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You know that Fleetwood Mac song with the line, “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.”
I love that song. I’ve just never understood the premise. Who wants to be lied to?
This week, I got my answer.
A slice of America is transfixed by You Can See Everything, the nearly three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Here in LA, it has become the kind of movie people discuss as if we’ve all been assigned the same college essay: Does Elizabeth Holmes know she’s lying?
I find this question fascinating — and troubling. Not because I’m unclear about the answer. But because I don’t understand why we’ve decided a lie means something different if the person telling it has convinced herself it’s true.
John Carreyrou’s reporting for The Wall Street Journal, testimony from former employees and evidence introduced in court documented years of deception at Theranos. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and is serving a federal prison sentence.
But the movie has revived an odd impulse to search for some explanation that might soften the facts. Maybe she believes what she is saying when she lies. Maybe she experiences reality differently. Maybe abusive relationships or neurodivergence mitigate her behavior.
Those things may help us understand a person. They don’t make false things true.
And that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
We live in a culture that increasingly rewards people who say things with absolute confidence, show little embarrassment when proved wrong, and simply keep going. Shamelessness can look remarkably like strength. Confidence can mimic truthfulness. And if someone performs sincerity convincingly enough — I didn’t find Holmes convincing — we start wondering whether believing your own story somehow absolves you of telling it.
Maybe it’s because the truth makes demands of us. It asks us to admit we were fooled. To change our minds. To give up a story we wanted to believe. A lie asks a whole lot less.
I don’t think Holmes presents a great mystery. I think the mystery is us.
In this newsletter: DOJ gets ahead of the vote. Carded at the polls. Family trauma becomes political fodder. From Russia, with lies. When Mississippi needs defending. Kushner’s alleged side accounts. The laptop returns. A Nobel for Melania? Ossoff: a closer look. And the accidental coral cure.
