The image of Auguste Rodin’s bronze statue entitled The Thinker (1904) is a powerful reminder that humans always have a lot to think about – not least the behaviour of their fellow humans. We are a tricky species. We lie and deceive one another, as well as speak honestly. So we have constantly to assess the words and deeds of other people – especially when dealing with strangers.
It’s very hard, in fact, for an individual to go through an entire lifetime speaking nothing but the plain unvarnished truth. That’s because there is a category of ‘sweet talk’ that has evolved as a form of social cushioning. Conventional remarks upon first meeting, such as a mutual exchange of ‘Good Morning!’, are polite ways of starting a conversation. It saves time and effort. No one has to think of something strange and wonderful to say.
So we may be uttering a ‘polite lie’. It may not be a good morning – either for the world or for us personally. But we say that it is. Similarly, when signing formal letters, we end with the salutation ‘Yours sincerely’, whether the contents of the letter are sincerely meant or not.
And in certain social contexts, we offer reassurance to others, even if our words may be considerably stretching the truth. When someone arrives, wearing smart new headgear, smiling gleefully, and asking: ‘What do you think of my new hat?’ it’s conventional to reply something like: ‘Oh, it’s lovely!’ even if privately one thinks that the headgear in question is unseemly or even outright ugly.
Such glosses upon the literal truth are known as ‘polite lies’ or ‘white lies’. Their function is to smooth inter-personal relationships. And they are not generally considered as morally dubious, unless something important hinges on the outcome.
For example, if a young woman, wearing a new pair of tight trousers, asks blithely: ‘Does my bum look too big in this?’ she clearly expects the answer: ‘No!’ And that is indeed the usual polite reply. But if the onlooker is a sharp-eyed person with medical training and if the rear view does not look right, he or she might plausibly respond: ‘Actually, it looks terrible. I’m sorry to say that your buttocks are disproportionately swollen. Please see a doctor immediately and ask to be checked for a potential case of lipodema or cellulitis.’
In other words, there is always a process of mutual assessment in even the apparently simplest social exchanges between humans. Is this a moment when ‘white lies’ are permissible and even desirable? Or is it time for the unvarnished truth, at all costs?
People often have to make split-second assessments in their dealings with others. And, in socially stable societies, it’s normal to assume that others are broadly speaking the truth, even if from time to time they may indulge in some socially pleasing little ‘white lies’.
Immense difficulties would follow if all people habitually set out to lie and deceive, in all matters, whether large or small. For example, someone arriving in a strange town and asking for directions to a specific location will expect the locals to respond honestly. Some may not know the answer. But those who do give directions are expected to be doing their best. It’s not usual for people knowingly to send a newcomer off on a wild goose chase to the wrong place entirely.
At the same time, however, many (if not most) humans do sometimes lie and try to deceive their fellow humans. The motive is usually for personal benefit – often financial. Yet deceptions may be undertaken for multiple motivations: to conceal prior wrongdoing, to advance a cause, to protect another person, to maintain personal privacy, or sometimes simply to enjoy the sheer fun of bamboozling others.
One very famous case of large-scale deception was perpetrated by the Dutch artist Hans van Meegeren (1889-1947). His motives were complex. He began with a desire to prove the art world wrong and to get his own back on the experts who, he felt, had consistently underrated him. His revenge took the form of faking a painting, allegedly by the Dutch Old Master Vermeer. It took great skill on the part of van Meegeren and great attention to detail. The painting had to be carefully ‘aged’ to give it the cracks and dried paint of a seventeenth-century masterpiece.
Van Meegeren’s deception succeeded magnificently. The art critics enthusiastically hailed the rediscovery of a lost work of genius. ‘The Disciples at Emmaus’ was exhibited and much admired. And van Meegeren realised that he had a huge source of income at his fingertips. He decided that pecuniary gain was preferable even to the great pleasure of telling the art world it was mistaken. Thereupon, he made a huge fortune by faking and selling many more ‘lost’ Vermeers. Not only was he a very skilful artist, by the way, but he relied upon public eagerness to own a masterpiece of traditional Dutch art – and also upon the art world’s conviction that Vermeer – a convert to Catholicism – must have painted many works on religious themes.
There was – incidentally – one final twist to van Meegeren’s tale. He had sold one of his fake Vermeers to a high-ranking Nazi official; and then, after the war, found himself on trial for allowing a national treasure to pass into enemy hands. The only solution was to ‘out’ himself as a forger. He was accordingly ordered to paint a ‘fake’ Vermeer in front of expert witnesses, which he did. After that, he was given a very light sentence (one year in gaol), but he died shortly thereafter, from a heart attack. The moral is that living a long-term lie can be very stressful.
Unsurprisingly, all moral and religious systems strongly discourage all forms of conscious deception. They are not only harmful to society at large, but they are also morally warping for the perpetrators themselves. Furthermore, the victims of serious fraud are often left psychologically as well as financially damaged. He or she is also likely to suffer not only strong feelings of anger, directed at the perpetrator, but also feelings of self-annoyance at having been foolish enough to be duped. Sometimes, victims are almost too ashamed to seek help and redress.
Moreover, some notorious frauds have triggered a wave of suicides among those who lost huge sums of money to plausible fraudsters. One such scandal was recorded in nineteenth-century Bavaria. A talented female actor and singer, known as Adele Spitzeder (1832-95), proved to have a great gift for extracting money from investors by making great long-term promises and paying out short-term, small dividends. She accumulated a fortune and, in 1869, opened her own bank. Before long, however, in 1872, she was brought to trial. Her bank was closed; her assets confiscated; and she was sent to prison. Some 32,000 individuals lost their investments, and a number committed suicide.
