“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
― Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged".
RYAN A SOCIOPATHIC LIAR?
Paul Ryan, the Republican choice for VP this election cycle, comes from a small town in southeastern Wisconsin, where I suspect, as a kid, he never had his mouth washed out with brown soap for lying--as I did. That unpleasant experience, the acrid taste, the constant need to salivate to clear the awful flavor was a regular and pointed reminder for me to watch more carefully how I treated the truth. I can't say I never lied again, but I sure did try hard to break that habit of cutting a path too far away from the truth. And that's what it is-- a bad habit. The Republican VP candidate, Paul Ryan has that habit in a bad way.
I can only suspect that like other habits, Paul's lying came on him slowly, like other forms of addiction. I recall my first puff of experimental tobacco smoke, it gags you, and makes your eyes tear. But the other twelve year-old kids with me didn't notice my watery eyes, and coughing behind my hand, they only saw the blue smoke streaming out of my burning nostrils. As they watched the smoke coiling gracefully above my head, I focused on them. I could see in their eyes a grudging, new-found respect and admiration for a small, skinny, inconsequential sixth grader. That bit of acceptance and admiration made my gagging and eye tearing worth while. That was the gratification,(at first) for my unwise smoking experiment. It worked to impress my peers.
So it was with Ryan. When he first ran for public office as a gangling, unmarried, twenty-something-stripling, he (correctly) felt he was too young, unprepared and insecure to compete. To win, he concluded he must delude and impress the voters. One method he is reported to have used on his campaign trips was to have his sister and her infant accompany him on his campaign stops. He purposely created the erroneous impression that the lovely young woman and her child were his young wife and baby. It worked. He manipulated the voters into thinking he was a mature, stable man with a wife and a growing family. His other ploy was to set up campaign photo-ops at construction sites where he would wear a bright yellow safety "hard hat". He made sure he was photographed in front of the construction machinery to create the false impression that he worked there. He could set that up easily, since his paternal family owned Ryan Construction Central a large construction company. Once again his deception worked! He was able to create the erroneous impression that he was an engineer or construction manager--not a college kid, a political wonk, with an undergraduate degree in politics and economics on which the ink was still wet. He became hooked, addicted to creating false impressions which he pushed on the unsuspecting public. Such behavior fits the definition of a sociopathic liar.
(See Truth about deception: http://www.truthaboutdeception.com/lying-and-deception/confronting-a-partner/compulsive-lying/types-of-liars.html)
Once in office, Ryan's technique worked particularly well in his somewhat backwater, insular, First Congressional district. The First CD is situated in the southeastern corner of Wisconsin stretching from Lake Michigan's shore into the hinterlands of the state and the Route 39 corridor. This portion of Wisconsin has few large cities, scanty big media or newspaper outlets, or influential universities. It is a very "middle of the country" place, where about 80% of the population is urban and nearly ninety percent of the citizenry work either at white-collar (@60%) or blue collar (@30) jobs. It is about 90% white, and about average in median income. Voters trend toward the Republican party. The unsophisticated middle and working class population perhaps became a form of social "tabula rasa", upon which a sociopath could foist all sorts of miss-truths and obfuscations with little chance of someone powerful or sophisticated enough rising up and questioning the veracity of a Congressman's statements--even if that Congressman was just a beardless kid.
Ryan is smart, ambitious, unscrupulous and charming. He used all his wiles to become a master at creating self-aggrandizing and untrue impressions, obfuscations, deceptions, distortions, and-- while smiling charmingly--mouth perfidious statements, mendacious utterances, untruths, half-truths, plain lies and big whoppers. His successes with a largely unsophisticated, believable, simple and decent citizenry, who trusted him, only reinforced his tendency to continue to use these unsavory methods. In a way, his First CD supporters facilitated his mendacious habit.
But since his VP nomination, he has moved onto a larger more sophisticated stage. The nation's and the world's press now parse his every word--and unfortunately for him--his past utterances too. His bad habits and his lies are now exposed on a national stage in an embarrassing and dibilitating display.
