Limited Evidence and Deception
Suppose, first of all, that you were not inclined to work. Not that you could not if you actually wanted to—you are not incompetent or incapable. You simply don’t care for working and will avoid it whenever you can. Like most people, you’d rather be doing something else: talking, watching videos online, playing games on your phone… whatever. Unlike most people, you do not feel bound by responsibility, decency, or honor to fulfill your hired role in an employer’s service. After all, if you’re clever enough to get paid without doing much, why shouldn’t you? Is there a better indicator of your innate superiority than not being governed by the same ethical harness that makes ordinary people into mere beasts of burden for those whose questionable claims to status and authority you certainly never assented to? Imagine, then, that you are willing to do whatever it takes to get out of working, including violating most norms of behavior or even victimizing other people. How might this version of you—lazy, immoral, unrestrained by conscience—contrive to work as little as possible?
Employers, of course, would terminate someone like you sooner or later if you were discovered. If you wished to make a living while working as little as possible, an employer would have to believe you to be of far greater service to them than you are in fact. And since no one else in the workplace is likely to stand up for a freeloader, the main thing that you would have to do to retain your position is somehow convince others that you were working, even when you were not.
Imagine too that this unscrupulous version of you shares an office with someone else: a professional. Think of this person however you like—the important thing is that your officemate actually does her work and, in consequence, potentially shows you up merely by doing what she is expected to do. She may or may not take interest in your performance, but she certainly has a vantage from which to notice that you are not working. If anyone represented a risk to your scam, it is your officemate. What might you do then?
First of all, you would have to do some work. The minimum, to be sure, but no one who needs to earn a living manages to avoid work altogether outside of a sinecure. To advance the lie of your professional usefulness, you must do a little work, and you must do it as conspicuously as possible. If, for example, a volunteer for some high-profile task was requested during a meeting, you might very nobly step forward. In the end, you really need do very little of the actual work involved: much of it could be delegated to people in subordinate positions, or you could solicit the help of a peer or several (Hey buddy! I need a huge favor…) with promises to pay them back down the road. The important thing is that everyone saw you step up—something which you will remind the rest of the team of often while exaggerating the amount of work that you truly did.
Another thing you could do is to keep things fun around the office. This would not be hard: you don’t care to do any actual work anyway, so you could be a constant source of amusement. The more that people like you, the less willing they will be to hold you accountable for your contemptible work ethic. If you can, make friends with your supervisor in particular. For someone like you, it is more important to be well-liked than to ever do any real work. Move as many relationships as possible from a professional frame to a personal one.
Who wants take out? It’s on me! | Don’t work so hard! Loosen up! | Let’s go for drinks after work! | Check out this hilarious video. | Man, have I got a story for you.
And so on. All day. Every day. Work can wait.
Yes, keep things light! And once people like you, you might as well partner with them on projects. Partnership means that there is credit to claim if a project goes well, and someone to blame if it does not. In the former instance, which will be the usual case, you could do but a small part of the work while taking most of the credit, just by persistently talking to different coworkers about how YOU are working on said assignment whenever the opportunity arose. It’s not a lie, technically. As long as your partners don’t overhear you taking most of the credit, your reputation as an effective employee should be secure. You will naturally be very grateful to them for their diligence and highly complimentary of their skill when no one else is around.
From there, you can excuse yourself from working on your regular work because of your devotion to the special projects, and excuse yourself from working on the special projects because of your devotion to your regular work. As the fun-loving social center of the workplace, you will be connected enough to keep the relevant parties from figuring out what’s going on, and if someone does start to catch on and complain, you’ll hear about it early enough to do damage control. It’s unlikely that anyone would have enough perspective to ever know exactly what you’ve been up to anyway, since the kind of accounting that would require isn’t necessary for the majority of people who honestly (and foolishly, as far as you’re concerned) deliver what is expected of them.
In order to keep this con going strong, a little expense shall go a long way. You know how charities like to send out little gifts in the mail, notepads or maybe even just a coin, in order to invoke your sense of reciprocity? A few spontaneous bargain bin gifts will assure people around the office that you’re really a good guy. People generally don’t give one another gifts unless it’s a special occasion, so an unprompted present will engender goodwill, even if it’s just some tchotchke that they wouldn’t waste their spare change on. (It will also make it harder to believe that you’re actually stealing most of their credit.) Handled well enough, your strategic curating of goodwill should permit the distribution of most of your workload around the office, allowing you to roll up your sleeves only when in view of management or to establish a plausible tableau of productivity to be recalled later on.
