The Believer - Adam Baer and Clancy Martin on Love and Lying

6/14/2016 The Believer Logger - “Aren’t I Making All This Up?” — “Aren’t I Making All This Up?”
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“AREN’T I MAKING ALL THIS UP?”
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Photograph by Greg Martin
Adam Baer in Conversation with Clancy Martin
The following is a conversation that I had with writer
and philosophy professor Clancy Martin, whose new
book is Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit,
and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love. Martin has also
worked in the jewelry business and written fiction. His
first novel, How to Sell, details the schemes of shady
diamond guys—and Martin’s no stranger to confidence
scams. But he gets confessional in Love and Lies,
combining philosophy with stories about his romantic
life, and it’s his contention that one must lie in order to
carry on a successful relationship. Don’t lie to yourself as
you consider the truthfulness of the discussion below,

and see Martin speak in a few YouTube videos that he
has provided us to prove that he is indeed someone who
has been recorded while giving philosophical
discussions.
—Adam Baer
I. TELLING THE TRUTH BUT TELLING IT SLANT
ADAM BAER: Let me start the conversation with a lie
and say that I don’t believe in being truthful with your
loved ones.
CLANCY MARTIN: You have to take the risk of being
truthful with people you love. But always examine your
motivations. Are you seeking the good for that person
when you speak the truth? Or are you just clearing your
conscience? Are you using truth as a weapon? Truth can
hurt just as much as a lie—sometimes more.
AB: My loved ones generally say I’m a bad liar. They even
know that I crack up when I’m telling the truth in a
situation that would cause others to expect a lie.
CM: Well, you’re probably a much better liar than you
think, Adam. Nietzsche writes that “lying to others,
relatively speaking, is an exceptional event. We most
often lie, and we learn to lie, by lying to ourselves.” So
very often when we think we are being sincere, or
speaking the truth, we may have already engaged in a
prior convenient self-deception.
I think we must be very attuned to our own thoughts and
feelings before we can feel confident that we are speaking
truthfully—especially when it comes to matters of love.
Sometimes, in order to care for a beloved, you might need
to lie. I might ask you to lie to me to tell me what I need to
hear.
AB: Seems like I should be careful. I’m not fact-checking
your philosophy quotes.

CM: Put any two people in conversation for ten minutes
and they will lie two or three times.
AB: Okay, but I’m not saying that I trust people most of
the time. Just that I trust myself to be honest, even about
not being truthful. I think most lying today happens when
people choose not to respond to others. The “if you don’t
have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” thing
is kicking ass in 2015. Look at Twitter.
CM: Stendhal said, “It is a matter of almost instinctive
faith with me that when any great man speaks, he lies.
And most especially when he writes.” Plato also thought
all artists were liars. So be careful.
AB: Remember, though, that the people presenting this
conversation are Believers, and I’m supposed to be one of
them with respect to the cultural work/art that I make
and endorse.
CM: I believe you are a natural bare-knuckler. But that’s
because I’ve read some of your edits on my own work, and
you were tough. People should be Believers! Life stripped
of belief is not much fun. Lonely, sickly, scary facts.
AB: Okay here I agree with you, in part. Facts are all of
those things. But apart from writing nonfiction as well as
the made-up, shouldn’t we stick to facts in life most of the
time so that we have a generally clear idea of what’s going
on around us?
CM: Then why do I spend so much time reading novels?
Watching movies? Writing fiction? I like the imagination
much better than much of the “factual” world. And I think
a lot of where we love—and what we love—is in the
imagination. When you’re falling in love, have you ever
stopped yourself and asked: wait, aren’t I making this all
up?
AB: I’m not sure. And that’s where memory comes into
play. I haven’t fallen in love with someone in over ten
years. Now, I have a wife, and sometimes she tests people
for Alzheimer’s. Her work has taught me that I better be

honest about what I don’t remember. On the other hand,
what do you think about that oddly brilliant George
Constanza line from Seinfeld? “It’s not a lie… if you
believe it.”
CM: Memory—and how we misremember—is so
important to how we construe “the truth.” People accuse
each other of lying—lovers accuse each other—simply
because they remember things differently. And yet both
people feel absolutely certain that they remember “the
facts.” Insisting on “the truth” as the highest good in
communication is deeply confused. And that’s just the
start.
AB: We all have our impressions of so-called reality. But
you’re a philosophy professor (it seems, according both to
facts and your ability to quote Nietzsche on the fly), and
I’m curious about how philosophers have or have not
been honest in their work. Maybe Nietzsche didn’t believe
a word of his writing and was just trying to win some hot
groupies.
CM: Now you’re just trying too hard to be funny for the
sake of this interview (a lie). As you know, Nietzsche was
incredibly bad at getting girls, and at getting published,
and didn’t get famous until after he no longer knew what
was going on around him. He also said: “The philosophy
of every great thinker thus far has been the more or less
unconscious autobiography of its author.” My point: when
we are talking about our truths, subjective experience, we
must be much more nuanced than when we are talking
about facts like “the apple is on the table” or truths like
7+5=12. Have you told a lie to someone you loved?
AB: Sure. I’ve told people that I’m feeling fine when I’m
not. I’ve told people not to worry. I’ve told people their
interviews will be great. I’ve told a deadbeat roommate
that I’m sure his girlfriend still likes him. And now I must
admit that I began this conversation with a lie about a lie
(by telling you, “I don’t believe in being truthful with your
loved ones.”). Just so you could put me in an antagonist
position and respond with passion about your book’s
subject. At least for a bit. I hope you don’t view this as me
using lying as a weapon.

