Delusion or Lie? Which Is It?

Two prominent and accomplished conservative-leaning news analysts with decades of experience disagree in their assessments of today’s mainstream media. Bernard Goldberg says they are delusional, while Bill O’Reilly says they are lying.
 
Take your pick of the issues. The media, whether print “reporter” or cable news talking head, frequently say things that are not true about our current president, our previous president, the previous president before our previous president, our adventure in covid totalitarianism, and so on ad nauseam.
 
The difference between delusion and lie raises epistemological questions about the nature of these concepts and their referents, and, especially, about their place in the continuum from moral to immoral behavior.
 
Both concepts entail falsehoods or incorrect perceptions. “Lying” usually means the falsehood is intentional or deliberate. Delusion may or may not mean that. Let us take delusion first.
 
In previous posts (1, 2), I have used “delusion” broadly to include false perceptions caused by psychological problems, whether neurotic or psychotic. A young man, for example, who on the same day is fired from his job and jilted by his lover suffers neurotic depression and concludes, “I’ll never find another job or lover.” This is not true, but the young man strongly feels it.
 
Typical psychotic delusions include hearing voices, seeing false images, or concluding things like “I am Jesus.” Psychotic delusion is a belief completely cut off from reality with the subconscious taking over. Neurotic delusion is an exaggerated belief based on an exaggerated emotional reaction to something, but an overall connection to reality still exists.
 
In both neurosis and psychosis, the delusion is fixed and impervious to change. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is “a form of mental derangement,” which makes us think of a certain derangement syndrome in response to our previous and now current president. “Fixed and impervious to change” means the person is motivated by the subconscious and is not aware of the mistaken perception. Such a person is motivated by a defensive habit that says, “I am correct in what I have written or spoken and that content is right, noble, and moral.” Self-reflection—introspection—does not often occur.
 
Honest and healthy people who are simply mistaken, on the other hand, are not “fixed and impervious to change,” because they do change when they realize their mistake or when it is pointed out to them. They are not driven by the subconscious premise that their frail ego depends on always being right, noble, and moral—albeit “moral” in a superficial way, usually steeped in “looking good to others” or just rationalization. Honest and healthy people are committed to facts and truth, which means they are committed to reason and reality, with no major defensive habits or subconscious motivations controlling them.
 
Lying is an easier case to discuss, at least on the surface, as liars are deliberate and intentional. They know that what they are writing or speaking is false. They know the facts but state the opposite.
 
This, however, is the dilemma I have been writing about for some time: how do we judge other people, especially others we do not know but who, working in the public arena, namely the media and politicians, affect our lives. How do we know whether they are lying? Or are delusional?
 
In previous posts, I have drawn the line with the criminal personality who lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden. The criminal is clearly immoral and many are attracted to law enforcement, the military, and politics. As Yochelson and Samenow point out, there also exists what they call “non-arrestable” criminals who do not overtly violate laws, but nonetheless enjoy manipulating and cheating relatives, co-workers, and citizens of our country. Are such people delusional or lying?
 
I stand by my earlier conclusion that to judge others who are not criminal personalities, we must know the persons well. Judging people from a distance, meaning not knowing them or knowing them well, is nearly impossible because they, particularly reporters, cable TV talking heads, and politicians, can have so many different motivations.
 
Many who work in business, for example, follow the dictum, “Business is business and ethics is ethics,” which means what we do in business has nothing to do with ethics, thus endorsing such dubious practices as cutting corners and BS-ing. Others just follow the money, meaning they choose to work for the highest bidder. Sales representatives, for example, sometimes cynically say this about an unprincipled co-worker: “He’s just whoring himself for a sale.” It seems this unprincipled motivation of “whoring oneself” is present in many professions, as well as, or especially, in politics.
 
A certain presidential administration in the recent past repeatedly ignored the law—immigration, student loan repayment, covid totalitarianism, and so on ad nauseam—and the media supported the moves. Is that not explicit lying? The problem here is that we are, or should be, attempting to judge individual human beings, not a collective called “the administration” or “the media.” The problem is we do not personally know the individuals in the administration who executed the unlawful orders or the members of the press who promoted the actions.
 
This does not mean that we cannot speak up and yell about the violations of law. If someone steps on my foot while standing in line, I will yell whether the act was intentional or accidental. What about the person who ordered the violations of law? Such a person likely justifies the orders and actions as variations on Plato’s so-called noble lie: “It’s for a good cause and, besides, the law itself is immoral.” Is this not the rationalization of a criminal personality? Maybe, but we still do not know the person.
 
This last, the morality or immorality of law, is a complication in making moral judgments. If the law itself can be demonstrated as immoral, violation of it can be the moral thing to do, hiding Jews from the Nazis, for example, or helping them escape Nazi rule. Or evading the military draft. In the late 1960s, one of my roommates quit school, which at the time meant you were almost immediately drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. He immediately moved to Canada. I wholeheartedly condoned his actions—and hoped I would not have to make the same decision. (I didn’t have to.)
 
What about an Adolf Hitler and other dictators who often isolate and label a group of people as scapegoats, by saying such things as “Jews are vermin,” then jailing or killing them? Yes, of course, this type of person, for which there is plenty of evidence in writing, speech, and action is a psychopathically criminal personality.
 
Delusional or lying? Both. The defensive habit of compulsively perceiving reality falsely and reporting it as such does not seem terribly different from what is called the bald-faced lie. The behaviors can be plotted along a continuum, from knowing something is false and saying it anyway to saying something is false but believing it to be true, unaware that it is false.* 
 
The delusional neurotic—the young man fired and jilted on the same day—still probably has some vague sense or glimmer that what he is saying is not true but does not know what to do about it and, perhaps, does not care to find out. Liars, on the other hand, clearly know what they are doing.
 
So who is right, Goldberg or O’Reilly? Both are, but lacking personal knowledge of particular players in the media market, how can we know whether any of them are delusional or lying? Presumably, some are delusional, some are lying, and the rest are somewhere in between the two extremes.
 
 
* These two personality types on a continuum are similar to the two continuums I wrote about in a paper on BS’ers and liars. The continuums range, on the one hand, from the BS-er who talks for show (facts don’t matter) to the liar who is concerned about facts to state the opposite and, on the other hand, from the deliberate motivation to BS or lie to a motivation from carelessness, ignorance, or unthought-about habit.

How Not to Jump to Conclusions When Judging Business People and Situations

Over the years, I have written a few posts discussing the issue of judging other people (1, 2, 3).

Applying ethical principles to make moral judgments in business is particularly challenging, requiring much research and sorting before making a decision. Taking time to process the acquired data is necessary to avoid making unsound decisions.

There are three overlapping steps in the process: gathering all relevant facts before making a judgment, identifying and separating moral values from optional ones, and, most difficult, identifying and sorting out the role and influence of government in our modern mixed (or worse) economies.

Let us take these overlapping steps one at a time.

Facts. As I would always tell my students, “Dig, dig, dig for the facts. Do you have all of them?” One new fact can overturn a previous conclusion. Calling a person inconsiderate when cutting in line, for example, should change when you realize the cut was inadvertent.

Options. In one of my previous posts, I encouraged readers “to get beneath surface appearances and not be swayed by looks, words, or demeanor.” In other words, style. I emphasized the abstractness and universality of moral values and virtues, cautioning readers not to elevate concretes and optional tastes to the status of moral judgment, such as eating red meat or drinking water out of plastic bottles.

And the use of hyperbole and BS usually does not make another person immoral. Learning the other person’s psychology is prerequisite to making moral judgments. The hyperbole and BS may be the result of years of entrenched defensive habits, often learned from parents. (It’s also called “sellers’ puff” in the law and is ineffective as a marketing technique.)

Competence in business is an expression of the moral value of productive work, but level of competence usually does not entail anything immoral, though it may mean management should work harder to find the appropriate slot for someone who is less competent in the current job.

Personality is our distinctive way of thinking and acting and does include character, but most interaction with other people involves sharing and working with their concrete values and morally optionally tastes and preferences. So-called personality conflicts usually have nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with options—looks, words, demeanor, style.

The importance of getting to know partners was impressed upon me in my six-plus years working for the same company in New York City. The company was founded by two men ten years before I arrived. While there, I did notice that the partners’ offices were at opposite ends of the building, but did not think anything of it at the time. Friction between the owners was mentioned by some co-workers and once I did see what must have been a serious or unpleasant disagreement between them, but in the entire time I worked at the company I never observed a dishonesty (and I don’t think there ever was any). About ten years later, after I had left the company to attend graduate school, I read that the company had closed and the two men were suing each other.*

Moral of the story? Business partnerships (and I include mergers, joint ventures, and acquisitions) are marriages with over half ending either in divorce or with the stronger partner taking over the business.

Taking time to get to know a future partner, including the partner’s judgment of others, is crucial. There does not have to be immoral behavior to cause a breakup in the relationship; most values that we hold are concrete and optional and accepting and enjoying many of the same ones are required for cooperative success.

Government. Identifying and sorting the components of a more general situation in business, such as opinions, personality, and, especially, government intervention are required before judging. This last is not always easy to find, since most today do not think about how government can affect a moral evaluation, nor does the press report such interventions. More digging in search engines to read several articles presenting alternative viewpoints is required.

