive to accurately forecast their performance on a future test (without the answers) they over-inflated their predictions, having persuaded themselves that their initial score was down to their unusually high intelligence. As a result they lost their money.

There
is something amusing about this, and of course, self-deception is the source of much of our greatest comedy. From Malvolio to Mr Pooter, through David Brent to the X-Factor auditions, we love to laugh at the gap between the way people present themselves and the way they really are. Perhaps this is because we instinctively recognise that all of us need a little self-deception to get by.

Asked for a shorthand definition of sanity, you would probably say it had something to do with being free of illusions. When we think someone's in danger of going mad we say they're ‘losing touch with reality'. For most of the twentieth century, this was an axiom of the mental health profession too. A report commissioned by the American government in 1958 concluded that, ‘The perception of reality is called mentally healthy when what the individual sees corresponds to what is actually there . . . Mentally healthy perception means the process of viewing the world so that one is able to take in matters one wishes were different without distorting them to fit those wishes.' In 1988, Shelley Taylor and her collaborator Jonathon Brown published a paper which turned this wisdom on its head.

As a young psychologist Taylor worked with people who had suffered severe trauma or tragedy, such as rape victims or cancer patients. Interviewing them wasn't easy; Taylor describes it as ‘a wrenching way to make a living'. The worst part of it was that Taylor couldn't help but notice how some patients developed self-deceiving fictions about their future. She would hear a cancer patient state with utter confidence that he would never get cancer again, even as she knew from his medical records that he would almost certainly die of the disease. But Taylor gradually realised that the patients who maintained these unrealistically optimistic beliefs were the ones most likely to make the fullest return to mental health. They may have been telling themselves lies, but the lies worked.

This led her to investigate the role that self-serving fictions play in the lives of the healthy and happy amongst us, rather than just the traumatised. She arrived at a startling conclusion: the normal human mind works with a pronounced positive filter on reality. ‘At every turn,' Taylor writes, ‘[the mind] construes events in a manner that promotes benign fictions about the self, the world, and the future.' We routinely over-estimate ourselves and – because other people are the only standard which we have to go by – underestimate others.

What Taylor calls ‘positive illusions' fall into three broad categories. The first is an exaggerated confidence in our own abilities and qualities. These ‘illusions of superiority' are extremely sticky: although people are very willing to believe that other people are prone to them, they can't help but think they're different. Emily Pronin calls this the ‘bias blind spot'. She gave a group of psychology students a booklet describing eight common self-deceptions (or cognitive biases) and, after they'd read it, asked them to rate how susceptible they were to each bias compared to the average person. Each rated themselves as less affected by biases than other people. The strange, recursive loop of self-deception doesn't stop there: in a follow-up study Pronin explained to the subjects how and why they might have displayed this bias, but despite this they still insisted
their
self-assessments were objective, while the self-assessments of others would probably be biased.

The second class of positive illusion is unrealistic optimism; our over-confidence extends to feelings about how we will fare in the future. When students are asked to envision what their future lives will be like, they say they're more likely than their classmates to graduate top of the class, get a good job, high salary, and give birth to a gifted child – and less likely to have a drinking problem, get divorced, or suffer from cancer. In the short term, we tend to over-estimate how likely we are to lose weight, give up smoking, or complete difficult tasks. In one study, subjects predicted how quickly they (or others) would complete various work projects, and whether they would meet their deadlines. They were over-optimistic about themselves, and over-pessimistic about others. The reason for this seemed to be that their own good intentions loomed much larger in their minds than rational assessment of their own past behaviour. Our inflated sense of potential is underpinned by our tendency towards self-absorption.

The third category is an exaggerated sense of control. We're prone to imagine that through our physical dexterity we can affect things we patently can't – when rolling the dice in a game of craps, people throw harder when they want high numbers and softer for low numbers – and we tend to think our decisions are shaping the world even when they're not. In one experiment, a group of successful professionals were placed in front of computer screens on which a line flickered up and down in imitation of a stock market index like the FTSE 100. The subjects were asked to press a series of buttons which, they were told, may or may not affect the progress of the line. Afterwards they were asked to estimate their effectiveness at moving the line. Many of them were convinced that they had made the line go up. In reality, the buttons had no effect whatsoever on the line. (The subjects in this test were all traders at an investment bank.)

