keeping up appearances

[flamingjune07]

This thing reminds me of this thing. It also makes me wonder if perhaps it isn't a little problematic to view the Harvard kid as an exceptional case, constitutionally a criminal whereas all the rest of us are perfectly normal, with all our ethical integrity intact. Certainly, it's probably not a bad idea to try to "seem smart" in addition to

Comments

[revoless]

This is why I like reading your Livejournal. Occasionally/often you pull out things that really shine a light on my own perceptions/reactions to people

[flamingjune07]

I mean, the thing is -- as sort of alluded to in jeremy's comment above -- it takes a certain amount of smartness to effectively seem smart, or to lie, or manipulate, or whatever. I have two responses to this

[revoless]

1: I don't deny that it's a decided skill to be able to deceive skillfully, particularly with regard to making people believe in greater adeptness than you actually have.
I do take a bit of umbrage at the insinuation that kids that lie are smarter than kids who aren't -- lying was beat out of me quite early, and I can assure you that it took one more level of thought to have a fool-proof lie already there, and still feel compelled to do the Morally Right Thing and tell that truth, than it would have taken to simply lie.
I didn't not-lie because I was too foolish to keep a lie in my head, I didn't lie because it was morally wrong to lie, especially when it involved trying to avoid punishment for my own wrongdoing. As a kid, I generally actually went up to my parents and informed them of the wrongs I did that they didn't notice, because I felt too guilty otherwise. Perhaps that makes me a certain kind of stupid (I would fail at being a banker, and my parents are very proud of that), but it certainly doesn't imply a lack in my

[flamingjune07]

Oh, I don't mean to imply that lying kids are smarter than non-lying kids. What I do mean is that there's a certain base level of smartness that a kid probably has to have in order to lie effectively, and so if you have a lying kid, you know that they're at least that smart. If you have a non-lying kid, their status as "non-lying" doesn't really say anything about how smart they are, because as you point out, they could be easily just as smart but also, you know, concerned with morality.