Towards a General Theory of Hoaxes

There is no end to hoaxes, impostures, frauds and fakes, so it was difficult to know where to begin. From the moment I started collecting Australian hoaxes some years ago with a view to giving them narrative coherence, I became conscious of the almost daily media reports about some new act of calculated deception.

Down the ages, the kind of everyday hoaxes that are reported regularly have for the most part involved three things—wealth, health and faith. In the wealth area, we are used to hearing everything from confidence tricksters of various kinds who deprive people of a few dollars through to huge financial swindles that cause losses in the hundreds of millions. As for health, the television current affairs programs are constantly shirt-fronting the quacks and charlatans who peddle dodgy vitamins and unlikely cancer treatments. Gurus with feet of clay continue to form cults and dupe their believers into giving up not only their money but often their bodies and sometimes their lives.

I take a hoax to be any plausible falsehood that people can and do want to believe in. In common usage, the word hoax is not confined to any particular mode of deception. For example, when visiting my bank’s website I am warned about hoax e-mail messages that ask for my account details, something, I am reminded, my bank would never do. For a while I could even view some examples of these hoax messages, exhibited like a collection of confiscated weapons you might see displayed in a prison museum. Some hoaxers laugh all the way to the bank, while others who commit fraud or perpetrate bomb hoaxes may go straight to jail.

There are near-hoaxes, false hoaxes and what I would term true fakes, which are inventions that themselves make no claim to be true but are nevertheless taken to be true. A publisher’s dream must be the novel which, though marketed expressly as a work of fiction, is nevertheless believed in as if it were non-fiction. Such a one is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a thriller whose sales reputedly put it among the biggest-selling books ever.

Too vast a subject to be contained within the pages of one book, there is now a sprawling online museum of global hoaxes “curated” by Alex Boese, which is continually updated. There are so many hoaxes in the publishing industry alone that in the United States the phenomenon has been given a new word—faketion.

After a while these myriad deceptions start to form predictable patterns, though like other familiar expressions of human behaviour they never cease to amaze. The explanation for all this hoaxing may lie in a paradox of human nature, which doesn’t seem to have changed since pre-historical times.

The paradox is simply this: humans are both remarkably deceptive in their behaviour towards other humans and at the same time remarkably trusting. Evolutionary psychology tells us that the bigger the brain, the more complex the social interaction and the more calculating and manipulative the species. Studies of our nearest relatives among the primates reveal that the sort of scheming we might call Machiavellian is the norm. Anthropologist Steven Mithen sums up the findings in The Prehistory of the Mind:

The two centrepieces of social intelligence are the possession of social intelligence about other individuals, in terms of knowing who friends and allies are, and the ability to infer the mental states of those individuals. When we watch chimpanzees engage in deception of others, we can be confident that both are working together smoothly.

Deception often precedes conception, and we are implicated in a matrix of deceit from the moment we are born. Babies, we know, in their helplessness are adept at manipulating their parents’ emotions by displays of distress. Children don’t stop lying, they just get better at it, and throughout our lives we feel the need to appear as something we are not, and we are constantly being invited by others to believe in things that are not true in ways that can be crude or sophisticated. From very early on, we need or want attention and we do what it takes to gain it through whatever means we have at our disposal.

Not all acts of deception between humans are designed with exploitation in mind or in order to serve an ulterior motive. Good manners, for example, is the art of treating everyone equally and not letting someone know what you really think of them lest you hurt or offend them. Politeness is often extended even to those we despise—this has actually been suggested as an effective social weapon—and in general we try to hide the primal part of our nature from the gaze of the world. The Slovenian social theorist Slavo Zizek went so far as to say that the basis of civilisation is hypocrisy.

Each of us possesses a secret self unknown and unknowable to anyone else. Though deep down we know ourselves to be capable of some form of deceit, we are constantly moved by what we perceive to be sincerity in others. In the current cant, being “passionate” about something is valued highly in our culture, at least rhetorically, since it is taken as a sign of genuine, unselfconscious commitment. But of course even that can be faked. As the American comedian George Burns observed: “The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” When we respond to seemingly spontaneous displays of emotion, are we impressed most of all by the thing itself or by how realistic it seems?