A 2002 academic paper of mine demonstrates the sorting I am talking about. It untangles many issues surrounding bribery, including its common law definition and the frequent conflating of it with several other terms—perk, grease payment, extortion, broker’s fee, and even candy or money offered to a child to clean his or her room. (Yes, it’s called bribing the child! Should mom be put in the slammer?? No, it’s metaphor, not ethics or law.)

Regulatory agencies, to elaborate further, are major initiators of physical force against businesses, through their nonobjective law, arbitrary rule-making, and catering to favored lobbyists at the expense of those who do not lobby or cannot afford to lobby. Violations of regulatory rules by the people or companies being regulated should not be taken as immoral action. The agencies themselves, not necessarily the regulators (bureaucrats) running them, are the ones that are immoral and unconstitutional, as they combine the legislative, judicial, and executive into one bureau (1, 2).

What I have concluded about judging others is that it takes time getting to know them personally before declaring, for example, a dishonesty. The adage “haste makes waste,” though trite, is relevant here. It should mean: don’t hop into bed after one or two dates or sign a business partnership after one meeting. Personalities and business situations are complex.

The most complex and challenging moral issue in business ethics is what I have called marketing to morally questionable countries. The problem is, what exactly is a morally questionable country—can there be one or are we talking about particular people, such as the leaders of the country who are morally questionable? And which moral values and principles are relevant to be applied?

Full, airtight dictatorship, especially of the giant post-office type of Lenin’s socialism where private enterprise did not exist, is often cited as an immoral country that one should not have traded with. The government owned and controlled everything, including you, so the system was totalitarian. The fascist Nazi Germany, although it had nominally private businesses, was also totalitarian; it controlled everything and everyone. In an airtight dictatorship, everyone is prisoner and slave and all external trade must be conducted with the party bureaucrats, the slave masters.**

In today’s world, countries without private-sector workforces are rare. China may have over 70% of its employment in private enterprises and even Cuba may now have over 20% of its workers in the private sector.

Justice is the relevant principle in judging the morality of international trade. As Ayn Rand stated, “the principle of justice…is the principle of trade,” and includes not treating other people as “masters or slaves, but as independent equals.” The prisoners of airtight dictatorships were slaves and the bureaucrats were their masters, but private enterprisers in many countries today enjoy a modicum of freedom and independence.

Doing business in China can illustrate the complexity of ethics in the international arena.

Ethnic Chinese in particular are known to be entrepreneurial and hard-working, whether at home on the mainland or as a minority in other Asian countries. On the mainland their economy has shown the fruits of their efforts. (Less than 7% of the Chinese population are members of the Communist Party, leaving a large number of people to trade with.)


Economic reform in China under Deng Xiaoping (1978-89) was indeed impressive: de-collectivization of farms, acceptance of foreign investment, allowing citizens to own businesses, privatization of state-owned businesses, and the elimination of price controls and other regulations. Unfortunately, subsequent leaders have sought to limit this reform, though the economy still thrives in all areas of the country.

Also, recent accusations of Chinese genocide should be made more precise. There is no evidence of mass extermination, the correct definition of genocide, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. There is forced labor and forced sterilization, actions the United States was guilty of in the twentieth century with the military draft and the progressives’ eugenic goal of keeping the “feeble minded” from procreating.

But mixing forced labor and forced sterilization with execution to call China’s actions genocide is tantamount to calling the slums of Harlem and Watts ghettos; slums are not ethnic prisons. The definition of genocide being used today comes from the United Nations, which is more broad, going beyond killing, allowing lesser crimes into the definition. The UN itself, incidentally, is a massive governmental organization (hostile to the US) and not exactly an expert on concept formation and definition.

Attempted destruction of an ethnic minority’s culture? This is an accurate description of the actions of a large number of Chinese leaders and bureaucrats, but there is a difference between physical destruction of a group—think Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, and Tutsis—and forcing that group to integrate culturally into the majority. Still horrible, but not genocide.

Free trade is said to be the primary foreign policy of free societies; therefore, trade with private parties, not bureaucrats, should be the corollary. And the line attributed to Frederic Bastiat—“if goods don’t cross borders, armies will”—is also relevant here, but that would take us into economics and away from ethics.

Doing business in authoritarian countries poses additional questions and challenges. Are you really dealing with, and selling your products to, private citizens or with the jailers and killers? How do you know whether your products are made by (semi-) free citizens or by forced labor? Analogous questions can be asked about doing business in (semi-) free countries, such as the United States: how do you know your products are not being bought by criminals and the Mafia?

Facts do matter—a lot of them—especially when trying to decide whether doing business in certain countries is moral.

