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Paltering or Lying
[ 6 minute read ]
Opinion 
Mental Health
Why do people lie? Why do people big themselves up to present themselves as better then they truly are? Why don't people just admit to having faults? Paltering is a form of lying that is telling the truth but omitting relevant information that is crucial to understanding the whole issue. It is what politicans are regarded as doing, except many people just use the umbrella term 'lying'.
'Will taxes go up?'
'Under this Government taxes have remained low and we expect to be able to keep them low.'
'But will they go up?'
'We are currently working on increasing the living wage to meet both current and the future financial needs of the people.'
'By future financial needs, are you including a need to pay higher taxes?'
Personally, I should like to be pre-warned before a warning is issued. Not that I want to do any insider trading or stuff. I should like to hire an architect to design an Anderson shelter in my garden and make plans to use it. I am not the 'burrowing' kind of coward that one might think me to be; nor am I an ostrich with my head in the sand. I am more the trap-door spider waiting for opportunities; yet I am not predatory such like spiders are. The closest I get to predation is eating chicken soup when I am ill. I actually don't eat or drink soups at all. It was a joke.
A long while ago, I had cause to use a food bank and the volunteers were mostly elderly folk. They were shocked that I refused much of what they offered. I was only concerned with staving of hunger and absorbing nutrition. Tins of soup and pastries just don't do either for me. Not taking everything that is offered is subscribing to my code of honour. Greed is so close to paltering in my eyes that I find if I look hard enough I might find they share the same parents. How so?
There is a decision made before greed is allowed to run the show. I have experience of just how easy it is for greed to be hired when it applies for the job of managing my personal health. I have been hungry, really hungry in the past. I have been hitch-hiking across Europe and not eaten for four or five days. Four or five days? Yeh, hitch-hiking means standing still and then sitting down and then standing still again. At home, when I have looked in my food cupboards and seen they are close to empty; two or three shriveled potatoes that I deemed not worth the effort to cook because they would not get anywhere close to satiating my hunger, and in any case eating stimulates the digestive metabolism. I have been able to ride out the hard times until an opportunity to improve has been found. Of course, no food didn't come from spending all my money on beer. Sometimes, I bailed other people out of debt because they were not as hardy as me. Paradoxically, when you have an expected period of reduced food intake it is the time to buy tea, milk and sugar.
Even with empty cupboards I refused some of the produce the food-banks offered me, but not every time. I have arrived back home with items that I would not dream of buying no matter how much money I have had, and I have had a lot. I have looked at the tins and boxes on the kitchen counters and thought I will not be pleased while I am eating this. Someone else would be though. I never returned or re-donated any of it because anywhere else I might go would give me the same. The truth is, I was a fraud because I was greedy. I readily took everything I was offered while I recognised the low value each of the items had for me. The worst of it is that my hungry position was largely through my own fault.
'Hello, thank you for volunteering at the foodbank. Yes, the tin of tuna please. Actually, no keep it. I am only here because I allowed myself to fail. I have fallen into a trap that I am reluctant to remove myself from and so I spend my money not on improvement but on palliative and comforting pursuits to ease the anguish of my mental unrest. Keep everything! Give it to people who need it through no fault of their own.'
I am a ruthless monster. I might be able to find fault with everyone whenever I take emotion out of the equation. I know there are addicts who rely on hand-outs, and it took some very careful thinking for me to enfold them in the same category as, what I determined were genuinely needy people through no fault of their own. Eventually, I settled on mentally putting them in a subset of needy. I could never accept that addicts have no control over their addiction. I had to make a large detour around that idea and clear a path through barbed brambles of bigotry to reach the understanding that addicts need to be kept healthy in order for them to be viable enough to form ideas on how to improve their lives. Their greed in taking everything they can get to alleviate their plight is a righteous one. This I did not like.
I told the chap who replaced my double-glazing that I could offer him only black coffee with sugar, because I am lactose intolerant and don't like black tea so I don't buy it. It initiated an explanation.
