Do you remember Albano and Romina Power? They were staples on Canale 5 variety shows through my childhood and I was enthralled by that long, long, long hair of hers. This week, I’ve been finding myself humming their song Felicita’, you know the one? Not because I had any reason to be jubilant, but it just kept popping in my mind every time someone uttered the word-of-the-moment ‘serenita’.
When even bank CEOs include it in their speech and appeal for ‘institutional serenity’, you can’t but not go “Serenita’ – la –la –la –la”. Soon enough instead of ‘int bis-serjeta’?’ we’ll be saying ‘int bis-serenita’?’ The ascent of this word is not surprising: it has long been jostling for the spotlight. A couple of years back I used to share a newsroom desk with Paddy, a half-Liverpudlian and half-Irish colleague. His years in Malta had taught him how to spew words like ‘mela’, ‘ejja’, ‘mhux ovvja’ like a true local. But he used to crack me up every time he’d finish and file a story and would go: “Eħħ, issa seren”. Maltese people use it all the time, he’d say.
So finally, serenita’ has wormed its way in newspeak, pushing aside a more deserving word: sincerita’, and we have a surreal scenario of Serenity versus Sincerity.
Sincerity is what I’d like to talk about today. I’ve just watched a TED talk by Pamela Meyer, an American author and certified fraud examiner. Her talk ‘How to Spot a Liar’ has exceeded 11 million views and is one of the 20 most popular TED talks of all time.
Lying is as old as breathing, says Meyer as she cites incidences from Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible and News of the World, and it mostly comes from the fact that we’re hardwired to become leaders of the pack.
We cannot collaborate in lies, we need to uphold the value of integrity, however much we feel betrayed
Take Koko the gorilla for example. Now aged 45, Koko lives in a zoo in California, and from a very young age he was taught the sign language and understands some 2,000 words of spoken English. For a stretch of time, Koko had a white fluffy kitten for a pet. Once she broke a sink in the wall and with a perfectly non-guilty look on her face, she frantically signed that she was not to blame, and that it was her miniscule pet kitten who had done it.
However, Meyer points out something crucial: lying is a cooperative act. The power of the liar grows when someone else believes a lie. Basically, if someone lies to us, we have to agree to get lied to.
Often, we go out of our way to believe that we are not being lied to because contemplating the truth is scary. The night after he met Hitler, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wrote to his sister and told her that he could tell from Hitler’s face that he meant what he said. Admitting that his policy of appeasement had been exploited by Hitler and that his country was now at serious risk, was too frightening for Chamberlain so he chose to believe the lie. This is a typical form of denial. We do it a lot as we go about our lives: do parents want to discover their children are using hard drugs? Do you want to learn that your spouse is cheating on you? Psychologically we put off discovering bad news even if it will get worse later, so we believe lies because we cannot face the harsh, stabbing pain of betrayal.
Of course not all lies are harmful – sometimes we’re limited by social constraints: We say: “Yum, I love this food” when inside we’ll be gagging. We say: “Wow, new hairstyle”, when our minds are shouting: “Noo, you look like Frauline Maria of the Sound of Music.” But there are lies and there are lies and some lies are dangerous. Some lies can undermine a country.
How can you tell if someone is lying? Unlike the popular myth, liars don’t fidget, instead they freeze their upper body; they don’t not look you in the eye, rather they look you in the eye too much; they resort to smiling by contracting the muscles in their cheeks but not those of their eyes.
When a liar’s anger turns to contempt, then the alarm bells should ring. It is usually visible in a very ugly expression, marked by one lip corner pulled up and in. US psychologist Paul Eckman coined the term ‘duping delight’, which is the thrill derived from having victims being manipulated by carefully formulated deceptions – and it shows on the face.
Most importantly an honest person is willing to get to truth and provide details to all possible relevant and credible authorities and an honest person recommends strict rather than lenient punishment. In this noisy world of bombardment of news, let us keep in mind that we cannot collaborate in lies, we need to uphold the value of integrity, however much we feel betrayed. We need a world where the truth is strengthened, only then can there be a real – not fake – serenita’.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti