Today moral philosophers and legal thinkers make room for a wide range of falsehood, from kind fibs (“you’ve lost weight!” or “I love what you’ve done with your hair!”) to injurious criminal deceit—identity theft, for example, or pyramid schemes. Psychologists and psychotherapists for their part recognize a sliding scale of lying from the routine and mostly inconsequential (“I’m on my way” and “the check is in the mail”) to manipulative gaslighting and aversive racism.
More pernicious liars deceive deliberately. Internet scammers and phone swindlers know what they are doing as they cheat the unwary.
But others lie reflexively and compulsively. Such compulsive liars are most puzzling because they lie even when the lie reverberates to their disadvantage and when their lies are easily discoverable.
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
And this brings us to the infamous George Santos, the United States Representative whose brief, ill-starred tenure in Congress ended unusually when his exasperated colleagues engineered his expulsion.
His story was not the strangest story to come out of 2023, a very strange year, in many ways a culmination of the last seven. But Santos’ record was surely the most entertaining. (Entertaining for the moment if we can put aside the insult to his office.)
His infamy seems already to be waning as late-night comedians have moved on to other subjects and returned to others that keep on giving: the multiplying legal woes of an ex-President and his advisors, for example.
Santos’ list of fabrications, however, is so long, ingenious, persistent, brazen, and blithe that it merits some further........