And judging other people is not an easy task, as the above examples indicate. Digging for facts is the first and persistently enduring action throughout the process required before making moral judgments in business. Time is your friend. Don’t jump to immediate conclusions.


* In contrast, I observed two brothers who owned their company; their desks were up against each other’s in an open office. They seemed to get along well.

** “Airtight” was the working title of Ayn Rand’s first novel We the Living. The background of the novel is life in the early years of the Soviet Union. Rand’s heroine shouts at her communist antagonist (p. 385): “You've driven us all into an iron cellar and you've closed all doors, and you've locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst!” I’ve written before about our recent covid totalitarianism as a taste of airtightness.

But, again, it is necessary to understand the complexity of judging: there are bureaucrats who have their critics cancelled, jailed, or shot and others who may even help some of the slaves to escape. Bureaucracy is a huge continuum from evil to decent. (And yours truly was a “super bureaucrat” for thirty years in two government-run universities; he thinks he was on the decent end of the continuum!)

The Dangerous Admiration of BS

Why is BS’ing admired, almost to the point of being “cuddly and warm,” as philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it, whereas lying is considered morally repugnant?

Frankfurt examined BS in his 2005 monograph On Bullshit (BS) and distinguished it from lying. The liar, Frankfurt argued, is focused on facts so he or she may state the opposite, but the BS’er is an entertainer or artist who uses words and sophistical arguments to manipulate others. Individual statements of the BS’er may be true, but their truth or falsity are irrelevant. The “show” is what counts. A sales rep, thus, puts pressure on a prospect by saying, “buy now, because I already have two firm offers.” The rep may or may not have two other offers; those particular words were chosen because they provide the most persuasive language.

Frankfurt’s discussion seems to imply that the creative and imaginative skills of the artist are what people admire in BS’ers and lead many to make comments about BS’ers to the effect “He’s good” or “She’s clever.” Such comments may be made about anyone. Politicians, of course, are often consummately admired spinmeisters, as are many lawyers and sales and advertising practitioners. Some admiration may stem from the challenge a BS’er must overcome, such as a sales person confronted with the objections of a particularly difficult prospect. A well-crafted story, not entirely based on fact, to convince the prospect to buy can produce the above accolades.

Expectation of truth is doubtless the reason we are offended by the liar, but why not the same for the BS’er? After all, the overall impression made by the BS’er is false, even though individual statements made by such a person may be true. BS, as I suggested in a conference paper, is a species of lying, the two behaviors occupying opposite ends of a continuum.

In a post-publication interview, Frankfurt named marketing (of course) and, perhaps surprisingly, democracy as causes of the preponderance of BS in our culture today. Marketing, because salesmanship and advertising are falsely assumed to mean lying in order to separate consumers from their hard-earned dollars. And democracy, because in such a system we are obligated to have an opinion about everything; since we cannot know everything, says Frankfurt, our opinions amount to BS.*

One consequence of the connection between democracy and BS, Frankfurt continued, is that the highly educated, because they have the linguistic skills with which to express their opinions and the arrogance to neglect facts in the process, are more prone to BS than their lesser educated counterparts. Does this “democratic skill” cause admiration of others who exhibit the same?

Rationalization abounds to justify BS, such as “everyone does it,” “everyone knows it’s done this way,” and “that’s how business (or politics) is conducted.” Not “everyone” does know it, however, and if everyone did know it, how would that justify departures from the truth? Storytelling belongs in the art of fiction, not in business, politics, or daily conversation. Justifying fabrication in negotiation and salesmanship is precisely what gives capitalism a bad name.

The danger in admiring BS, and not carefully distinguishing it from the creative fiction of a true artist, is that habits of mind become established and human relationships end up being built out of little more than BS. Perception of the truth becomes nearly impossible, because every statement is for show, not a description of facts. Politics has become almost entirely a BS show, with honest intention seemingly nonexistent.

Worst of all, parents can encourage this habit in children at an early age. Smiling approval of a less-than truthful statement can communicate a “you’re clever” message to a child. For example, a boy who wants to get his way makes something up that will please his mother. The mother plays along, knowing fully that the gambit is less than genuine. A pattern of behavior has just been sanctioned by the mother.

Commitment to facts and truth, when such encouragement is continued throughout childhood and adolescence, goes out the window. Of course, parents who exhibit the same behavior become their children’s models. The BS habit becomes ingrained in the child’s subconscious and he or she may not even be aware that anything is wrong. “My parents do it. Everyone around me does it. Politicians do it. It must be right.”

From this beginning in the home, we derive a culture of BS.


* The fundamental cause is altruism, specifically the premise that self-interested behavior, which is required in our daily lives, is opposed to character and morality.)