Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

I continue to find the wit and wisdom of the past to be comforting. Mark Twain truly was a genius, and knew the human soul. (The title of this is a quote from him).

There are days that I wonder, what is the truth? So often we become mushrooms in our lives - living in the dark, being fed nothing but bullshit, and getting our heads cut off whenever we stick them up - that we start to wonder.

Don't get me wrong - while I may not have the most perfect memory in the world (and it takes me way too long to learn people's names), I do know the difference between reality and fantasy (if for no other reason than fantasy is so much more pleasant most of the time). Even so, one's perception of events, which is the truth for them, can be different from others.

The movie Vantage Point does an excellent job of showing this - I really enjoyed this (both seeing it in the theatre, renting it once, and watching it a few more times on cable) movie, especially then end where the final public story has no bearing at all on what really happened.

However it isn't the idea of truth itself that I've been thinking on lately, it is more of the difference between honesty and lies. Like fantasy, lies are often so much easier and simpler to believe (at least at first) than what is often called the cold, hard truth. I've had a lot of personal experience with this - because my ex-wife is a compulsive liar. I was sucked into many, many of these in the ten years I was married to her. In fact, the only thing I miss about her is the entertainment value in re-telling the soap-opera stories that were her life, because she made it that way.

I don't understand the persona of a person who habitually lies. Me, I'm not smart enough to do this. You have to be amazingly brilliant to remember what lies you have told what people, so that you can effectively keep juggling more and more balls in the air. Me, I'd forget what I told the first person and blow it right away, which is why I prefer honesty. It is just easier. My ex would keep juggling things more and more until they all blew up and like a juggler attempting one ball too many, everything collapsed. Then she would figuratively dust herself off, find a new group of 'friends' and start the juggling act all over again.

I guess the fantasy world that many people create is simply nicer to live in than the real world - and at least the people know you there.