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A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife .org.
Casey's autistic. She says it's puzzling, neurotypical people, and how much they lie.
She's not alone. Yeah.
In our support groups, that issue comes up a lot.
But for some people, it's very puzzling and they just don't understand the concept.
And especially because so often, lies are just completely transparent.
She gave me this example.
When she worked in HR, they caught this guy who was having an inappropriate relationship with his administrative assistant.
A naked picture of her was on his work computer.
And still, he denied it.
Kept lying. It's just baffling.
to me. It's just, it's inexplicable.
I don't understand the continuing in the lie, and I don't understand why they haven't learned at an earlier point that it's not productive, that this is not an effective tool for you.
Looking around on Reddit, we found a lot of autistic people writing about this exact thing.
Here's somebody who posted saying, I recently realized that a lot of things I'd always categorized as lies are not seen that way by NT people, no typical people.
Like, they say it knowing it isn't literally true, but they don't think of it as a lie because they don't expect others to believe it.
For example, here's some things that I always thought were weird, inexplicable lies.
And then there's a list.
It was great to see you.
Let's do this again soon.
I hope you have a great holiday.
You are so funny. I love your hairdo.
Where did you buy that dress?
I need to get one too.
Oh, wow. That's very interesting.
See you later. They continue.
i've decided to start translating a lot of nt chatter from its literal meaning into a simple form of hello i want you to see me as friendly so i am making friendly noises do you yes do you relate i i do you know the the um the white lies and the polite fictions and the pleasantries that go along with small
talk a lot of autistic people really do perceive that as lying.
For me, I recognize that it's a cultural structure rather than an intent to deceive.
And does that make it any better?
Absolutely. She remembers when she realized just how widespread lying is for neurotypical people.
She was a teenager and she says she was heavyset from a heavyset family.
That's pretty normal to me.
You know, I am not offended by or afraid of the word fat.
But a lot of the people that were my friends were very afraid of that word.
And so they would say to me, oh, you're not fat.
And for me, that was just baffling.
Like, I understood that they were trying to be kind, but I couldn't fathom how they thought that would actually be believed or helpful.
I mean, it's a demonstrable fact.
I have a mirror. I know what I look like.
It started to make me clue in to this idea of white lies and polite fiction.
And then, you know, with the teenage politics, you start to see people who, oh, I'm so happy to see you.
Awesome. Let's hang out.
And then behind the person's back, oh, my God, I can't stand her.
She is just the worst.
So I started to catch on that this was not just widespread, but that this was considered appropriate behavior.
Now, of course, she's used to it.
When I talked to her, she was just about to go to a conference where she knew people who barely remember her would be saying, so great to see you.
And I mean a word of it.
She's OK with that.
She ignores it, moves on.
But she tries to keep things more strictly truthful.
So you never lie? I won't say never.
I think of myself as sort of practicing radical honesty with tact.
So I do my best to tell the truth in all circumstances.
I have to say, if that's your philosophy, I find it so interesting to think about what are the very few examples where you do let yourself lie, where you feel like that's the right thing to do.
What are those? So from a moral and scriptural basis, one is justified to lie to protect others from individuals who mean to do them harm.
So, for example, there was someone in my life who was in a domestic violence situation, and I helped her to get to a safe place.
And when her husband called, I said, I have no idea where she is.
It's quite simply a lie, but it is a lie that is fully justified because it is information to which he is not entitled for the protection of life and limb of myself or another person.
That is obviously a very hard example to argue against.
She told me another one where her dog pooped all over her car and she was late to a meeting.
And when she got there, she did not tell the truth about why.
She didn't want to gross anybody out.
Also, none of their business.
Otherwise, she almost always picks honesty.
When kids picked on her nieces about their weight, they came to her crying and asked, Am I fat?
And she says it was really hard not to say the kinds of lies that people said to her when she was their age.
But she didn't. She said, Let's talk about your body and being fat.
Is there something wrong with being fat?
Honesty, she says, is the only way to vulnerability and intimacy, which, you know, of course.
I was very curious how she does not lie at work.
I definitely do most of my lying on the job.
Not here on the air, of course, where everything I say is deeply, thoroughly fact -checked, but just around the office, just white lies.
I don't understand how you get by without a little pretending now and then in a workplace.
I don't actually understand how you would get things done.
Casey has none of that.
Okay. Let me ask you about a lie that I tell all the time at work.
Okay. At the end of pretty much any interview I ever do, I thank the person and I tell them how great they were, even if they were not great, even if they were not good talkers, even if If they were not able to describe the thing that we'd hoped that they would describe, that is what I say.
Because it seems to me to be such a vulnerable thing to ask people to, like, come and talk in an interview and they don't know how it's going to go.
And it's just kind of a nerve -wracking thing that it seems just kind to say you did a good job.
I think that most of the time if the person you're speaking to didn't do well, that they're going to know it.
And so the polite fiction is not going to reassure them.
So what is the honest thing you could say in that situation?
The honest thing is, you know, coming to do this, to have these conversations and be open and vulnerable is a big thing.
And I really appreciate that you did it and that you made the effort.
Thank you for that.
That's honest. Hmm.
I have to say that is really, that's really, that's really good.
Thank you. It's honest and it acknowledges them.
I wasn't expecting you to really, like, say something so actually useful.
I'll do you the favor of being honest about that.