CM: Hardly. Dietrich Bonhoeffer discussed a concept he
called “the living truth.” What he meant by this is that we
often have psychological barriers to hearing certain kinds
of meaning—he found this idea in Kierkegaard’s notion of
indirect communication. Sometimes we need to “tell the
truth / but tell it slant” as Emily Dickinson says. That’s
how we get through to each other.
You might say that’s lying—or you might say it’s a more
effective and imaginative way of communicating. And
once you recognize that we can “believe before we lie,” as
you say, then you really have to rethink the ideal of
sincerity. And honesty.
AB: What if we spend too much time thinking about that,
though? What if we’re self-conscious to a fault? I’m a big
believer in going out of my way, especially in this age of
texts and emails and Snapchats, to make sure that people
understand my tone. I can never ensure that they will, but
I’m not sure that it’s always necessary. I may be wasting
my time. People may still infer something else than I
intended. I may care too much.
CM: I suspect that most of us are egregiously careless
communicators. We don’t spend nearly enough time
thinking about what, why, and how we say what we do.
II. BETWEEN THE EXTREMES OF EXCESS AND
DEFICIENCY
AB: What about the unsaid? My wife calls me “the
antenna” because I often I seem to hear that.
CM: I think the first question to address all of this is: how
carefully am I listening (with or without an antenna into
the unknown)? Am I giving that cared-for person—we’re
talking about love, now—that kind of room they need in
order to be able to talk? Some people, like Thich Nhat
Hanh, call this “deep listening,” and I think it’s a useful
idea.
AB: That and knowing that we tend to overlay our
perspectives onto whatever we’re hearing—and it’s our

job to do our best to dig beneath that top level. Scratch off
the scabs.
CM: Yes. This idea of “perspective” is crucial, too—that’s
why real communication is a lifetime’s project, in all of
our love relationships. If we could simply tell the truth all
the time that would make it very easy. But that’s just not
the way love works. Yet when we’re scared or upset we
default to, “But You Lied To Me!” As though we’ve never
told a lie. And this kind of hypocrisy can be very, very
damaging in love relationships. Parents do it to their kids
all the time.
AB: And sometimes to their adult children. Sometimes to
conceal that they’re angry about the fact that when you
visit them you plan to stay with your in-laws instead of
sleeping on trundle beds in the room where you grew up.
Although, to be honest, I don’t know parents who aren’t
truthful about their feelings on such issues.
CM: Aristotle argued that the “arete" or virtue of any
activity lay between the extremes of excess and deficiency.
You can eat too much or too little. Work too much or too
little. Sleep too much or too little. Be foolhardy or
cowardly. Similarly, I think, you can tell the truth too
much or too little. Lie too much… or too little.
AB: Okay, then, what do you think about being a
“skeptic” in the vein of the stellar philosopher Sextus
Empiricus. I remember this much. He wrote: “Skepticism
relieved two terrible diseases that afflicted mankind:
anxiety and dogmatism.” My worry is that approaching
love and marriage with this philosophical operating
system will increase communication problems and
possibly lead me to think that the people I love are lying
to me all the time. OK, maybe not. But I worry about the
suspension of disbelief on intimate matters, e.g., my
honest marriage.
CM: I think you might interpret Sextus slightly
differently there. He is one of my favorite thinkers, and I
think he is exactly right: we must suspend belief—in
terms of certainty—and open our minds to the possibility
of doubt. But doubt needn’t be a fearful condition: on the

contrary. It is misguided certainty that creates fear and
anxiety. Skepsis means “to search”: Sextus always insists
that the good skeptic goes on searching. So for me this is
like The Cure: “I don’t care if Monday’s blue / Tuesday’s
gray and Wednesday too / Thursday I don’t care about
you / it’s Friday, I’m in love.”
Best song ever written about marriage. Your commitment
is to the search together, the going forward with the
project of loving, even though you will never, in one
sense, settle “the fact” of your love. Life and love simply
aren’t certain in that way. But they don’t have to be. And
we get scared and confused when we insist they should
be. That’s why all of this dogmatic insistence on “the
truth” is so misguided.
III. THE TRUE AND THE GOOD
AB: There’s a lot of lying in philosophical circles. I
assume this has less to do with getting tenure than I
think?
CM: Aristotle was the first Ancient to call Socrates a liar,
and then it became a very popular claim. Because of his
irony—another form of indirect communication. And I
always feel like, well, if Jesus spoke in parables, and
Socrates was a liar, well, we’re in pretty good company.
Aren’t the most dangerous liars always the ones who
insist that they know the truth?
AB: I think the most dangerous liars are the ones who
insist that they always know the truth, have access to
terrorist groups, and then set your house on fire. But as I
am accustomed to not-knowing, I see where you were
headed there. Would you mind being called a liar?
CM: What I find fascinating is that everyone hates being
called a liar, despite the fact that everyone does it. That
deep cognitive dissonance is something we should worry
about. That should show us that we aren’t being honest
with ourselves, that the emperor has no clothes.
AB: But what about the people who are lied to? We want

