Lies All Lies (Pt 2)

Ever since I was a kid, I had honed my craft of lying without actually lying. Yeah, I liked to disobey my parents often, and I hated punishments worse, so I began to find ways of bending the truth, or misdirection. That way I could get away with stuff without having to repent my sins to Jesus. Lying was always a last resort for me. As I became good at evasion, I was able to analyze very quickly the different ways to present the truth, and judge its efficacy in satisfying the question. But if I was unable to come up with something within 5 or 6 seconds, then I had no choice but to lie. You see, with any hesitation or pause, it already means you’re making something up. So the quicker the response, the more truthful it seems (even if it’s not.) Knowing this, if I couldn’t think of anything good within those 5 seconds, I had to make a decision to lie, there’s no backing down. And remember the rules for lies. Keep it short. No, yes, I don’t know.

So what are some tricks to bend the truth? Well, I’m not going to show you ALL my tricks, lest you use them against me. I can’t have that. But I will give you a couple and you can take it from there. My first trick I’m going to share doesn’t even involve your mouth. It involves your eyes. As I had learned from television (See? And you thought TV is a waste of time! Actually, today’s shows offer more information than ever before. Especially psychological or crime dramas, they like to throw out statistics and actual interrogation methods to make the series seem more real. A smart person would do well to write these things down.), before you open your mouth, you have to absolutely -- make a conscious effort now -- to look the person in the eyes. When people lie, they feel ashamed or guilty, so often they can’t look at the person, hence the phrase, "can’t look them in the eye". If you want your lie, or trick or whatever, to succeed, you gotta stare straight at their peepers. And you have to concentrate looking at their pupils. Don’t ever shift your eyes to their ears, and don’t look up or down. Stare into their eyes, note the color of their irises, how big their pupils are (Actually, a good benefit of staring into their eyes is you can tell right away whether your trick is working or not. When you see their eyes narrow or their pupils narrow, that's a red Alert! Shields up! Evasive Maneuvers!). Also, don’t stare at their bridge of their nose. You may think that you’re looking into their eyes, but they can tell you’re not. Choose one eye first, I like to start with their right eye. Then while talking, if I’m bored at looking at the right, I’ll shift to the left. But whatever I do, I never look away, not even for a nanosecond. Now this seems easy, but it’s a hard skill to master.

Second trick I like to use is to let the other person’s imagination fill in the blanks for me. It’s said, that people only hear and remember about 20% of a given conversation anyway. Try to be vague, and have holes in your story, and if you’ve been staring at them, they will want to believe you and their own mind will fill in the rest of the blanks. In effect, you are having them lie for you. I’m not sure who’s guilty in this case. It’s best for me not to dwell on that too much. But the key to this trick is how vague to make it. It’s a very fine line to walk. You have to be vague enough with the important details that you aren’t lying, and yet not be so vague that it makes it look like you’re hiding something. Once you crossed that line of appearing to be hiding something, immediately they’ll become suspicious, and they won’t be helping you lie anymore. Instead, they’re going to start grilling you and not really believing everything you say. After that, you’re screwed. Either fess up or tell a straight lie, because one thing you can never do is make someone unsuspicious. You may swear to Heaven, God, your mom’s grave, their mom's grave, it’s not going to work. They won’t be satisfied until you give them a direct answer. Your wiggle room is gone, so to speak.