If we are all constantly deceiving others for reasons that are both good and bad, then it follows that we are all being deceived to the same extent for better or worse by everyone with whom we come into contact. “There’s a sucker born every minute” is a saying usually attributed to P.T. Barnum, the immensely influential nineteenth-century American impresario who built a whole career out of hoaxes, transforming carnival sideshows into the early forms of mass entertainment.

Though Barnum was happy to take the credit for this observation, what he really said was “The people like to be humbugged”, which is perhaps even closer to the uncomfortable truth. Hoaxes can reveal just how readily we embrace unreality, though I suggest that in general we would prefer to do this on our own terms and not on those of the deceiver.

We are such easy prey for hoaxers because of the way our human brains are wired. Humans, we know, are an intensely social species. Without trust in people to whom we are not related or don’t know intimately there would be no confidence, no co-operation, no society and ultimately no civilisation. So perhaps gullibility, or suggestibility, is as important to civilisation as hypocrisy.

Then again, it is arguable that all the sensational deceptions that feature constantly in the media are newsworthy because in the everyday lives of most people they are relatively rare; in the vast majority of transactions that make up the daily grind our trust is rewarded or else not abused in any serious way. So perhaps we are not aware just how much we trust each other most of the time. It is said that the greatest lie is the one that is never uncovered.

Our self-esteem depends on us feeling that others whose opinions we value like and respect us. In seeking to persuade others of how wonderful and indispensable we are, we are also working to convince ourselves. Do we realise the extent to which we believe in the lies we tell ourselves, or can we? “Nothing is so difficult,” wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “as not deceiving oneself.”

Since it is a natural part of human nature to want to convey the impression to others that we are attractive, successful and secure, our consumer economy is geared to facilitating that desire and providing, in commercial terms, something like reassurance. Consumers are most susceptible to products that promise health, wealth and popularity, which is why the advertising industry, for example, works to associate virtually every product with these aspirations.

Though it may make us vulnerable to vanity, prejudice, emotion, pigheadedness and cause other impairments to rational thought or boosters to delusion, our susceptibility to deception and self-deception is also essential in obeying the first law of nature, self-preservation. T.S. Eliot famously wrote that mankind cannot bear too much reality, and as the psychologist and author Cordelia Fine wisely and wittily points out, an absence of a sense of unreality is disastrous for our mental health:

There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed.

At its best, self-deception is an expression of the optimism that drives us to achieve our ambitions and make a difference in the world. At the same time, however, uncontrollable fantasy—what is termed confabulation—is of equal concern to clinicians as depression.

Imagination is both our greatest strength as a species and our most serious weakness. Illusion and delusion are two sides of the one evolutionary coin. Putting dreams into action has led to all the discoveries and inventions that further the development of human society. The parallel process of seeking to redefine reality by creating an ideal society has also been the cause of all the misery in the world, as the countless victims of totalitarian regimes or utopian cults can testify.

Hoaxes are universal, without cultural or ethnic or national boundaries. Age and gender are not determining factors, nor does the reach or frequency of hoaxing have anything to do with the level of education or a person’s political or religious affiliation.

The non-partisan nature of political hoaxes demonstrates that neither the political Right nor the Left has a monopoly on the whole truth. No philosophy or religion can in and of itself provide a safeguard against hoaxes. Systems of belief as such can work to enshrine it. Indeed the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume asserted that all belief is irrational. It is a sobering exercise to ask yourself how much of what you believe you can actually prove. So too is considering to what extent does the fact that you are inclined to agree with someone depend on whether you like that person, or vice versa.

No profession, no matter how learned, is immune to promoting or being seduced by deception or delusion. Academics and journalists, among whom we might expect to find people with a sharper eye for a fake or a phony than most, are not only regularly taken in by hoaxes but can also be the source of them. Editors, publishers, even judges of awards have all been heavily implicated in literary hoaxes, which shows that despite the fact that the cultural gatekeepers and arbiters are assumed to know what they are doing, it could well be that they do not, or else they are complicit in the deception, which raises the possibility that culture is a sham.

