March 1963
Sunday Evening Assembly [LYING]
Both those readings were concerned with truth and falsehood. In both of them the word 'lie' was mentioned. Earlier in the term I spoke about moral courage, and this problem of being able to tell the truth is very closely bound up with moral courage. Now in education, in living with young people, what one hopes will happen will be that they will so grow up whole, that one will not need to talk about telling the truth, because having moral courage and telling the truth will come naturally out of them. But that would be to be a perfectionist – we have to talk about it sometimes and I am talking about it tonight, because it is a continual problem in this and perhaps any other school.
Why do people tell lies? You have probably – every one of you – told lies during your time in the school, some more than others. Ask yourself in the next five seconds why you tell lies…. Did you decide during those five seconds that it was out of fear: It might have been fear of punishment, because to admit having done a thing may land you in having to give up a privilege or endure a punishment. Did it occur to any of you in those five seconds to use the word 'guilt'? That 'guilt' stood in the way of admitting what you had done? Did you think that to admit your fault was to let yourself down in your own eyes, in the eyes of somebody you respect, or in the eyes of the community?
Now what is the effect of lying? Now this is the most worrying thing of all. If lying were just like other faults that showed themselves at times and then disappeared leaving no trace; for to break a window is a thing like that – you can break a window in a moment of aggressiveness or stupidity or activity, get it repaired and the thing's done with and finished with for good and all! But not so with lying – it leaves an effect far beyond simple destruction. The effect of his own lying on a person who lies is to shut him off; there are very few actions in life that can so completely shut you off from the person to whom you lie. It shuts you off more than to strike a person; it shuts you off more than to express a momentary hatred; it shuts you off more, sometimes, even than bitter words, because when we strike a person, when we are bitter, when we show hatred, most often we try to put it right afterwards, but people find it very difficult indeed to put lying right afterwards – it has made such a great barrier between themselves and the person to whom they lied. And though often lying results from guilt, the very act of lying makes the guilt deeper: you would get rid of your guilt if you admitted it, but having lied you drive the guilt deeper and therefore, as guilt always does, you are cut off the more from your fellow human beings.
The effect of lying on a community too – on people who have to work together – can be quite disastrous. Now, in the history of this school, there have been many adults who have worked with us and come and gone and, as in any other community, there have been some adults who were not honest. That is true of every business: every crowd of human beings who have ever worked together for any purpose, and I can't tell you how terrible it is when you find that the people with whom you work – perhaps one among them – doesn't tell the truth. It makes one's heart sink into one's very boots: the situation seems utterly hopeless because you just don't know where you are. For a person to be angry with one, to criticise one – one can accept that and carry on – but not to know how the truth stands between you and someone you work with is terrible.
I have shown to you that it is worse than other forms of misbehaviour because other forms of misbehaviour can be got over; we can all accept naughtiness. And naughtiness, when it is admitted, binds people together. That may seem to you strange, but the ways in which we upset each other and annoy each other and do bad things – they can always be made a bond of affection when they are admitted. Many a child has known when he has done something frightfully naughty and he has admitted it to his father or mother in a fit of crying, that the love between the parent and the child is greater than it was before, because the act of admitting brings the people very close together indeed; they become fellow human beings – they are no longer the authoritative parent and erring child – they're people who love each other and can get over their troubles by their love.
So it's not surprising, you see, that that story is repeated in the acts of the two people who joined the Church and then did only half of what others had done; and you see it was pointed out to them by the apostles: “Look here, this was all your own – all the money was your own, you sold the estate: the estate was yours, and the money was yours, you needn't have given us a penny of it. Why then did you only give us half of it? You were coming into the church: you were pretending you were whole-hearted and you were only half-hearted; you were lying to the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit was the thought, the feeling, the life that bound the young Church together in oneness of heart, and if people came in in a hypocritical mood, only half-hearted and pretending to be whole-hearted, they were putting something rotten into the very foundation of the Church, and nothing could be worse than that.” And so according to the story, death was their punishment; they dropped dead. Now it doesn't matter so much whether the story is exactly true, whether they did in fact drop dead: the important thing was that as a result of their action they were spiritually dead – the life had gone out of them; their membership of the Church was meaningless because they were making a pretence of their giving.
Now let's have a look at the truth. In the first reading – in fact I almost read it just for those four words – The Truth shall make you Free. That is one of the most important statements made in the whole of history, and when people laugh at the Bible and say it no longer applies, they forget that in the Bible – scattered from end to end of it – are these truths that are always true and always will be true of mankind, and that T he Truth shall make you Free is one of these profound truths. We are set free to do things by knowing the truth. Take a very simple example. You want to make an engine. In order to make an engine you have got to know the truth about steel, about cast-iron, about aluminium, about aluminium alloys, about phospher-bronze: if you don't know the truth about them, if you don't know how much they expand for every degree centigrade they go up, if you don't know how much strain each one of those will stand, how much rubbing wear each will stand, how much lubrication they require, your engine will be a wreck within an hour of first starting it. In other words if you don't know the truth about these you are not free to make or have an engine. And the same is true of all the things we do in life: we cannot do anything effectively – in other words we are not free to do what we want to do unless we have the knowledge of the truth about all the material we are working with.
