Co-operation demands great honesty —Krishnamurti
Here is a bold claim that is ripe for a healthy discourse: “Everybody lies, essentially about everything. Either verbally or through their actions. Either directly or by omission.” Lies, deceit, dishonesty and deception come in an assortment of different skins. Honesty as a virtue is a rare commodity. Why be honest when you can be deceptive and reap incomparable benefits from an interaction? Why choose truth over lies? To me, understanding these questions through the lens of evolution, animal behaviour and a dash of philosophy was truly inspiring. Let us start from scratch and contextualize certain words like ‘communication’, ‘honesty’, and ‘deception’ as they arise in the animal kingdom.
No Man is an Island is the title of a book by John Donne. I have come across a similar phrase in one of my ecology classes: ‘No organism exists in isolation’. Interestingly, the first law of ecology confirms this by stating ‘Everything is connected to everything else’. So, interactions and interrelations are inevitable. The essence of an interaction is communication. Technically, communication can be termed as ‘signalling’. During signalling there is a clear ‘sender’ and a potential ‘receiver’. Depending on their sensory world or their Umwelt, organisms can choose the type of signal they send from a diverse toolkit of sensory capabilities. This concept is aptly termed as ‘multi-modal signalling’.
Communication can be simple; often involving only one sensory modality or it can be multi-modal, embracing multiple sensory modalities, including chemical, visual, and auditory stimuli. Insects and arachnids often use different signals such as movements, gestures, touch, and even light during courtship. Some spiders dance and jump. Butterflies flit and float in the air. Fireflies light up. Some arachnids touch tails or antennae to communicate during courtship. In all these modalities, a particular animal can either send an ‘honest’ signal or a ‘dishonest’ signal. To put it in simple terms, an honest signal carries ‘truth’ and a dishonest signal carries ‘wilful deception’.
Deception and deceit are widely prevalent in the animal kingdom. In specific cases, the animal that practices dishonesty and deception enjoys anomalous advantage over another. They usually reap short-term benefits. Animals can use deceit defensively to save themselves, to survive in the merciless natural world. Camouflage, which is a type of mimicry, is (usually) a defensive strategy. It is like lying to save your life.
But, now let us look at brood parasitism. Brood parasitism is an exploitative strategy. One of the common examples is the infamous Asian koel, which exploits the parental care of crows by invading the crow’s nest and laying their eggs in it. Koel eggs hatch much earlier than crow eggs. It is observed that sometimes the koel chicks will kick the crow’s eggs out of the nest before they could even hatch. There are also instances when the (host) crow has died of pure exhaustion due to the enormous food demand put up by the (parasite) koel chick. Sometimes the other crow chicks have simply died of starvation because the parent crow was busy feeding the koel chick. It is wilful deception of such a high degree that as a child you may start to believe in the notion of ‘evil’.
Now let’s look at another cheeky liar of the animal kingdom. There is a wily bird in Sub-Saharan Africa that practices what researchers have termed as ‘tactical deception’. The fork-tailed drongo is a bird that specializes in auditory mimicry. It possesses an arsenal of more than seventy different types of alarm calls, some of which closely resemble the alarm calls of the animals it is trying to fool and exploit. Alarm calls are essentially warning messages that are broadcast mostly by birds in the presence of a predator. Since survival is of utmost importance, most animals instinctively scamper for the nearest cover when they hear an alarm call. The fork-tailed drongo exploits this instinct in animals. Whenever it sees a tasty snack in the hands of another animal, it sounds a ‘false alarm’. Upon hearing the alarm call, the animal drops the treat and scurries to save its life. The fork-tailed drongo ‘lies’ so often that researchers have found out that close to one-third of its diet comes from stolen food. This might sound like a successful strategy, but only for a short term. The victims of the drongo catch up on the lies pretty soon and do not fall for it later on. This is a classic scenario of the ‘cry wolf syndrome’.
Lying and deception seems like an easy and powerful strategy in most cases. But in the long run, when it comes to human interactions, it hurts all of us and painfully reminds us of the importance of trust among people in a community.
In Prisoner’s Dilemma (a hypothetical game), the assumption is that humans as purely rational agents are selfish, and that people will inevitably betray each other for self-interest. But interestingly, when this experiment was conducted using a random population, it was found that the majority of the participants chose to cooperate more than once, rather than betraying every single time for selfish gains. This is gladly surprising because cooperation beats betrayal, even when betrayal is strongly favoured and incentivized.
The first documented sin in The Bible is ‘lying’. The devil lied about the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. In Dante’s Inferno, ‘betrayal’ (which is the shattering of trust) is found in the lowest part of the hell, a ‘greater evil’ and the ‘worst of all human sins’. Anyone who has been betrayed, child or adult, will whole-heartedly agree to that, and I believe there is no hierarchy in the emotional hurt caused by an act of betrayal. Betrayal is arguably one of the most painful experiences.
And yet we may still choose to trust, knowing full well that betrayal can be lurking around the corner. Being honest and so, trustworthy, demands great courage. Honesty can be seen as a cornerstone, a precursor to trust. Trust is built on the immovable foundations of honesty and truth. In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, author David Landes gives a convincing account of how some of the most successful, rich, and developed nations scored very high on interpersonal trust among its citizens. They also scored very high on the Happiness Index, showing an air-tight correlation between honesty, trust, and happiness. The author claims that “trust is the only true natural resource”.
Sometimes, honesty could be the most uncomfortable state of being we could experience; for we are afraid of revealing ourselves and our thoughts to others. But it is a ‘courageous and intelligent’ risk. Quoting J Krishnamurti here: “Only then, when the mind and the heart are really simple, not encrusted, are we able to solve the many problems that confront us. Simplicity is not merely adjustment to a pattern. It requires a great deal of intelligence to be simple and not merely conform to a particular pattern, however worthy outwardly.”
In a school, building this awareness that each of us is very similar, though yet very uniquely different, helps us to reduce prejudices and empathize with each other. Better relationships mean lesser conflict, and that means we can truly focus on cultivating a learning atmosphere together. Expressing oneself honestly in a school environment helps a student or teacher to more readily find their niche in a place.
Honesty nurtures trust in our schools. Where there is trust, there is no fear. Cooperation blossoms out of trust. The role of trust in a school is thus huge and should be explored and discussed much more and in greater depth. I believe my sole purpose as an educator should be cultivating the ‘extraordinary atmosphere where learning can happen naturally.’ Everything else should silently and harmoniously support that purpose. Unsurprisingly, my two favourite quotes complement each other deeply: “Truth is a pathless land”… “And it shall set you free!”