But what about your officemate? Focused, head down, trying to concentrate while you’re chatting away at your desk? She’s no fun. I don’t know what her problem is. Dollar store gifts for her especially. You need to make her let her guard down, because you must construct a narrative for her as well—one crafted to contrast with your own.
Assist her with something, if you can—even if you have to impose your “support” where it’s not wanted. She can either reject it (I offered to help! She’s just not a team player.) or accept it and enter into your debt. In the latter instance, you will remind her of how you helped her that one particular time for the next dozen favors you ask of her. You will remind others, as well. Work tends to get assigned to the people who actually get it done, so if you happen to step in and assist with something that should have been your job in the first place, ironically it will seem like you're going above and beyond. But the really clever move here is to offer help, then turn around and delegate the work to someone else while complaining about your officemate’s inability to get her own work done. The beauty of this is that you’re simultaneously credited for a favor while cultivating resentment towards her.
This kind of reputation destruction is available and easily accomplished whenever you can leverage trust to advance your preferred narrative by relentlessly imagining and voicing an unfavorable, critical view of her various behaviors.
Does she use productivity apps on her smartphone? Take the occasional personal call? Point it out. Look at her: she’s on her phone constantly. I don’t think she does any real work over there.
Does she delegate anything of her own volition? Why are you doing her job for her? She gets paid a lot of money to do that. (Later that week, talking to the same person: Hey, I’m really sorry about this, but I need a huge favor. Help me out and lunch is on me today.)
There’s no limit to this trick. Did she call out sick? Wasn’t she just sick a few weeks ago? Does she have any sick days left? Haha. Did she raise her voice at you for using her desk like a picnic table when she was out of the office? She completely freaked out on me the other day. I think she’s unstable. Did she leave early to pick up her dog from the vet? There she goes again. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her work a full eight hours… She will make a mistake, sooner or later. Everyone does at some point. Make a note of it. Talk about this inexcusable error with people around the office. Bring it up often. The next time she slips up, do the same. It will start to look like a pattern. Do this enough and it becomes her brand.
Before you know it, you’re the fun guy whose work nonetheless inexplicably “gets done”. Your coworker? You’re actually carrying her. A lot of people will believe the story you have been telling them for months before the evidence of their own eyes, no matter how much quality work she submits.
The deception works because attention is being deliberately focused in a manipulative way on limited evidence. One conspicuous instance of volunteering is represented as an ethic. A small contribution to an assignment is represented as equal involvement. Strategic, superficial camaraderie is represented as genuine friendship. A cheap gift is taken as a sign of generosity and goodness, just as a single, oft-recalled favor is meant to indicate reciprocity.
Likewise with the professional coworker. Occasional calls, when repeatedly highlighted, appear to be a habit. Standard delegation, if always called to attention in a negative light, looks like exploitation, just as some instances of begrudgingly-accepted assistance can be made to look like dependence. Normal mistakes and absences, foregrounded and recalled often, become in the imagination a pattern of incompetence and truancy.
Deception does not require lying. People can be misled with facts alone.
One’s mind simply cannot be put to everything there is to notice, and the trick showcased above exploits this universal human limitation. What you choose to pay attention to is, for the most part, your “perspective”, and it is part of our social nature to enhance this in relation to another’s perspective. A friend or even a principled adversary will point out important things that you have missed; a manipulator will instead point out things that reinforce their agenda. Under the sway of a manipulator, perspective is directed away from the truth and towards a false narrative. And while exaggeration or outright dishonesty can certainly enhance the manipulation, the most effective element involved is the necessarily limited evidence that we are deviously made to focus on. A lie could be refuted; the truth cannot. We trust what we witness1, overlooking how the incomplete picture may be filled in with a bogus narrative fabricated to take advantage of our trust.