I appreciate it. One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you today is that we're doing a whole episode of our show about inexplicable lies.
Lies that you just think like, why lie about that?
In your experience, what percentage of lies are unnecessary lies?
Can I say 100 %? I really don't think, except in extreme circumstances, that Anne Frank is hidden in my attic situation.
I don't think that lying is necessary.
I think if we have honest, tactful interaction, we're always going to be the better for it.
Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for doing this.
It's my pleasure. I know that it's a vulnerable thing coming in and speaking honestly.
Thank you. And I really appreciate you doing that.
No, I can genuinely say that you were great.
You were very straightforward, and you spoke in a real way about what you really think, which is what we want.
Thank you. I hope it will be useful.
With a day on our program, lies that really just leave you scratching your head sometimes.
Seriously, we have some fun stories for you.
I'm WBEZ Chicago. This is American Life.
I'm Eric Glass. Stay with us.
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It's This American Life, Act 1, the real L word.
Okay, so to kick things off today, we're going to revisit some recent historical events.
I think that's all I'm going to say for now.
Dana Chivas tells us what happened.
Liz Flock was just starting out as a reporter in 2011 living in D .C.
working at the Washington Post this was the golden age of blogging and social media.
Instagram was just a year old basically a toddler.
Twitter was five and news outlets realized they could use these blossoming tools of the internet to do a hybrid version of reporting.
They called it the breaking news blog Liz was a reporter at the Washington Post breaking news blog.
Called Blog Post. Very original.
Very original. And what was happening at that time was the Arab Spring.
So I was writing about protests in countries all over the Middle East every day for months on end.
The job was a combination of actual reporting and aggregation.
Basically reading other reporters' stories in various social media accounts and repackaging it all.
I was doing a similar job around this time at AOL News.
Our blog was called Surge Desk because we were supposed to create a surge of traffic for the website.
Only I worked at AOL News, not the Washington Post.
So I was reporting on Groundhog Day in Staten Island and writing posts about how solar flares are kind of like the sun is farting.
Liz was writing about the Arab Spring.
And I was writing about all these really complicated topics And I was really scared every day writing about them.
Scared of what? Just at the responsibility that I had, the tremendous responsibility to write accurately and quickly about all of these really important subjects.
Yeah. And it's just you and one editor.
Is that right? Yeah, it was me and my editor, Melissa, and we were actually the number one traffic driver for the Washington Post for a while, so we would get about three million page views a month, and we were encouraged to keep that up, so we posted as much as we could.
To keep up with all this from her desk in D .C., she followed a bunch of social media accounts and blogs.
The Arab Spring, you might remember, was one of the first big social movements to use these online tools to organize.
Rightly or wrongly, it was called the Facebook Revolution.
One of the blogs Liz followed was written by a 35 -year -old Syrian -American woman named Amina Aref, who had recently moved back to Damascus from the U .S.
Her blog was called A Gay Girl in Damascus.
She writes about her complex identity of being an out lesbian in conservative Syria.
having grown up in the U .S.
And on the blog, she writes poetry, she writes history, she writes what are basically like foreign policy op -eds.
She's openly critical of the Bashar al -Assad regime at a time when the regime was arresting, torturing, and murdering critics and activists.
In one post titled Irony, there's a photo she's taken of a billboard.
On it, Assad's smiling face and the head scratcher of a tagline, Syria Believes in You.
Below the photo, Amina writes, sure, in all caps and multiple exclamation points.
She's provocative. She sometimes writes more sexy poetry, I would say.
I forgot about this, but I went back to it, and there was one piece called Testimony of Jasmine, and she writes, My sex to your sex, grinding in time, with sounds of the city stretched out below, and it goes on and on.
Legally, I can't let her read you the rest of this poem.
FCC rules. So, a young, pretty Syrian -American lesbian taunting the brutal Assad regime.
It's not much surprise when the secret police show up at her house one day.
On April 26th, Amina publishes a post titled, My Father the Hero.
She describes a harrowing scene.
It was the middle of the night, and these two young, muscly guys in leather jackets rang the doorbell of her family's home.
They've come for Amina.
They know about her blog, know that she's a lesbian.
They threatened to rape her.
But Amina's father argues with them, chides them.
He knows them, knows their families.
He says to them, quote, Do you know what is our family name?
You do? Then you know where we stood when Muhammad, peace be upon him, went to Medina.
You know who it was who liberated Al -Quds.
You know, too, maybe, that my father fought to save this country from the foreigners.
He tells them to leave, and they do.
Amina's post goes viral.
Back in D .C., Liz decides to write about it.
So the second I read her post, My Father, My Hero, I immediately reach out to her for an interview.
I mean, we were interviewing lots of activists, but she's like the dream interview because she's so interesting.
Amina emails her back, and the next day, Liz publishes a post.
Syria blogger says she faced arrest but remains defiant.
In the article, Amina tells Liz, quote, If we want to live in a free country, we need to start acting as though we live in a free country.
Six weeks later, Liz goes into the office.
I am checking the blogs and social media and I see that on Gay Girl in Damascus there's a post, not by Amina, and it says, Dear friends of Amina, I'm Amina's cousin and I have the following information to share.
earlier today at approximately 6 p .m.
Damascus time, Amina was walking the area of this bus station.
The Post says Amina was abducted by three government agents.
Then they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Bashar al -Assad.
The men are presumed to be members of the security services.
Amina's present location is unknown.