I don’t mean to sound unduly harsh on the humanities. Even in those parts of culture where objective standards are firmly established and are thought to operate, hoaxes can flourish. Scientists, judges, doctors—they’ve all become involved in hoaxes at some point as victims or perpetrators or facilitators, though they are also in the front line, as are those of their colleagues in the humanities who are capable of thinking critically, in the never-ending struggle against lies and falsehood.

The specific incidences of hoaxes are a combination of the peculiar circumstances operating there and then. Hoaxes are creatures of historical change, mutating in order to regenerate like each winter’s new flu virus. At any given moment in history some hoaxes are more likely to deceive than others. Hoaxers and fakers operate at a point just beyond the limits of the knowledge of their victims and just within the bounds of their victims’ credulity. A hoax positioned too close to the known facts would immediately be rumbled, but if the hoax is situated too far from common knowledge and received wisdom then the ruse won’t be taken seriously. There is, in short, an art of deception.

It is in areas where belief runs a little ahead of personal knowledge and experience that the hoaxer can work most effectively. Hoaxes grow best in the fertile ground of delusion, manured by prejudice and preconceived ideas. Perceived irreconcilable differences between groups of people and the existence of a gap in knowledge and understanding between them all work in the hoaxer’s favour.

If someone is implacably prejudiced along racial, ethnic, gender as well as political or religious lines then that person is more likely to believe that people who appear different or think differently are lesser, or, if the prejudice takes a positive form, greater human beings. For it is not just racial hatred that nurtures hoaxes, but equally also the misguided assumption as to the moral superiority of other peoples, as in the historical notion in the West of “the noble savage”.

Geographically speaking, the less someone knows about another part of the world, and the more remote that person is from it, the more likely it is that he or she will believe whatever the hoaxer says about the landscape and flora and fauna of the place. Thanks to modern communications and transport we do know much, much more about other peoples and places than was the case even a generation or two ago. Hoaxes based simply on physical distance are less likely to succeed now, though in subtle ways this is still a useful weapon in the hoaxer’s armoury.

Our individual responses to delusions and deceptions are magnified and confirmed when they can be shared. Hoaxes gain from the widest possible acceptance among their target audience, as Barnum, whose most popular hoaxes included mermaids, dwarves, “Siamese” twins and bearded ladies, acknowledged when he declared that “Every crowd has a silver lining”.

The sum total of human knowledge about the world we live in and life in general has increased exponentially in the historical period, which has altered the content and to some extent the form of hoaxes. The invention of the printing press assisted in the spread of knowledge and thus helped overcome ignorance and superstition, but it also provided an equally convenient means for hoaxers to get their message across. Modern communications technology such as the internet has made hoaxes easier to detect, but also made them easier to create in the first place.

One quick illustration of the changing nature of mass panic is provided by the reaction to the years 1000 and 2000, which are figures on the Roman calendar, a purely human invention to measure time that is still not recognised by all of the world’s people. In the year 1000, historians tell us that millenarian anxiety expressed itself in the apparently widespread belief that the end of the world was at hand, though whether it was simply because of the date is disputed. In The End of Time, a study of millenarianism, Damian Thompson offers this assessment: “The Terrors of the Year 1000 might be a myth, but there can be no denying the sense of doom that permeates so many documents of the period.”

In 2000, there were a few fringe cults scattered throughout the world whose members believed that doomsday had arrived, but the more general fear was secular and focused on the so-called millennium bug that could, we were told, cause the world’s computers to malfunction with catastrophic effects. Whether or not the threat posed by the millennium bug was ever real remains open to question. Were the elaborate and costly protections taken against it needed?

