When I put on my rose-colored glasses and look back at the past (1950s??) it seems that lying was very much looked down upon. Not so much any more. Seems like it's 'anything goes that you can get away with'. Is this because we're not teaching ethics in school? Decline in churches? Apathy from feeling helpless?
No, just lying about different things. Back then you were absolutely supposed to lie about things like having sex before marriage, where your teenage daughter went for six months just after she started dating that guy and putting on weight, how much you love being a housewife, the attraction you have for your own sex, your interest in non-gender-conforming behaviour, what your creepy uncle did when he babysat you...
I agree with you that humans are prone to lie, and that cultures have developed protocols around that, but we can distinguish here on both degrees and categories of lies. If your daughter became pregnant in school in the 50s, something terribly had gone off socially acceptable script. (It is irrelevant how we view that script today.) All of your examples are specimens of social remedies to deal with these social hot potatoes. But adopting domestic propaganda as a norm is another thing.
Or take the somewhat analogous history of torture in USA. Of course that shit has been going on in this country (and elsewhere) from day one, but it is one thing for individuals or units or even communities to lose it, or do it out of sight, and another thing entirely for the state to officially adopt it as a tool of state craft.
Those lies were as much in support of the system as they were ways to deal with it. The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.
> The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.
(Their neighbor should have lied too.)
I tend to view societies as non-linear and catastrophic systems. The system above was trying to maintain a social order and it wasn't attempting a 100% conformity to rule x. There is a threshold of violating rule x that would destabilize the social order and the governing social rules are optimized to keep violations well below that threshold. By lying about a violation event, both the fact of the violation is leaked (because the lies are transparent), and, a family unit is protected from suffering the consequences of publicly breaking rule x. But if a family of daughters repeatedly had presented daughters with cases of 'eating disorder', then you can be certain that family would be subject to social scrutiny.
Every culture develops a variant of this mechanism. For some it is a first class device (e.g. Ta'arof in Iranian culture) and for others it is an implicit device.
The key issue is always "where is that threshold" and not that these mechanisms exist. They exist for a reason, since as every school child knows:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
[p.s. to be clear, imo, the contemporary lies we're discussing have crossed those thresholds and are destabilizing and we can possibly trace the seminal event to Watergate and Deepthroat and acceptance of anonymous sources.
Here is a very interesting example of a key leader discussing transparency in the press. It is interesting in the sense that it both addresses this issue and is itself the source of a fairly prevalent disinformation.
Perhaps the penalty for lying has gone down? Much broader reach, so you can potentially dupe a lot more people, and you can either hide your true identity or you're so removed from the individuals you duped that they can't effectively affect your real reputation. There's gotta be stuff out there on reputation that looks into this.