Now most of the materials we work with really, you know, is human beings. We do spend a lot of our time making engines, and roads, and crockery, and tables and chairs, and buildings, but everything depends finally on our ability to work with each other: to put it roughly and very poorly, our ability to work with human material. And we have to know the truth about ourselves because our own self is the first bit of material we have got to work with; we've got to know the truth about our own particular selves if we are free to be ourselves. If you think you are somebody different from what you are you are not free to be yourself. If you think that you're a man of tremendous power when in fact you are only a person of moderate ability, you will never be able even to use your moderate ability, because you don't know the truth about yourself. And we have to know the truth about each other and so we have to be open-hearted to each other. You can't work really effectively at any deep level with a person who won't let you know him, but if the person you work with allows you to know him, then you can work with him, you can co-operate, you are free to do the job you are trying to do. If a person pretends to have a great deal of knowledge when he comes to you for a job, and you take that for granted and accept him and then you discover that he is going about with a swelled head all the time and really doesn't know his stuff, you're not free to work with him and he is not free to work with you but if be came to you saying “Look, I don't know very much, but I do know this and this and that” and it's true, then at least at some kind of level you can work together.
So we have to admit the truth about ourselves to ourselves and to other people, even though it may be very hard. It's very hard to know the truth about ourselves and we nearly always need help about it. One of the good things about marriage is that it gives you a tremendous amount of help in knowing the truth about yourself; to be able to live with someone who can lovingly tell you when you are wrong is a most important and valuable experience – perhaps the most important and most valuable of all, because if you don't know when you are wrong you will always make mistakes.
Now the same could be true of friendships in a school. If you trust each other enough to be able to take each other's criticism and say: Well, so-and-so has said of me that I was mean on that occasion – perhaps he's right, perhaps he's right. If you can accept things in humility about yourself like that you will stop being mean because you will know that there is that particular danger, and what we have tried to prevent here is the development of any kind of human 'type' and kind of 'formal' behaviour becoming a 'Wennington pattern' – whatever that might be – that might stand between one person and another in knowing what you really are like. We don't want false faces. And of course what stands so much in the way of knowing the truth about ourselves and admitting it is pride. You think you will let yourself down if you accept the truth about yourself; you don't - you raise yourself up. Fear, prejudice and hypocrisy are the enemies of truth. Being afraid of what will happen; being stuck in your attitudes so that you can't accept anything new, or pretending to be something that you aren't.
I want to tell you a story of a boy I once dealt with who lied and lied and lied after having stolen. At the school I was then teaching some of my books began to disappear. I couldn't understand why they were disappearing – they were disappearing from the laboratory where I kept all the science books. One day I was going through the school library and I saw a pile of books standing by a pile of exercise books, and they were science books. They weren't the ones that I had missed: they belonged to the school library. I just went idly to the books and opened the cover, and I was puzzled because the fly-leaf seemed to be stuck down to the cover, and then I looked through the four books underneath and I found that the fly-leaf of all four books was stuck down to the cover. You know what I mean by the fly-leaf; it's the first page inside the book – here; that had been stuck down on there very neatly but there was just a corner lifted up, so that I could see that it had been stuck down, and there was a patch in the middle that seemed raised. I took the books away and moistened the fly-leaf, and the fly-leaf lifted up and on the cover itself was the ex libris badge of the school stuck on the cover. Incidentally, on the fly-leaf that had been stuck down was the boy's name. He had taken books from the library, he had stuck the fly leaf down to cover the ex libris and he had put his name on them. I began to be worried and talked to him about this, and at first he denied any knowledge of it at all, until I had brought the books out and I showed him what I had done; how I had soaked the fly-leaf of one of the books, lifted it up and there was the school library mark! And then he confessed, of course, confronted with the evidence, to having done this to these five books. Then I said, “Well, look, I've got a whole lot of books missing from my own laboratory library, have you had anything to do with those?” “No, no, no, I wouldn't do that.” I pressed him and pressed him, but no, he wouldn't admit anything more, so I said: “All right, you can go.” and so he went.
During the next two or three days I did some investigations. He was a sixth former. I went to his drawer in the sixth form room; I found all his ordinary possessions on evidence when I pulled the drawer open and I lifted a few of them, and underneath there were books, and I took those books out – many of them were mine, from my laboratory library – so I took out the whole drawer full of books, I took them down to the lab. And I summoned the boy again. I said “Look, I found all these in your drawers. “Oh, somebody must have put them there!” He denied it vigorously for the next 20 minutes or half-hour, until in the end he broke down and confessed that he had taken those too. I said “Now, you have taken an awful lot – there is about 20 or 30 – are you quite sure you have told me about all of them?” “Oh yes, quite sure. Look, I have had to admit so much that if there were any more, good heavens! No, I wouldn't be afraid, I mean, look at it.” There were piles of them all over my bench you see. I said “All right, you can go.” and he went. The next two or three days I made some further investigations. I found a drawer in the prefects' room in the sixth form room that was not a drawer claimed by any particular person; again there seemed to be a lot of rubbish in it. I lifted up the rubbish and there were still more books. Having collected these books I went through the same performance again and he admitted to these because there was just no escape from it; the logic was obvious, but he said “Now, I really have told you about everything.” “Are you absolutely certain?” Yes, he had told me about everything. I said “All right, you can go.” and he went. But I was still uneasy. I went further into the sixth form room – I penetrated into odd dusty corners of the school, and in an odd dusty corner of the school I found a packing case, and I opened the packing case and there were 40 or 50 books from the school library – the total came to about 200 altogether. The boy broke down completely when I faced him with this and I was certain then that he had told the truth; he was so utterly humiliated and defeated.
