Lying in America

This is a short post. This morning, my wife complained that a Facebook "friend" "unfriended" her with the reason that she limited her "friends" to family members. Turned out that the "friend" was lying. I shocked my wife, when I replied: why are you so upset, lying is the American Way! From an German(-American) perspective:

 1. You go out shopping or to an eatery and people ask you "How are you doing?" and you answer "Oh, excellent." even if your client just ditched you, you lost that eBay auction, and just caught another cold from your pre-school daughter. So, "excellent" is a plain lie. This is cultural classic which provides endless comedy material in Germany.

2. You hear from your favorite political candidate things like that same sex marriage hurts American families. Well, this does not make sense. The one has nothing to do with the other. I can understand when people object for moral or religious reasons but whether gay couples marry or not has absolutely no impact on my family whatsoever.

The same mechanism works in the business world as well: "We need public funding for this bridge because of the children." Everybody likes children and wants to protect them - so we need that new bridge. The mechanism here is the same: two absolutely unrelated issues are tied together. Take a highly emotionally loaded subject and combine it with something else to spill over some of its negative or positive emotions. A classic in commercials certainly, like freedom and cigarettes. Such things would not fly in Germany outside of advertisement. If a politician would try that, he would lose instantly credibility.

3. If you do not have to say something nice, do not say anything. Well, this is a form of lying as well. My wife knows better: she would never ask me whether her butt looks fat in those pants because I might answer that her looks is independent of her jeans... She knows better not to ask such question  - not that I had to give a rude answer even without lying. Germans are known to be direct and rude. In the German culture lying to be nice is considered fake and not replying is considered rude. People prefer inconvenient and uncomfortable opinions over no answer or a faked one.

This was the first thing I realized when I came to America that you cannot take literally what people are saying. On my first day, I had a run in at the Office of Admissions at Berkeley with one of the Admissions ladies. She told me that my degree did not had the value I thought it had and that she did her job for 10+ years and knew everything about German degrees. She was BSing me left and right with her credentials without me noticing initially. Needless to say that I did get admitted and that this woman had not freakin' clue about German degress - to say it directly. The next thing I learned is that people in America have very high opinions about themselves. Everybody is the expert and the best. One of my friends came visiting Berkeley on a scholarship, also from my school in Munich, and educated me a bit about some of his "expert" Mathematics PhD mates at Berkeley. And the "world leading mathematicians" all the sudden became plain students of Math. I learned, that in America, you cannot take anything at face value, and self promotion, often a form of lying, is engrained in culture.

I guess I got used to either way, though sometimes it may take me a bit when switching between cultures. Anyway, this post was encouraged by my wife who also is posting her take on that topic on her blog.

• Mirror, Mirror...Everybody Lies