Spitzeder was running what later became known as a ‘Ponzi Scheme’ – named after the Italian- American swindler Carlo Ponzi (1882-1949). The deception depended upon continuous growth based upon confidence in the person running the scheme. As a result, he or she had continuously to raise ever more money, in order to pay regular small dividends to keep the support of earlier investors.
Personally, Spitzeder may well have found it a somewhat testing business, since her accounting system was reportedly chaotic. (She kept her money in untallied loose sacks of coins and notes, to which her helpers had access without supervision). Nonetheless, Spitzeder maintained a public display of confident affluence. She was evidently a good actor. Publicly, she appeared to be a reliable person of great piety, who cared for the poor workers, many of whom deposited small sums in her bank.
All these examples provide reminders of the potential trickiness of all humans. Even an apparently gracious benefactor of the poor, like Spitzeder, might be amassing her own fraudulent fortune behind the scenes.
What follows for ordinary humanity? Should we all become cynical – and suspicious of everyone we meet? Fortunately for the maintenance of social harmony, the answer is: No! We have to sustain a measured trust in fellow humans, for the general good of the species. Life without any element of trust at all would be unbearable. Indeed, one can go further and state that shared trust is a huge communal asset.
But the message instead is that people should simultaneously remain vigilant. Many people are trustworthy. Yet some do lie and try to deceive. Others use violence when attempting to get their way. The percentage of the world population who engage in such behaviour is in a minority – but a not insubstantial one.
Global crime statistics offer very rough-and ready guides. Definitions of what constitutes a crime vary from country to country; prejudices against specific racial or class groupings within a given society may lead to biased policing; and in all countries there is an unknown number of crimes that are either unreported or remain, after being reported, unresolved.
Bearing in mind those major qualifications, the latest global statistics (from https://worldostats.com/country-stats/crime-rate-by-country/) suggest that – at a minimum – global crime rates since 2000 have varied from year to year between 5-7 crimes per 100,000 population. In a world that today (2025) sustains over 8 billion people, that’s certainly a lot of criminal activity. Yet it’s far from universal. Thus, crime rates are highest (no surprise) in countries with high levels of economic and political instability, allied to extensive social inequality. And lowest in societies with strong governance, political stability, lower levels of inequality, effective social cohesion, and community-oriented policing.
Ordinary citizens should thus not panic. (To repeat) The motto should instead be: Vigilance!
Be prepared to trust one’s fellow humans. But, if in any doubt at all, then cross-check information and references. If still in doubt, then double- check, remembering that references can be forged. It’s also helpful to get advice from others. There’s no shame in consulting a disinterested third party.
Fraudsters often try to throw a web of false friendship around a given relationship, to encourage confidence where confidence should not really be granted. Think of the siren voices on the phone during the recent Covid epidemic. They enquired solicitously about people’s health when what they really meant was: ‘How’s your money?! Give some of it to us! And don’t tell others about this conversation’. The remedy? Bring others immediately into the conversation and break the bubble of secrecy.
Countless other examples of apparently plausible of fake news and disinformation could be given at this point. Political propaganda is often not above such wiles. And today’s social media can multiply the speed of circulation of carefully crafted lies. It’s not hard to find examples. (Vigilance!)
On the positive side, meanwhile, there is good news to report. Over many millennia, humans have cooperated to generate a huge body of substantiated knowledge about the great cosmos as well as the specific local world in which we live. True, there have been instances of fake facts being mistakenly accepted as true, and cases where successful disinformation has for a while pulled wool over people’s eyes.
Over time, however, shared research and public debates help to cross-check, to remove errors, and to verify truths. There are some areas that are still subject to genuine debate. Not every great issue is instantly resolved. But applied human rationality, shared and debated with other rational humans, has established an impressive corpus of knowledge. Look, for example, at the number of solid works of reference on the shelves of your local library. It cannot be said that they are all perfectly accurate in all things. But they will be amended if proved to be in error.
Overall, humans have collectively assembled and cross-checked a huge and ever-accumulating stock of global knowledge. It stretches to the state of the great macro-cosmos, as well as to the micro-cosmos of sub-atomic quantum physics. Humans have also learned a lot about the psychology as well as the physiology of the self-styled ‘learned ape’ or ‘homo sapiens’. We are an inventive and tricky species. Together we can do great things. The message is therefore ‘Never despair!’
Trust is important. Humans have done many great things together, and we have much yet to do. Yet trust should never be blind. We have to constantly tell the difference between ‘polite lies’ and gross deception. So the message is: ‘Keep your eyes open! Combine a degree of trust with sustained vigilance! Be prepared to check and then to double-check! Don’t just walk and talk in circles with those who always agree with you!’
Vigilance – accompanied with open and reasoned debate – is a response that we owe to all our tricky but inventive fellow humans.
Oh, and is it ok to say ‘Good morning!’ even on a cold, damp and drizzling day? Yes it is! Humans can, if we try hard enough, tell the difference between conventional courtesies and conscious deception.
For more on these themes, see Penelope J. Corfield, Time-Space: We Are All in it Together (Austin Macauley: London, 2025), esp. chapter 11 Coping with Deception; chapter 12 Generating Shared Memory Markers.
