Everything You Want

My name is Randal Anders and I’m a liar. I’m not ashamed of it either. Far from it. I embrace it. Lying is one of the greatest tools mankind has access too. Of course, I grew up like most kids did, being told how horrible liars are. My mother. My teachers. Pretty much all adults really. It’s like they all got together and came up with the same talking points which they then fed back to us kids. They call lying a sin, enumerating all of the terrible things that happen to people who lie. It’s drummed into us from a young age that telling lies is bad because it hurts other people. We are told that if we lie too much, people will eventually stop believing anything we say and our life will be ruined.

To press that point further, they will usually tell some kind of morally laced story. The one about the boy who cried wolf, anybody? Well, a lot of kids swallowed that junk like it was chocolate ice cream on a one hundred degree day, never suspecting that it’s all manipulation by adults to get us kids to rat on each other, or ourselves, when we do something wrong. It was like watching a dog wolfing down a treat that it doesn’t realize is hiding nasty medicine. Not me. I didn’t fully buy in then and I don’t buy in now. I saw adults lying all the time and having a grand old time but then turning around and making a big deal about us kids always speaking the truth. It seemed to me adults just wanted to keep the fun for themselves.

My mom lied about where my own father went. The summer I was seven she said he died in the war. I never learned what war. The summer I turned thirteen, he got carried off by some islanders where he was working as a journalist and was never heard from again. Every time I asked the answer got stranger so I just quit asking.

My Aunt Hazel hid her shopping bags from her husband in the trunk of the car. When he was gone she would bring her illicit purchases inside to carefully place them as if they had been there all along. Two of my married teachers had an affair. The scandal was hushed up as quickly as possible but some of us kids still heard little snippets about it when the adults thought we were out of ear shot. Mr. Palfry’s, the youth’s soccer coach and volunteer boy scout leader? Turns out he had a raging gambling addiction and had been misappropriating funds for years to carry his expensive habits. I could go on.

My point is, lying doesn’t hurt people. Being bad at lying is what hurts people. Lying is a tool like anything else. If you’re good at it, they’re none the wiser or even happier than before. In fact, I’ve found that the properly used lie is much like cooking oil in a hot pan. It thwarts the heat from burning up your food. Lies keep the wheels of society turning. You can think of it as a more intense kind of diplomacy if that helps. Seriously, everyone lies. Everyone. Anyone who claims they never lie is, you guessed it, lying.

It feels strange being one of the few to have this all figured. I didn’t just figure it out. I embraced it. I didn’t try playing make believe and continue acting like everyone else isn’t also at a minimum fudging the truth sometimes to get by. It’s a tough world and you have to take advantage of every shortcut and easy mode option that presents itself. I refuse to not face the world head on and to accept it for what it really is. Why are there so few people who feel this way? You know what, that’s not entirely true…

Maybe most of them aren’t fully aware of it yet, but in a way they have come to accept that lying is the way of the world. They don’t realize it, whether by sheer stupidity (there is a lot of that) or by willful self-deception (plenty of that too), a lot of them do endorse the liars of society. Not the inept liars, but the good ones. The talented liars. They have embraced them, and by extension, they have welcomed the liar within themselves. A private joke I have with myself is that we may not all have a private chef, but we all have our very own private liar. You know what I mean.

It is that little voice that comes on in our head when we’re in a sticky situation. That voice finds the quickest, easiest route out of whatever rough terrain we’re heading for. It knows what to say to save you from looking bad. It knows how to answer a question so that you don’t make things awkward or get into trouble. It knows what to say to soothe a sensitive ego and how to keep a potentially tense conversation from boiling over. That voice buys us time to think. To recalculate. To come up with a better plan given the newest information. It saves us and all it asks in return is to be listened to.

So many people try to suppress that voice. They try to muffle it, as though it were a screaming child on a plane. They chide themselves over it and waste so much precious time feeling guilty over what was surely meant to be a gift for mankind. Not me. I welcome it. I listen to that voice and it has served me well. It has helped me achieve successes that I know I couldn’t have otherwise. I have it to thank for where I am today. My private motto is that being able to lie is to be able to live another day.

People do what works for them. Lying works for me. I’m good at it. I know when and how to utilize it. Many do not have that insight. For those people trying to tell the truth all of the time no matter what it may cost them probably does work best. Somehow. They don’t have to have an A plus memory like I do for one. Secondly, I’d imagine it gives them the feeling of having the moral high ground. People LOVE their moral high grounds. Remember that. They seem to enjoy the feeling of having something figured out that everyone else does not. That they are contributing in some unique way that few others are. It doesn’t really matter what it is, so long as they can feel adequately superior while they are doing it. Vegans. Non vegans. Electric car drivers. Gas car drivers. Flat earthers. Round Earthers. Liars and people who claim they don’t lie. They all have one thing in common. They think their way is better.

As for me, I’ve learned to enjoy the show. I try to let people be who they are, or rather, who they want me to see them as. You consider yourself to be a funny guy? I will laugh at every joke. You think you are the smartest person in the room? I will listen to your opinion on any subject, even if I happen to know it’s bullshit. You seriously believe your partner is faithful in this business? I won’t say anything to ruin that illusion for you. My angle is to see things from your angle and go from there. If I were a bull, I wouldn’t charge the matador, I would instead offer to carry the burden of his heavy red cape. See how much nicer everything runs on a steady supply of fabrication-oil?

