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illuminate the mental chicaneries that lead us down the road to self-deception. As with the dangers of dehumanization and its role in denying reality, so too is self-deception a dangerous state of mind, allowing individuals to inflict great harm while feeling aligned with the angels. What did William Safire have in mind when he called Hilary Clinton a congenital liar? Congenital refers to a trait that is present in utero, at birth or soon thereafter. Congenital disorders, diseases, or anomalies typically refer to defects caused by a combination of genetic and environmental problems. A cleft lip is an example of a congenital anomaly, one that appears at birth as a gap in the upper lip. Because we don’t have detailed records of Hilary Clinton’s life as a child, it is hard to say whether her lying was congenital in the same way that a hair lip is congenital. We can rule out the in utero and at birth periods because Hilary, like all other children, was not born speaking or lying. These capacities mature. That she developed a tendency to exaggerate and distort is consistent with other reports. She falsely claimed that she was centrally involved in the creation of a Children’s Health Insurance Program, an initiative that was actually created by Senators Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch. She also claimed that she played a significant role in the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland, a comment that Nobel laureate Lord William David Trimble described as “a wee bit silly.” When Safire described Clinton as a congenital liar, what he was referring to was the habitual pattern of fabrication. When patterns of the mind become habits, they are hard to break. Each distortion, rehearsed over and over, becomes part of the fabric of truth. It is a life story that starts as fiction and ends up as non-fiction in the mind of the story-teller. We can begin to understand this transformation by looking at the clinician’s notebook. For more than 100 years, psychiatrists have described a syndrome known as pathological lying. If lying is pathological, it must deviate from some norm. The psychiatrist Charles Dike sums up the essence of this disorder: Pathological liars can believe their lies to the extent that, at least to others, the belief may appear to be delusional; they generally have sound judgment in other matters; it is questionable whether pathological lying is always a conscious act and whether pathological lars always have control over their lies; an external reason for lying (such as financial gain) often appears absent and the internal or psychological purpose for lying is often unclear; the lies in pathological lying are often unplanned and rather impulsive; the pathological liar may become a prisoner of his or her lies; the desired personality of the pathological liar may overwhelm the actual one; pathological lying may sometimes be associated with criminal behavior; the pathological lar may acknowledge, at least in part, the falseness of the tales when energetically challenged; and, in pathological lying, telling lies may often seem to be an end in itself. Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 108 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012854