those with criminal predispositions.
The lie heroic is often justified as a means of noble ends. Youth has an instinct
which is wholesome for viewing moral situations as wholes. Callow casualists
are fond of declaring that it would be a duty to state that their mother was out
when she was in, if it would save her life, although they perhaps would not lie to
save their own. A doctor, many suggested, might tell an overanxious patient or
friend that there was hope, saving his conscience perhaps by reflecting that there
was hope, although they had it while he had none. The end at first in such cases
may be very noble and the fib or quibble very petty, but worse lies for meaner
objects may follow. Youth often describes such situations with exhilaration as if
there were a feeling of easement from the monotonous and tedious obligation of
rigorous literal veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err.
The youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may reverently be
referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the need of keeping which as a
private tribunal is now apparent.
Many adolescents become craven literalists and distinctly morbid and
pseudophobiac, regarding every deviation from scrupulously literal truth as alike
heinous; and many systematized palliatives and casuistic word-splittings,
methods of whispering or silently interpolating the words "not," "perhaps," or "I
think," sometimes said over hundreds of times to neutralize the guilt of intended
or unintended falsehoods, appear in our records as a sad product of bad methods.
Next to the selfish lie for protection—of special psychological interest for
adolescent crime—is what we may call pseudomania, seen especially in
pathological girls in their teens, who are honeycombed with selfishness and
affectation and have a passion for always acting a part, attracting attention, etc.
The recent literature of telepathy and hypnotism furnishes many striking
examples of this diathesis of impostors of both sexes. It is a strange
psychological paradox that some can so deliberately prefer to call black white
and find distinct inebriation in flying diametrically in the face of truth and fact.
The great impostors, whose entire lives have been a fabric of lies, are cases in
point. They find a distinct pleasure not only in the sense of power which their
ability to make trouble gives, but in the sense of making truth a lie, and of
decreeing things into and out of existence.
Sheldon's interesting statistics show that among the institutional activities of
American children,[12] predatory organizations culminate from eleven to fifteen,