Liar Liar

I saw a study recently about just how inherent to our species deception is (conducted by the Psychology Dept of Univeristy of Portsmouth). Even babies lie, apparently. It's a reasonable conclusion - the animal kingdom lies as well. They say it's a sign of intelligence, which is a little bit worrying, when you think about it. But all in all, it seems Sun Tzu was stating the obvious when he said "all warfare is based on deception." According to the conclusions of the study, you can pretty much say everything is based on deception, or at least the ability to deceive.

Survival can be seen as warfare, for any species. We've pretty much removed ourselves - in the developed world at least - from the knife-edge of survival margins. We've used this inborn ability to lie to create fiction and explain the vast mystery of the universe in stories we can understand, and talked ourselves a load of pretty prose and philosophy about peace and generosity, about the value of honour and integrity (rarity value, but we deceive ourselves and gloss over that), but when the chips are down, and the battle is joined, all of that goes out of the window and we revert to natural, combative, deceptive type.
We laugh when we say that All's Fair in Love and War, but we're only half joking. We use it as an excuse for the most underhand and ruthless behaviour, because we want something so much we don't, by comparison, much care about anyone or anything else. We pay the price without hesitation, regardless of how many other people's pain that price involves.
In love, this generates rom-coms and business for therapists and agony aunts. In war, the picture isn't so pretty. It may be overly optimistic, but it would be nice to think that if we recognise the inherent deceiver in all of us, we might then learn how to mitigate her.