Thank you for your honesty.
Never have I ever...
Yes, I watched "The Moment of Truth" (and so can you). That "repetitive and irritating" (Boston Globe), "abhorrent, asinine" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) show. Partly to see what kind of person would do this - as the LA Times noted, a completely shameless or a completely blameless person would do really well in this, but they'd never pass the audition. But partly because for all its repetitiveness and overblown dramatics the show succeeded effortlessly in making me identify with the protagonist - as an absorbing book or a movie would do. I tried the questions out. "Did you ever go through someone else's things when they were not there?" "Did you ever hit someone's car and left without leaving a note?" Then tried changing the ones that don't directly apply. "Did you ever have sexual fantasies during mass?" - at a synagogue? an interview? a math lecture? "Do you think you are better looking then your friends?" - smarter? cooler? more honest? And then tried to imagine what my friends and relatives would say.
Sometimes I'd get off easy for one reason or another ("Are you a member of the "Hair Club for Men?", "Do you delay having children because you are not sure that your wife is going to be your lifelong partner?"). Sometimes I could safely say "No" to a question and almost hear an internal "whew!" of relief. But then sometimes I couldn't. The show serves simultaneously as a source of very rare information about others and a force for self examination. Before watching I almost thought I would be one of the "blameless". Now I'm not so sure (though I should note that there is a difference between saying "yes" to what the show writers would think an embarrassing question and actually being embarrassed about it).
The truth shall set you free.
At one point a friend asked a contestant's wife "Is it worth a hundred thousand dollars to hear this?" I, too, would like to know. How much is it worth to be paid to know that your husband thinks you will not stay married? What about to know that he has a lover? How much would you pay a private eye to find out?
The show does not put a price tag on information, it puts one on embarrassment. The knowledge you'd pay to gain privately is often the same knowledge you'd pay to keep private. As a result we get not a market of truth, but of shame. Here shamelessness, not truthfulness, is turned if not yet into a virtue, then certainly into profit.
Shame is a social structure for enforcing honesty. For a moral person lying is to be avoided, as is crime. Yet we impose shame, just as we impose our criminal system, to reinforce the weak moral fiber and bend more people into honesty and obedience to law. Lying, however is generally a much smaller transgression and shame is a correspondingly softer penal mechanism. It has to be, for we lie all the time.
In his New York Times article (included in the "Best American Science Writing 2007) "Looking for the Lie" Robin Marantz Henig cites a the following study. A group of people were asked to keep a diary of their social interactions. The subjects averaged 1.5 lies a day. These are self-reported and, judging from the samples given, factual lies like "Lied about where I had been," or "Said that I did not have change for a dollar," as opposed to lies of opinion as "I like your new jacket" or "That was a good dinner" could be. I can only speculate what number of daily lies a tabulation by an impartial and omniscient observer would produce. Lies are the lubricant of social interaction. Remove them and it would grind to a halt.
Or would it?
This is certainly the position that Henig takes. He writes that if a truly efficient lie detector could be developed, we might find ourselves living in "a fundamentally different world than the one we live in today" and then that "this would be a problem. As the great physician-essayist Lewis Thomas once wrote, a foolproof lie-detection device would turn our quotidian lives upside down: "Before long, we would stop speaking to each other, television would be abolished as a habitual felon, politicians would be confined by house arrest and civilization would come to a standstill."
The article's last sentence sums it up:
"Worse than living in a world plagued by uncertainty, in which we can never know for sure who is lying to whom, might be to live in a world plagued by its opposite: certainty about where the lies are, thus forcing us to tell one another nothing but the truth."
Would it really be so horrible? Sure, if you were to start telling the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth to everyone you meet it would not end well. Do people really want to hear that they are fat or boring or stupid? That their new shoes are ugly (unless of course the shoes were a well-intended but misguided gift from grandma)? I leave the more grave questions of the type asked on "The Moment of Truth" to your imagination.
But what if everyone did it? All the time. Of course there would be problems - by the time you are done telling your wife that she is not as good looking as her sister she may not be in the mood to hear you say you love her anyway and start counting the ways. Yet after that first fury, would she not be relieved when she finds out you do love her? Or even if she finds you don't - now, as opposed to ten years and two kids later - would she not be happy?
We would have to change our reactions to everyday remarks. Even something as simple as "How are you?" could now be an interesting question. We would have to get good at compressing information, develop shorthand, learn to make explicit the omissions implicit in "Fine, thanks." Learn to take negative feedback not as personal offense and positive comments not as sign of friendliness, but simply as information.
It would be a different world, that is certain. Certain, indeed, is what it would be. No crime. No political manipulation. No drama. Well, at least no melodrama. Imagine what that would do to romance and love. Yes, you can say I'm a dreamer. All I know is that when that pocket lie detector comes out - I'll be camping out in front of the store.
Epilogue
Colombian version of "The Moment of Truth" was canceled after a contestant admitted to hiring a hitman to kill her husband. Sometimes the truth can land you in jail.