Pat Stuart

How is it that perfectly rational people believe blatant lies and liars?”

That was my cousin’s question. We were sitting on her back porch soaking up the warmth of an autumn sun, watching two deer cross the South Fork below us while enjoying the myriad colors of a perfect fall day. No snow yet touched the two lines of mountains that flanked us to meet in the distance. Yet, everything hinted at winter to come.  

We’d occasionally seen a fisherman down on the same gravel bar where the deer had now paused. Grizzly crossed the river there, too, sometimes climbing the bluff and walking across the bit of lawn in front of us. Fortunately, not while we were occupying it.

“Anyone catch any fish down there?” I nodded in the direction of the deer.  

“Oh,” she answered, “there’s a tall tale or two, mostly about the ones that got away.”

Maybe one of the stories held a grain of truth. I said so, adding, “Lies and liars ... why would anyone believe ...” We both laughed.

A bald eagle drifted above us. If he saw anything moving in the water, he was ignoring it.  

Still smiling, I added, “Love of fishing. Hope for a catch. Don’t they call it the will to believe? Or, speaking of love and wanting to believe, how about the time you—”

“OK.  OK.” She cut me off again. “All’s fair in love and war.”

“Still.” We’d been talking about love affairs earlier and about love being blind. But it’s not just love, is it? All emotions are blinders. The best way to promote a lie is to mask it with an emotion: hate, envy, outrage, passion, fear, anger, jealousy and any other emotion that gets our blood pressure up.  

“Still.” We want to believe that we’re “rational.” We’re objective. We listen and decide what is true and what isn’t in calm and measured ways. We’re mostly convinced that the other guy may get conned, but we know better.    

“Sure,” we say when we hear someone’s bought into a lie, “and if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.”

It’s not that we lack the skills and tools to make rational decisions. Most of us, anyway. We have developed good brains. We can read. We have multiple sources of information. We know how to research. Most of us, too, have moral compasses and know right from wrong. 

But, then, a lie comes along. It may not be a big lie, but it might be a whopper. The size doesn’t really matter. We tend to treat all lies the same when emotions are involved. And, when aren’t they? Here’s a good example, “All inoculations are bad for you.”   

“Yes!” you say. “I hate shots.” You remember the fear and horror you felt as a child. You have avoided having shots as an adult. How wonderful to hear that shots are not only unnecessary, but they are bad. Your emotions push you toward believing the lie because you want it to be true. “It all makes sense now,” you say. “I’ll never have another shot.”  

But there’s more to the process. Having convinced ourselves, we need to convince others, to validate.  

“Shots are bad,” becomes a mantra, an election slogan, a newspaper headline. Big lies or small. The tale tales about the fishing hole clog the river with fishermen, and the local grizzlies better find another place to cross.  

More, once we believe the lie, it’s such a wrench to the emotions to roll it back that we just keep right on believing — herd immunity goes away, and the river is fished out.

A breeze comes up, skittering leaves about. “Winter’s coming,” my cousin says.  

I say nothing. Some things just are true. Hate it or love it, and shots may be good or bad, but winter will come regardless.