Overview

The History of Lying is a humorous, satirical tour of human dishonesty-from the first mythic ""I didn't do it"" to deepfakes, bots, and hustle culture. An unnamed, very self-aware narrator walks the reader through how lies evolved from campfire stories and sacred myths into propaganda campaigns, PR spin, social media ""authenticity,"" and the tiny, daily lies you tell yourself in the mirror. The book moves chronologically. Early chapters play with origin stories and trickster gods, treating the serpent-at-the-tree, Loki, Anansi, Coyote and company as humanity's first crash course in temptation, half-truths, and ""plausible deniability."" From there, the narrator follows lies into early states and empires: pharaohs carving god-approved autobiographies into stone, divine kingship as institutionalized fiction, oracles and omens as ambiguity machines, and philosophers inventing the ""noble lie"" to keep the masses in line. Holy wars, colonial ""discoveries,"" and royal courts show how sacred language, flattery, and maps get weaponized to justify conquest, hierarchy, and a lot of very creative inscriptions. In the modern era, lies industrialize. Snake oil salesmen evolve into advertisers, war posters become patriotic fib factories, and ""propaganda"" politely rebrands itself as ""public relations."" The book dissects crisis comms, corporate non-apologies (""We're sorry if you felt offended...""), and motivational hustle speeches that ignore structural reality in favor of ""grind harder"" dogma. Later chapters pivot inward: the ""little lies that hold your life together,"" dating profiles and 2014 selfies, performatively honest social media, and hustle culture's gospel of grind. Throughout, the narrator runs recurring ""Liar's Lab"" segments that explain the psychology underneath-cognitive dissonance, self-serving bias, survivorship bias, motivated reasoning, social comparison, epistemic fatigue-always with jokes and absurd mini case studies. The final stretch tackles politics in the age of ""alternative facts"" and the automation of deceit: outrage cycles, ""fake news"" accusations, deepfake-triggered crises, bot armies, and the way cheap, scalable lying erodes any shared baseline reality. The epilogue zooms back out and sorts lies into three rough families-playful fictions (stories, art), protective lies (emotional cushioning), and predatory lies (fraud, propaganda, gaslighting). The narrator quietly confesses that the book was never a complete ""history of lying"" so much as a history of how desperately humans want their stories to be believed, and teases Book 2, The History of Stealing: if lying rearranges reality in words, stealing rearranges it in matter. It all closes on a wry warning: if you finish the book assuming you're more honest than everyone in it... that might be the most dangerous lie of all.

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