24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Post 7

For Read-a-Thon information, see The Hidden Side of a Leaf. For my own Read-a-Thon posts, see the deblog's Read-a-Thon category archive.

Currently reading: Peter Sagal, The Book of Vice: Naughty Things (And How to Do Them)

Pages read: 31 (since last post) | 188 (total for Read-a-Thon)
Time spent reading: 31 (since last post) | 3:05 (total for Read-a-Thon)

Thoughts: Sagal devotes chapter four to the subject of lying, with sections on Holocaust deniers and President Clinton and explicit directions on how one might go about convincing people that Massachusetts doesn't exist. ("You tell compelling stories about how you were heading north on I-95 in Connecticut, and the next thing you knew, you were in Vermont.") Being able to tell a lie convincingly is a powerful tool, because people on the whole expect other people to be telling the truth:

"People are bound by certain rules of conduct, always unspoken, sometimes never even consciously enumerated. Among these rules is that everybody will, more or less, tell the truth, with generous allowances made for subjectivity. Anyone willing to break that unspoken compact has an immediate and powerful advantage, in the same way that anyone playing soccer would have a tremendous advantage if he were just to pick up the damn ball."

By way of illustrating the social compact, Sagal writes about the lengths a husband and wife might go to to avoid doing the dishes. They may stretch the truth in claiming that exhaustion or unpleasantly wrinkled skin prevent them from accomplishing the task, but they are unlikely to beg off the chore by claiming, for example, that they have Huntington's disease.

I love this book.