Paul Ryan is a self-professed advocate and avid promoter of the works of Ayn Rand, the Russian emigre, angry refugee from the 1917 Communist Revolution, fiction author, and self-professed economist and philosopher. Congressman Ryan who famously claimed that Ayn Rand was the "single most influential person" in his life. He was the Congressman who attended and spoke at Ayn Rand conferences, and insisted that his Congressional staff read "Atlas Shrugged" and other Rand works, and even gave these books to his friends and staffers as Christmas gifts. Such a devotee should have at some point come across a famous quote on lying (see above under header) taken from Rand's fiction, "Atlas Shrugged". (But perhaps, then he just lied about that too.)
The key sentence that should have been underlined in Ryan's personal copy is this: "The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on."
Rand's words were prophetic, for Ryan has become "the slave of his own lies". His mendacious behavior became self-reinforcing and addictive, simply because his untruths worked! This behavior brought him immediate self-gratification, re-election several times over, and political success.
But how much of a "slave" he has become to his lies became apparent to us all just recently when he was interviewed on a right-wing radio talk show. The interviewer brought up Ryan's well publicized athletic prowess. During the ensuing conversation, Ryan mentioned that he continues to run "ten miles" at a clip. The interviewer picked up on that and asked if he had run a marathon. Ryan responded that he had, and his answer implied that he had run several marathons. The logical next question from the interviewer was: "What was your best time?". Ryan, without hesitation answered, "Under three hours," and added, more precisely, "two hours, fifty something." The response of the interviewer was "Wow!"
He understood how exceptional that was (or what a whopper it was). So let's give Ryan the benefit of the doubt and let him claim a two-hour, fifty-nine minute marathon. That would mean that Ryan would have had to have been averaging better than a seven minute (6.9 min) mile for each of the twenty six plus miles of that marathon. Only professional super-athletes can sustain such speeds. For example, the top-ten world-marathon times range from two hours and three minutes to two hours and four minutes--all run by men from Kenya. "Two hours fifty something"--would be something indeed. Hearing this conversation on the radio, some Runner's World journalists tried to research Ryan's actual times. They found only one marathon Ryan had run...twenty years ago. His actual time was "four hours and four minutes". This was a bald-faced lie and not accidental. How could one forget such a thing? A whole hour slogging along in the last part of a marathon run is painful enough to be seared into one's memory. It is not a thing that one would likely forget. Furthernore, four hours was a good time! Why didn't he simply tell the truth?
The reason: he is an habitual liar. One must conclude that such behavior brings into question his suitability for high office. The man, a heart beat away from the Presidency, must be trusted and believed.
Other Paul Ryan lies with a similar modus operandi as in his initial foray into politics as a young man (with a phony hard hat and sister's baby in tow) follow .
- "Accused President Obama’s health care law of funneling money away from Medicare “at the expense of the elderly.” In fact, Medicare’s chief actuary says the law “substantially improves” the system’s finances, and Ryan himself has embraced the same savings.
- Accused Obama of doing “exactly nothing” about recommendations of a bipartisan deficit commission — which Ryan himself helped scuttle.
- Claimed the American people were “cut out” of stimulus spending. Actually, more than a quarter of all stimulus dollars went for tax relief for workers.
- Faulted Obama for failing to deliver a 2008 campaign promise to keep a Wisconsin plant open. It closed less than a month before Obama took office.
- Blamed Obama for the loss of a AAA credit rating for the U.S. Actually, Standard & Poor’s blamed the downgrade on the uncompromising stands of both Republicans and Democrats."
Ryan lies about social security, about medicare, about women's health care issues.
And the band plays on, with Paul Ryan writing and rewriting the fictional lyrics to achieve his own personal advancement. Everytime he opens his moouth remember his personal history and that he never had his mouth washed out with brown soap.
He is a sociopathic liar.
Get the picture?
rjk
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