When bad things happen we're much less likely to take responsibility for them. To illustrate how reluctantly people assume blame, Shelley Taylor quotes from drivers' explanations to police:

‘As I approached an intersection, a sign suddenly appeared in a place where a stop sign had never appeared before. I was unable to stop in time to avoid an accident.'

‘The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of its way when it struck my front end.'

In the pithy summary of psychologist Eliot Aronson – a disciple of Leon Festinger – the average person will go a long way to persuade themselves that ‘I am nice, and in control.' Anthony Greenwald compressed this even further when he coined the word
beneffectance
to describe the normal human tendency to interpret reality so as to present ourselves as both beneficial and effective. Whenever either of these propositions are thrown into question, we are good at inventing stories that resolve the inconsistency between our actions and our self-image. Most of the time we're not aware of doing so.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It makes it easier for us to interact and cooperate with other people if we assume that we are conscious, reasoning, reasonably nice people, and that most other people are like us (just slightly less so). If I weren't able to deceive myself about my ability to control my destiny I'd become petrified by self-doubt. The philosopher William Hirstein has proposed that the opposite of self-deception is not self-knowledge, but obsessive-compulsive disorder: ‘Whereas the self-deceived person might say to himself “It'll be OK if I don't brush my teeth tonight,” the person with OCD will get up and brush his teeth again and again. The nagging thought, so easily suppressed by self-deceivers, rages out of control in OCD, cannot be ignored, must be acted on.'

There is good reason to think that our over-confidence is a trait that provided a survival or reproductive advantage and was therefore spread by natural selection. A degree of unrealistic optimism about ourselves would have helped us survive in the treacherous ancestral environment, and confidently impress potential mates. Now that we live in centrally heated houses rather than caves, we still rely on illusions to carry us through life. We imagine that having children will make us happier even though empirical studies suggest this is, at best, uncertain (anticipating our own happiness isn't the only reason we have children, of course, but it certainly smooths the decision). We fall in love with a person we believe is uniquely suited to us, and this helps us stick with them for long enough to raise those children. We believe that though our lives on this planet will end, we will live on in another form, and – somewhat paradoxically – that helps us to live longer. Without the ability to fool ourselves we would be sadder, limper, less dynamic creatures, unwilling to meet or rise to challenges. As Shelley Taylor puts it, positive illusions are ‘the fuel that drives creativity, motivation and high aspirations'.

There is a group of people with no positive illusions, who get closer to the truth about themselves, who have a more realistic perception of their abilities, of how the future will pan out and of the amount of control they have over things. Philip Larkin described them as ‘the less deceived'. Psychiatrists call them clinically depressed. In various studies, depressed people have been shown to have a firmer grip on reality than most. They don't have an exaggerated belief in their own competence or goodness, or remember the past with a deceptively warm glow, or over-estimate their agency in tasks of control.
Severely
depressed people can live with negative illusions about themselves. But the moderately depressed, in Taylor's words, ‘appear to have more accurate views of themselves, the world, and the future than do normal people'. Psychologists call this phenomenon ‘depressive realism'. Prior to the emergence of this category of disorder most researchers and clinicians focused on how the depressed person distorts reality. As it turns out, they're not distorting it enough.

It appears that most of us need a cushion of self-deception to protect us from the harsh edges of reality. In the words of the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, we have an ‘optimal margin of illusion'.

The actual margin fluctuates from day to day. In Joni Mitchell's song ‘Both Sides Now', our oscillations from illusion to reality and back again are described in exquisitely bitter-sweet poetry. In the first verse, clouds are ecstatically celebrated as ‘rows and floes of angel hair', ‘feathered canyons' and ‘ice-cream castles in the air'. By the second verse they have lost their lustre – they block the sun, drop rain and snow and generally get in the way of the singer's life. Love is either ‘moons and Junes and Ferris wheels' or ‘just another show' made for someone's cheap amusement. On the one side lies glorious illusion, on the other, mundane and dispiriting truth. At the end of the song, the singer reflects that though she's looked at life from both sides, it's the illusions that persist: ‘I really don't know life at all'. Apart from being a beautiful song, it's an unnervingly acute description of the normal human relationship with reality.