In a fashion, it is quite common for us to fool ourselves in this manner, and we are typically cautioned against the self-made varieties of this error in numerous ways. Prejudice and stereotyping are deprecated when observed. (Think “judging a book by its cover”, or making “snap judgments”.) Listening to both or all sides is conventional wisdom (which is also enshrined in the due process of the American legal system). The attribution of character over circumstance to explain behaviors is known in the field of psychology as fundamental attribution error, and cherry-picking is a condemnable fallacy of data analysis. But if there is vocabulary for when an error of this sort is purposely induced in another person by malicious actors, I cannot think of it. Deceive, mislead, and misdirect can be used, but none quite capture the key emphasis on the underhanded use of small pieces of truth in service of making someone believe what is not true. If I have not missed a better word, it is sorely needed, for it is altogether too easy to fall prey to such ruses without suitable language to identify them. And—perhaps worse—without a dedicated, illustrative word or phrase, it remains rather difficult for anyone to convincingly complain of being victimized by the truth, however selectively it might be conveyed.
And ever Wormtongue’s whispering was in your ears, poisoning your thoughts, chilling your heart, weakening your limbs, while others watched and could do nothing, for your will was in his keeping.
Dialogue from J.R.R. Tolkein’s “Lord of The Rings, book two: The Two Towers”
When the act of using limited evidence to deceive is given as a defining behavior to someone in story, the resultant characters can be positively archetypal. Certainly Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello fits the bill, contriving for other characters to see each other and think as he wishes them to, ruthlessly playing them all for fools in a deadly frenzy of egotistical manipulation. The machinations of the counselor Gríma (aptly known as Wormtongue) in J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of The Rings saga are only alluded to, but as adviser to his king he is said to supply “twisted tales and crooked promptings” which enfeeble his monarch and the kingdom alike. Such masterminds and schemers frequently appear in less definitive forms too: “corrupters of truth” in myth, fiction, and religion, ranging from the merely diabolical to literal demons, whispering in the ears of the fallible and the virtuous alike with compelling partial visions of some matter while concealing the entire story for nefarious purposes. The fantastical wish-granting fiend is one sort, forever tempting the ingenuous with grandiose promises while obscuring the ultimate cost; the surprise villain is another variety, leading allies and audiences down a crooked path with select clues and misdirection. When the ruse is not discovered in time, such stories tell us that giving insufficient attention to the entire truth may deliver unto the deceived a fate from the full range of tragic outcomes: everything from petty personal misfortunes to the loss of a soul, all the way to tremendous mistakes of world-changing consequence.
It is with good cause that artists and prophets do seek to expose such devils. Consider how it would be troublesome enough to only ever notice only the bad in any situation, or to only ever notice the good: anyone can see, when a person is so inclined by temperament, just how hard as it to adjust one’s thinking to suit various circumstances in our complex environment. But to encourage such polarized views intentionally, and further, to apply creative will to the matter with the end of aggrandizing oneself or injuring someone else? This is abominable stuff. To merely call it fraud would be too kind.
And the scope of this trickery is hardly limited to the personal sphere. Consider what a malicious, curated focus on limited evidence can do at scale. Indeed, what happens when this shameful game of unfairly promoting one side and vilifying the other is employed on the political level? What groups, even now, are we being directed to see only through a narrow lens aimed at scenes specifically selected to provoke us, and who stands to benefit from this distortion? In national or global terms, the information we consume is necessarily limited, and its brokers are too frequently motivated by something other than truth—especially with regards to factional politics, where the entire game often boils down to convincing enough people that your side is righteous and the other is corrupt. (And if you instantly imagine such shenanigans to be the exclusive strategy of your political enemies and never your own side, I implore you to reflect on this essay’s theme a while longer.)
Truth, alas, can be made to serve the devil. Parceled out deviously, it can ruin reputations, scapegoat whole categories of people, or divide an entire country. It is imperative that individuals of conscience take notice when some party, be it a person or a political group or a media entity (and whether you have an affinity with them or not) always seeks to nudge their attention in the same direction, and instead push themselves to look always for evidence to the contrary.
Just because you are being told the truth does not mean you are not being misled.
“Select the facts and you manipulate the truth!” I tried to license the linked comic strip for insertion into the body of this essay, but Andrews McMeel Licensing does not license Calvin & Hobbes for web use. I suspect that this is creator Bill Watterson’s preference, and I would not blame him for it. That said, it would have been worth the $45 licensing fee to include it, despite the free alternative of the link.