The millennium bug may or may not have been a furphy, but the year 2000 was not allowed to pass without occasioning some of the more traditional forms of hoaxing. The Australian Securities and Investment Commission, the taxpayer-funded federal government body intended to protect consumers, decided to set up, according to its own report, “a fake internet investment site, www.smbi.com.au, telling people it was a sure thing they would triple their money in fifteen months if they invested in Millennium Bug Insurance (MBI). The site claimed MBI was offering blue chip companies insurance against losses from the Year 2000 Millennium Bug.” On the basis of the website alone, which was deliberately launched on April Fool’s Day, 1999, ASIC claimed that “10,200 people visited the fake site, 233 people committed themselves to $10,000 and $50,000 investment packages and 1212 people asked for more information about the investment”.

It is perfectly possible to be rational, empirically minded and sceptical in a part of our mental lives and remain vulnerable to the power of suggestion in other areas. We may even be aware of this division in others if not conscious of it in ourselves. Francis Wheen, author of How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, observes:

It never ceases to surprise me: people I know who appear to be intelligent people you then discover to have some fantastic eccentric peccadillo—they can’t get out of bed in the morning, for instance, without reading what [British astrologer] Jonathan Cainer says in his horoscope. So faith and reason in that sense can often coexist in the same person.

One of Wheen’s examples of the faith–reason mind split is Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the best-known rationalist in fiction, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle himself believed in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden and, in common with many intelligent people of his era, he was a devotee of spiritualism.

An Australian example of the coexistence of faith and reason is the second prime minister and one of the founders of Federation, Alfred Deakin, who in his youth believed that he possessed supernatural powers. Deakin was a devotee of theosophy and thus was in touch with the spirit world, a contact that apparently was authenticated by images of ghosts and apparitions captured by the then new and purportedly truth-telling technology of photography, the same medium that facilitated the fabrication of the Cottingley fairies that so enthralled Arthur Conan Doyle.

If those individuals ranked as the great and good are susceptible to delusion, however quarantined it may be within their otherwise rational minds, how then do we approach hoaxing? If it is so ubiquitous, why do we even care?

Well, gullible and deceptive as we are, and however tenuous the grip we have on reality, humans desire to know the truth. As Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Strangroom argue in Why Truth Matters:

Humans are the only entities in the entire universe, for all we know, who have the capacity to make truth their object. The other needs and wishes, the ones that can conflict with truth, the needs and wishes for contentment, happiness, comfort, feelings of security and safety and being protected, are ones that other beings can want and strive for after a fashion. But truth? No.

A theory of hoaxes, then, is an attempt to get a little closer to the truth about falsehood, to understand a bit more about how and why some people have been convinced by the most preposterous fakes and can swallow often outrageous lies. In looking at past hoaxes and thereby understanding more about how hoaxes arise, we may learn a bit more about our own susceptibility to deception and self-deception, and perhaps try to think a little more critically about some of the assumptions we carry around with us in our everyday lives which influence the choices we make.

Our own internal bullshit detector is not infallible, but it is probably our best protection against fakery and falsehood. One of the lessons that emerges from the study of hoaxes is that a story is more likely than not to be a hoax when it is either too good, or too bad, to be true. An obvious tip would be to try to avoid holding preconceived ideas and keep an open mind. Hoaxes all too often make what we don’t know dovetail with what we think we do know. The value of intuition and common sense in this regard should not be discontented. When someone wants to convince you of something, what could their self-interest be in doing so?

Humans are not only truth-seekers, they are also ethical beings, and here again I think the study of hoaxes is instructive. How we feel about a particular hoax depends on where we stand in relation to it. The further removed we are from a hoax in time and space the more likely we are to view it with detachment and to indulge in the natural human feelings of delight and relief in the foolishness and misfortune of others. If a hoax appears to discredit a person or position we don’t like, or otherwise confirms our biases, then we are likely to approve of it as being a hoax in the public interest. Our feelings tend to be more sharply defined and hostile towards the hoaxer when the victim of the hoax is no one but us.

Simon Caterson’s Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds, from Plato to Norma Khouri was published in November by Arcade Publications of Melbourne (169 pages, $18).