How to Spot a Liar

How many BK "yuktis" (methods or skills) are actually lying and deception. As the BKs used to teach, "the divine art of concealing and revealing". How much of "being royal" is learning to control and suppress the signs we give off and when we lie?

Pamela Meyer has written a book called "How to Spot a Liar". OK, she has a book to sell, so filter out some professional self-promotion, but she states, "we live in a post-truth society" ... "in a deception epidemic" infecting every aspect of our lives. She presents the current state of art about lie detecting in an easy to read fashion and how the technology to recognise the truth is improving and will get even better in the future.

Don't expect to see her book in the BK bookstore.


How much of religion, whether innocent white lies like "Father Christmas", used to make children behave better in order to get a present, or persistent adult deception, like the Brahma Kumaris history and much of its activities, are just pure and simple ... lies?

And is it not damaging?

I was remember how much of the excitement of being a BK was the element of being

a) superior to others ... (which in itself was a big lie!), and
b) on a secret mission of which outsiders did not know the real purpose and in which we and our leaders regularly deceived those outsiders. Indeed, skilful deception (being subtle) was encouraged and rewarded as "good service".

Meyer writes various researchers have determined that in a given day we may be lied to anywhere from 10-200 times. In one study, strangers lied to each other three times within the first ten minutes of meeting each other. Yet, the average human can detect a lie only 54% of the time.

To make matters worse, it turns out evolution is the equivalent of a kind of "arms race" in which our ability to detect deception must keep up with our ability to deceive. The better we get at detecting lies, the better the liars' stories become. The more sophisticated the stories, the more advanced the techniques required to detect them. The more intelligent the species, individual or group, the more deceptive it is.

In her talk, she highlights a few signs that we can learn to look out for, to recognise both honest and dishonest people, and a few ways of trying them.

• Duping delight

A couple interested me, the first was "duping delight" ... the unconscious thrill or happiness of the liar as fooling the lied to. She showed how this even breaks out as a smile or a laugh on the face of the one lying. I remember how we laughed sometimes as BKs at some act of duping a VIP or outsider, or Dadi Janki literally laughing at "... we tell people everything is for free, but then we takes everything".

• Leaked expressions

She encourages people to watch out for leaked expressions, especially those expression of contempt when anger turns to contempt, your looked down upon or 'dismissed' and I remembered flick of the hands, heads being turned away, little snaps used to bring junior BKs into lines. Mostly, I thought, senior BKs, like Jayanti Kripalani, Miriam before she left, Mohini, even BK Shivani are extremely controlled and that is part of the training of a BK.

Dr Hansa Raval, the BK leader who started legal action against us but turned out to have had a secret marriage and affair as a BK center-in-charge, all absolutely against Shrimat, is a perfect example; like a "Bill Clinton" of the BKWSU. Her fraudulent visa applications, in which she claimed high paid Indian BK Brothers in IT were "priests" working in the community in order to get an American visa, are wonderful examples of much of this. As was the hierarchies support of her.

• Honest response

Interestingly, Meyer points out honest people will far more often recommend strict punishment, and dishonest ones ... not.

• Clusters

Meyer talks about how to look not for single signs but clusters of sings, e.g. the use of overly formal not simple and informal language, choices of words used to distancing the individuals, e.g. not referring to them by name but by some title, using specific language to discredit the subject or threat and the putting up of barrier objects or body language like point one's feet towards the exit of wherever the liar is being confronted.

Half-truths covering a bigger lie or a lack of straight answers, e.g. a thief being accused to "taking" someone's belongings will answer, "I don't have them" not "I did not take them". To say, "I don't 'have' them" may well be true ... the thief might have already passed them on ... but it masks that they did also 'take' them.

She also says, "over-sharing is not honesty". It can be another trick. or cover up ... "too much irrelevant information".

Another video is here.

On the subject of lying but a little bit lighter, I enjoyed the gentle humour of a 2009 Ricky Gervais movie called, 'The Invention of Lying'.

Imagine a world in which there is no such thing as lying and everything said is the absolute truth. In this world people make blunt, often cruel statements, including those that in our world people would normally keep to themselves. There is a lack of religious belief.

The lead actor is fired from his job, his landlord evicts him for not paying his rent and, depressed, he goes to the bank to close his account. The teller informs him that the computers are down, and asks him how much money he has in his account. Mark is about to tell her when a strange reaction occurs in his brain, he has an epiphany that enables him to tell the world's first lie

He then lies in a variety of other circumstances, including telling an attractive woman that the world will end unless they have sex, winning money from a casino, and stopping a neighbour from committing suicide. He learns that by lying he can not only get what he wants but make people feel better too.

His mother has had a heart attack and is terrified of death, believing that it will bring an eternity of nothingness. The actor tells her that death instead brings a joyful afterlife, introducing the concept of a Heaven to her, and she dies happy while the doctors and nurses appear awed by what he says. He soon receives worldwide attention for his supposed new information about death.

In short, he invents religion and a "Man in the Sky", God, parodying religion but then overcomes it for something more valuable. His own morality rises above both the worldly success he has gained and the falsity of religion.

It's a feel-good romantic comedy with a twist. It also takes a few pot shots at everything from parents to relationships.

How to spot a liar? If you can see anyone, then you are almost certainly looking at a liar.

As an aspie, I abhor deceit. I have spent my whole life being punished and discriminated against for being too truthful: I finally learned to lie to the authorities, at times, in order to avoid trouble.

I naively thought the BKs would be a haven from this. They teach purity in all aspects and this explicitly includes honesty. But, of course, they don't really follow this teaching any more than they follow any of their other teachings. In fact, honesty is explicitly discouraged by their dogma and systems. It seems that, with them, everything is for namesake.

Had I understood even slightly how endemic lying is in the BKs, I would have walked out the door immediately. I did not find out how bad it is until several years after I had left, and still I was outraged (and threw out all of my remaining BK paraphernalia).

In the context that the BKs set themselves in - a spiritual elite, specialising in, and celebrating purity - their dishonesty is hypocrisy writ large.

They will reap what they sow.