People love lies, and they love the ones who are brave enough to utilize a lie well. The problem is that so many people do not want to handle a lie themselves. They can be admittedly messy and difficult to handle if you do not know what you’re doing, which many do not. Secretly they are grateful when someone else steps up who is willing to do the dirty work for them. Lying is a bit like sewage work in that regard.

Everyone has to use the bathroom at some point, but very few want to deal with the realities of their own produce, if you know what I mean. So some smart person figured out how to make people’s shit disappear for them. But of course, shit doesn’t actually just disappear without a lot of help to do so. It has to have somewhere to go and eventually someone, somewhere, is going to have to do deal with the smelly stuff. Which is where some of my favorite people come into play. People I relate to on a strangely personal level. Sewage workers.

Sewage workers are really just like everybody else, the key difference being that they know their shit stinks, along with everyone else’s, because they must deal with it regularly. They don’t get to just flush it away and forget about it. They, better than almost anyone, know that bottom-line, we’re all really just walking shit-bags. Shit bags trying to forget about it through our various distractions and moral high grounds. It used to depress me but now I just find it amusing and use it to my advantage as often as possible.

It’s like I was saying earlier, people love skilled liars. How do I deduce this despite all of the pious protestations to the contrary? First I will ask you a question. Who are the people who hold some of the biggest and most important positions in the country? Politicians of course! Besides mothers and sewage workers, of course. If folks truly hate liars so vehemently, then why do the people, almost without fail, always seem to vote in the very best liars who applied? Society proclaims its hatred of liars, and yet it persists in choosing the slickest and smoothest candidate on the regular. They choose the polished, silvery-tongued devil over the less polished, plain speaking option whose only real fault was in not throwing out a bunch of glittery, shiny promises to fix everything the way the other candidate easily does.

A politicians bread and butter is being able to make people believe that they are there to rescue everyone. That they know what has gone wrong and they alone can fix it. All they need to accomplish this once elusive dream outcome is power. Elect them. Elect them and they will take care of everything at once. Much like a skilled liar, a talented politician knows how to make people feel like they are important, strong, and in control of their own destiny while simultaneously instilling the idea that they are the victim of a broken society that is designed to keep them down. Society is blamed for why they cannot get ahead in life and they, if elected, can fix it. It’s brilliant stuff really. People swallow it down even quicker than they do the whole bit about how horrible lying is.

So make up your minds already. Do you want to be lied to or not? Past and present trends predict the former. Look, maybe there is some small part of me that would like to try being completely honest, but the reality is that the majority of people don’t vote for honest. They vote for how what is being communicated makes them feel. However you slice it, the honesty cake frequently doesn’t go down smooth.

Who is going to vote for the candidate who gets up there behind the podium and awkwardly says,

“Well. we’re in a rough spot, and I’m not entirely sure how long it’s going to take for us to fix this mess. The answer to correcting our current trajectory isn’t even fixable by one person anyways. This is in no way a one woman, or one man job. It belongs to all of. Anyone who gets up here claiming they alone can solve this country’s problems is either delusional, a liar, or both.

The plain fact is, the answer to fixing our problems rests upon each of us individually. Each of us who make up this collective we call a society. The solution to making our community a healthier, safer, kinder place to live is to start making yourself a healthier, safer, kinder person. It’s about taking personal responsibility and looking out for your neighbors. Ultimately, it’s about becoming the kind of neighbor that you would like your neighbors to be.

Like I said. This isn’t a one person job. It’s a job we all must do. If you elect me for this position of temporary leadership, my only promises to you all is that I will hold myself accountable for my actions and I will do my absolute best to help us all begin the work of improving our communities on a personal level. We will figure the rest out as we go.”

See what I mean? No sparkle. No pizzazz. Just boring talk about self-improvement and responsibility blah blah blah. Who’s going to buy into that? There’s no promises of quick, easy solutions. People crave fast fixes. They salivate over them. So what if it;s the moral equivalent of a McDonald's hamburger and fries? It tastes and feels good in the moment and most people are only living for the moment. It’s what the majority wants apparently. If the majority wants McDonald’s then I’ll be the Golden Arches, baby.

Speaking of majorities, I love them. God are they great. Besides my private liar, I always keep my ears open for what the majority is saying. What they want, I want, even if it’s stupid. I’m not in the business of judging other people’s life choices. I am in the business of giving people what they want. Or, perhaps better expressed, I give people the strong impression that I can give them everything they want. That’s what happens in the big leagues. Your promises have to grow in proportion to the power you could be gaining access.

I will give you what you want. That’s basically been my campaign motto. The majority seems to love it. To love me, and I would love their vote. That’s why I’m getting up on the stage now. Before me is a great, jubilant, adoring crush of people who are eager to hear from me. They want to know things will be different this time. They want to know that I will make everything easier and better for them and their children. The spotlight is on me. I’m about to do what I love to do most in this world. What I’ve been working toward for years. It’s almost like my life really hadn’t begun until this moment. I stare at the crowd and tell the biggest lie of my life.