to think of ourselves as sensitive souls who don’t hurt
others, but if we’re always lying than how can we know if
we’re not? And then isn’t it incredibly difficult to repair a
relationship with someone who feels deceived?
CM: If people were more honest about their lying, I think
a lot of grand, collective, truly dangerous lies would be
less widely accepted, less easily accepted, more carefully
scrutinized.
AB: For example…
CM: Let’s take the case of the “lied to.” First, we aren’t
always lying…we’ll try not to exaggerate. We are
sometimes lying, and when we are lying, we should
examine our motives. Now let’s suppose you’ve been lied
to and you find out you’ve been lied to. Once my mother
lied to me when I was in terrible pain—it was a real
whopper—she said: “Life gets easier, Clance. This is the
hardest part.” Now that was total b.s., and she knew it.
But it was a lie I needed to hear then, and her motivations
were very good.
Now if the “lied to” discovers a lie that has merely served
the interest of the liar, of course he will feel hurt and
betrayed. As well he should. But he might feel just as hurt
and betrayed by being told an inappropriate, cruelly
motivated truth. The True and the Good are not the same
thing.
AB: Sure, but that’s parenting. It’s also sometimes
growing up. It’s the rare child who doesn’t instinctively
learn that it’s his or her role to lie back, perhaps in one
smile, and say to the desperate parent, “Oh, good, I knew
the universe was kind and life will be pure pleasure.
Thank you for confirming my dream world.”
CM: We expect our children to lie to us all the time. We
teach them to lie to us. And it’s the same in our other love
relationships. There’s a wonderful passage in Robert
Trivers’ terrific book about lying when he says, "I
suddenly realized, in my marriage, that my wife was
storing up my lies for future use.” Isn’t that great?

Very, very often, we know we are being lied to, and
sometimes we want it and participate in it, and
sometimes we use it for our own duplicitous ends, and
sometimes those ends are unkind, but sometimes they
may be very desirable ends. This is again why we should
consider self-deception, because we do exactly the same
thing with ourselves. We can either do it with open-eyes—
try to be honest with ourselves, so we don’t get hopelessly
confused—or we can be hypocritical and pretend it’s not
happening and then often create judgmental, intolerant,
destructive situations and relationships.
AB: But here’s what I’m most interested in: the fact that
the people who are lied to often know that and respond
with lies. It’s not just a childhood game with your parent.
It’s like we’re all just rolling ourselves up in endless layers
of wool army blankets. Anything to know the truth. But at
a certain point we have to get real with each other. And
that is about good, about caring. I want my wife to really
know the “darkness within,” as she and I like to playfully
say. When a very close loved one dies, people often are
saddest when they feel that the person was one of the few
who “really knew” them. I want my wife to really know me
—bad truths and good lies, and everything in between.
She says that she wants that, too…
CM: Okay, you’re right, intimacy. Truth and intimacy—
sharing the scary parts—that is very important. You have
to be willing to risk saying things that are scary for you to
confess while respecting the fact that you must try not to
harm the person you love, so we should never say that the
truth doesn’t matter—of course it does.
AB: If you’re not trying to harm the person you love, why
even try a relationship?
CM: Proust says, “And by love I mean: reciprocal
torture.” I think Proust is wrong. I think Sextus Empiricus
is right. Love is a venture. It’s a risk. But you know, it’s
worth it. We could all just be Buddhist monks, and it
might be easier. But we’d still be in love relationships.
Just different sorts. And I think marriage, the daily choice
to love this person in a particularly intimate way, as
difficult as it can be, just makes your life much richer.
Like having kids. They aren’t easy. But they really enrich

your life. It’s been my experience—at the end of the day,
when it comes to love, we have to fall back on personal
experience, we should do so—that being in love is simply
much more fun than living alone. Even though it’s also
more work. But I feel the same way about writing, and
teaching, and meditating, and all of the things that matter
to me. Hard work but more fun.
AB: Okay, have we beat love and lying to death yet?
CM: Well, the straight dope is that my wife is yelling for
my attention at the moment, so I am called by a higher
power.
AB: Thank you for being honest. By all means, go.
Clancy Martin- Deceptive Seduction
Clancy Martin- Lite-Brite Lies

Clancy Martin- The Illusion of Love
Adam Baer is a writer in Los Angeles who has
contributed to The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone,
Harper’s, and other publications.
Permalink | 17 Notes | Twitter | Facebook
#INTERVIEW #CLANCY MARTIN #ADAM BAER
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The Believer - Adam Baer and Clancy Martin on Love and Lying