'Like everyone over the age of seven I do not naturally produce lactase to deal with the lactose in dairy products. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I chased socialising in pubs over tea-drinking at home and spent my money on pints of beer rather than milk and sometimes sugar, so I suppose my body just gave up producing lactase and has never gotten around to starting up production again.'
'Do you still drink?', he boldly asked. I knew why he asked this. He had mentally noted that I have no soft furnishings such as a sofa or armchairs, a kitchen cupboard door is missing and I have no curtains. The truth is, I don't have any need to sit on a soft chair and I don't have visitors. The kitchen cupboard door I took down because it impedes my movement when I am cooking if it is opened, and I am concerned only with the retention of heat in winter and the blocking of sunlight in summer and hanging perfectly sized pieces of material in the window spaces more efficiently meets my needs than curtains with their wavy aspect would ever do. (I open the window when the sun shines in during summer and I don't want the warm air to waft into the room where there are regular peaks and troughs in the fall of curtains).
I knew that I would have to elaborate on what I was about to reply to him.
'Yes, I do. Every now and then I get absolutely caned. It is a holiday induced by alcohol. Some people spend hundreds of pounds on flight to Spain, or Greece or Brazil, I spend about sixty to one hundred on my mental holiday. I don't crave alcohol and I stop drinking when I have had enough time off. I don't run out of money and I even go 'cold turkey' with the attendant physiological withdrawal problems. I don't give in and buy more alcohol to alleviate the effects. Where some people have jet-lag I have a hangover and am sometimes sick. I don't need a beautiful vista or a cultural change, I only need to be unconscious sometimes; I suppose just like people who find sleep refreshes them. I am concerned with function and not aesthetics.'
The last sentence was to qualify why I have no soft furnishings. He wasn't really convinced and why should he be? He has experience of addicts and knows his home city well enough to recognise where addicts live. As far as he is concerned I am an alcoholic. His later statement that his wife keeps a pristine home was not lost on me either. My home is clean but there are bicycle tyre marks on the walls where some of my bikes touch the walls on their way in and out. To all intents and purposes I could well be a drug and alcohol addict. Let's be honest, they, in the main, are also not concerned with aesthetics.
I don't use food-banks anymore. In fact, I buy art supplies and give them away to promote creativity and provide outlets for nascent creative aptitude and inclination.
Of course, most of us when we think of addicts don't include ourselves as being an addict. As I mentioned before, I traded the purchase of milk and sugar for a pint of beer in my local pub because I felt that I would get more satisfaction from company than I would a cup of tea. I was, no doubt about it, addicted to other people and not caffeine; the longer term effects of social interaction over temporary stimulation at home were more important to me at that time.
Having had no clear guidance from absent parents from the age of sixteen I have had to make life up as best I could. I have spent weeks without speaking to a single person and have by now somewhat curtailed a wild desire to socially interact. It is not so weird though, before mobile phones many explorers were socially isolated. Accepting, in my mind, that constant social interaction begets a desire for constant social interaction, I can look back on the days of no milk and sugar as being entirely acceptable when I was really quite poor. Yet acceptance of that level of poverty has allowed me to feel comfortable in foreign countries of which I did not know the language at all. Being bereft is not a problem for me. Recognising a loss or absence is just something I absorb into my plans to move on.
Not using a SmartPhone in the same way as most users do is entirely normal for me. I really don't need to be in constant contact with anyone. I am not addicted to society and its inherent cost. I don't tell myself half-truths about myself to satisfy my desire to be accepted. There is no paltering in my home. I want to be aware of what may come to be, merely so I can truthfully position myself to manage change.
The hiring of a metaphorical architect to build an Anderson shelter is not planning to hide. It is merely recognising that it is not always good to bang my head against a wall with any expectation that I can resolve a problem in the immediate term and utilise that same solution for a future and sustained improvement. If I put it a different way; it means I am not addicted to dopamine delivered when there is any anticipation, immediate gratification is less important to me than it once was. and posturing is not being honest about myself.