It’s just part of our times, something in the postmodern air, that we produce so many people like Jonah Lehrer, charming, inveterate, high-level liars. Publishers have been pulping his books left and right, as plagiarism and made-up interviews are discovered in them. The latest is How We Decide, which, among other things, includes what Lehrer describes as an interview he conducted with an airline pilot. Lehrer quotes him in the book:
“For most of my career, we kind of worked on the concept that the captain was the authority on the aircraft,” says Al Haynes, the captain of Flight 232. “And we lost a few airplanes because of that. Sometimes the captain isn’t as smart as we thought he was…We had 103 years of flying experience there in the cockpit [on Flight 232], trying to get that airplane on the ground. If I hadn’t used CRM, if we had not had everybody’s input, it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have made it.”
Twenty years earlier, at a lecture, the pilot said this:
“Up until 1980, we kind of worked on the concept that the captain was THE authority on the aircraft. What he said, goes. And we lost a few airplanes because of that. Sometimes the captain isn’t as smart as we thought he was … And we had 103 years of flying experience there in the cockpit, trying to get that airplane on the ground … So if I hadn’t used CLR, if we had not let everybody put their input in, it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have made it.”
March 2nd, 2013 at 7:14PM
” . . . [C]harming, inveterate, high-level liars.” I’m a late bloomer, I guess. I was in my mid-30s, maybe, when it sunk in with me how routinely our betters lie. Willful, malicious, self-serving, self-stroking lies.
Recently I talked with a woman who works at a nearby college. She has eleven months until retirement, but, she told me, “I don’t know if I can make it.” She went on, “You can show them [her Ph. D superiors in the grad school] where they’re mistaken, but they just ignore you and insist they’re right.” You’d have thought she’d be talking about her devotion to today’s youth becoming tomorrow’s leaders, all that.
March 3rd, 2013 at 3:18PM
Who are some of the other “charming inveterate high-level liars”?
March 3rd, 2013 at 5:45PM
Seth: The usual suspects: Johann Hari, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, James Frey, Greg Mortenson…