What I find particularly notable is that the journalism about the incident seemed to focus on the propriety of Coach K giving unsolicited "character teachings" (i.e. a scolding) to opposing players in the handshake line. The issues of Krzyzewski's 1) lying about his exchange with a kid, 2) bringing the kid's character into question, and 3) only owning up to it after audio of the exchange surfaced and then 4) only really apologizing for what he said, not lying about it - "It is not my place to talk to another team's player and doing so took the focus away from the terrific game that Dillon played" - did not deserve top billing.
It doesn't take this incident to show that our culture has a serious problem with its valuation of honesty. Donald Trump, praised for his "straight shooting" by his supporters, revels in his disregard for the truth.
Most everyone, I guess, thinks it's ok to lie sometimes. To protect someone's feelings over an insignificant matter ("That dress looks great!") This is not depraved. Maybe fewer people think it's ok to protect one's livelihood or finances, even if they will when they have to. Maybe the lies of politicians - more or less accepted as a fact of life - fall into this category.
Lying isn't explicitly OK, but maybe candor has become of questionable value. This certainly makes sense if evaluating reliable candor as a quality from an employee's perspective. What if I'm honest about the product I'm trying to sell? What if I'm honest about my satisfaction with my work? Today, consistent candor, more often than not, will imperil your employment prospects rather than strengthen them. Even if someone would rather not lie, they're surely not going to voice a belief that might draw rebuke from someone that could fire them. Even if you're careful to toe the line at work, a reputation for candor outside of the workplace isn't going to make you more attractive for most job positions.
The devaluation of candor and the resurgence of lies might be better understood as a side effect of the expansion of bullshit - communication crafted and understood to avoid dealing in easily verifiable truths or falsehoods - in our lives. Private bullshit has been around forever. That, after all, is what we're engaging in when we ask someone "how they're doing" when we really don't want a detailed answer, and it's what the other person is doing when they say "fine" - no matter how they're "really doing." I do this, we all do this, and it's ok: we're just, in this example, trying to communicate some mutual care and respect without getting bogged down in the semantics of expressing this. And, when we say that "the dress looks great" when we actually believe it's heinous, we're answering a perceived appeal for support, not an opinion-request on the aesthetics of a dress, with an answer that provides support. This example is tougher for me to swallow (if you guessed it took me a bit longer than most to figure out how this works you're right) but it's nothing new. It's also private - it is a way that someone in a close or intimate relationship tends to the emotional needs of another person.
Public bullshit - someone who's stuck in a shitty sales job having to say drivel about a product to keep their job - is not new either. And advertising has always, more often than not. been obvious bullshit, less an attempt to impart information about a product than to make the target associate it with something. But, as the 20th century witnessed advertising turning into a profession, then "marketing" and the M.B.A. (Master of Bullshit Articulation?), bullshit has expanded, risen in status and become the normal mode of discourse. The most surprising thing about the Coach K incident wasn't that he was misrepresenting himself but that he was careless enough to actually lie and actually get caught.
Whether they know it or not, people are sick of the omnipresence of lies and bullshit, and they have been, as David Foster Wallace described:
Because we’ve been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about that complicated: it hurts. We learn this at like age four—it’s grownups’ first explanation to us of why it’s bad to lie (“How would you like it if … ?”). And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks—that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if experience seems to teach that everything you’re supposed to believe in’s really just a game based on lies. [ . . . ] It’s painful to believe that the would-be “public servants” you’re forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they’ve just got to believe you’re an idiot. So who wouldn’t yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt? And who wouldn’t fall all over themselves for a top politician who actually seemed to talk to you like you were a person, an intelligent adult worthy of respect?The above was published 16 years ago. It was prescient: people have "fallen all over themselves" for someone who "seems to talk to you like you were a person." The problem is that Trump's talk is the talk of a hustler to his mark: its only concern is its appeal to its target, reflecting a virtually unprecedented lack of concern for truth, falsehood or coherence in U.S. national politics. Sure, there have been lies and liars, but politicians usually think about the truth or falsehood of what comes out of their mouth before letting it fly. Not Trump.
Maybe people have lost the ability to distinguish false candor from the real thing, the kind that treats
its recipient "like an intelligent adult worthy of respect." Or maybe people have accepted perceived success as the only real value, and managing to lie and get away with it just as another skill of the successful. Whatever the array of reasons for it, our acceptance of lies and liars and bullshitters as a society, if continued, will tear us down. If nothing else, a government like ours requires some degree of mutual respect among those living under it. And obviously denying someone your candor - whether from a position of inferior, superior or equal status - signifies as deep a disrespect as any other.
Addendum, 10/24/16:
How ok is private bullshit after all?
