A Strange Pathology of Lying

     In my last post, I mentioned the Kantian analysis of the morality of lying, something I've been contemplating a lot lately. I've been trying to understand the reasons why people tell lies. Sometimes the reasons are obvious (using a falsehood to convince someone to give you something, for example) but sometimes it can be baffling. Especially confusing to me is the blatant, obvious lie, told directly to the person best equipped to recognize it as such. I've encountered this many times, but the first I can recall was way back when I was in junior high school. I went (as I often did) to the local convenience store with a friend for our usual dose of unnecessary sugary snacks. Having made my purchase first, I went outside to wait, and while sipping on my slush, a couple of girls I didn't know arrived with their dog, who (as dogs do) immediately started sniffing at my crotch. I look at it, it looked at me, and suddenly it yipped and bit my thigh. Playfully, I suppose; it didn't draw blood or even hurt, but it did tear a small hole in my trousers.
    I was startled, and said, "Your dog just bit me!"
    "No it didn't," the dog's owner said.
    "No, look! It tore a hole, right here!"
    "You had that hole before. I saw it," she replied instantly.
    That she would say such a thing surprised me even more than the dog biting me. I was so dumbfounded at the audacity of the lie that I just stood there blinking incredulously as my friend came out with his purchase, and we left.

     I have thought about this incident occasionally over the years, and others like it. For quite some time, I could not make any sense of why she would have expected me to believe her testimony against my own experience. In the moment, the strategy worked by simply stunning me; I just was not prepared for so brazen a falsehood, spoken with such confidence. But I found it hard to imagine that being a viable long-term strategy, because sooner or later people will stop being surprised.
     Eventually, it made sense when I realized she wasn't lying to convince me; she was lying to her friend, who would very probably trust her over a complete stranger, and feel obliged out of loyalty to back her up. She may also have been signalling to me that she was prepared to lie if I took the matter to some authority, and that I should expect her friend to support her story over mine. For her friend, it was a loyalty test.

      And so I can see how a narcissist can easily fall into the habit of lying like that. Quite apart from the fact that it often works (at least with people who are unprepared for it) to deflect an accusation, there must be a sense of power and affirmation, when your friend who knows you're (probably) lying, goes along with it out of loyalty to you. When you persuade your friend to do the right thing, you can't really take all the credit for it, but if you get them to do something wrong out of loyalty to you, you know you can take it personally. It must be quite a rush.