Now, you can see a whole lot in this story and there is more in it still, because I wanted to discover why it was that he chose only one kind of book – the books were all scientific or technical books – every one of them. He was a boy of not much ability – he had been by-passed in promotion through the school; he had eventually arrived at the sixth form without having any of what we would now call the Ordinary level subjects except perhaps one or two. And I investigated his family. He had had a brother at the same school many years previously; his brother had done brilliantly, had gone to the university and got a 1st class honours degree in science. And I began to get a glimpse of this boy's condition. He was humiliated by the brilliance of his brother. His brother was brilliant in science. Now this boy had no ability in science at all, but he had ability in other things. Now what he was doing was filling every available thing that he had got with science books instead of putting science into his head, which wouldn't hold it! He was trying to impress himself by having a lot of learning around him in the form of books, which he was going to take home during the holidays and fill the shelves of his room at home with them. He had not faced the problem of what his parents would think when 200 science books turned up unannounced in his school luggage.
But you see the extent to which that boy and lied and lied to himself; he couldn't bear the thought of his own incompetence, his lack of intelligence, and so he lied to himself by collecting science books and thinking that that made him learned; and it didn't. We got him through this trouble; he accepted, freely, in the end the interpretation that we put on his actions. He didn't steal again and he did do quite well in his subsequent career, which was not a very learned one if I remember rightly, but a very useful one in which he did have competence.
But there you see how he was shutting himself off from me – the one person who could help him – he was shutting himself off from me by continuous lying. He was pretending that the books were his by covering up the school badge, by binding down the fly-leaf and putting his name on it – persuading himself of something that wasn't true; and he was trying to persuade himself that he was an intelligent person when he wasn't. And when he was relieved of all these falsehoods, then he had a chance to grow up and he did grow.
Now we all have difficulties when we say things, of getting people to accept that they are true. I'm in that kind of difficulty at the moment; it's very difficult for people to face the truth in the world, to accept the truth in a way that will enable us to go forward in any direction at all. The broadcast that I gave with Dr. Bidder last Sunday night has been accepted in a true way by many papers, but accepted in others by an absolutely untrue way: people find it very difficult to accept a thing, even on its face value, if they are deeply prejudiced against it and afraid of it. Surprisingly the “Daily Mail” - a newspaper for which I have never had any respect hitherto - was almost the most truthful; certainly the reviewer there was to the heart of what we were trying to do, and the “Church Times”, which you might expect to be the most reliable, was in face the one which gave the most false, and almost deliberately false impression, extracting a quarter of the truth, leaving the other three-quarters unmentioned, so that that quarter of the truth seemed to be the opposite of what we intended.
Now that's another way of falsifying things – to take a little bit of what somebody else has said and forget the other three-quarters of what went with it. I wonder if I can think of some way in which I can very simply illustrate this. Oh, this! Suppose you were to say “Electricity will burn your house down if you have wires which are too thin to carry the current and you replace burnt out fuses with hair pins.” Now that would be an absolutely true statement. But suppose that were repeated by somebody else who was afraid of electricity, just in the form “Electricity will burn your house down.” Now that just isn't true! By leaving out a part of the statement you make the remainder of the statement untrue. Now watch yourselves for that kind of thing. When you repeat to a third person what one person has said to you be careful that you don't just snip a bit out of what that person said and pass it on in such a way as to represent that person as telling something untrue or put that person in a bad light. Now that's what newspapers are doing all the time, and those of us who dare to open our mouths in public have to suffer that particular form of persecution. But don't let's get too far away from the school, because the habit of truth is something that has to be learnt now and it has to be learnt not so much as a habit but as the result of taking courage.
In the first days of the school, when we were small – perhaps 25 people – and when we were all gathered together shocked by the onset of war, and death and suffering reaching our own land, in those days we had no trouble with untruthfulness or with even stealing. We had many troubles with other things but not with untruthfulness and not with stealing, and I remember that it was at about the end of the second year that the first act of stealing occurred. We'd never had a single penny reported as having been stolen while the school varied in numbers from about 10 to about 40, and then one day half-a-crown was missing, and I gathered the school together and said “Who stole that half-a-crown?” And I remember the boy to this day – his name was Julian Fuller – and he put his hand up and said “I did.”
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 35