Before you dismiss this thought, consider: human deception and evasion are no different than the animal equivalent of camouflage, spots, and stripes. Charm is our very own version of frilly fins and peacock feathers. Whether it’s a stick insect adapted to cheat by hiding among twigs or a pretty pink orchid mantis lying in wait to devour the next gullible hummingbird looking for a little nectar, the effort to deceive, from camouflage to creative bullshit, is an evolutionary arms race as old as organic life.

Humans are not the only species that lies—far from it, in fact; any living species that can communicate, verbally or nonverbally, has absolutely figured it out. Take, for example, the Cryptostylis orchid, adapted to both look and smell like the alluring backside of the aptly named orchid-dupe wasp—giving a whole new meaning to honey trap. Or the snake-mimic hawkmoth caterpillar, sporting a pattern resembling the face of a snake to mislead and frighten away any bird that might otherwise see a tasty meal.

Trickery is fundamental to interaction, and the instinct to sometimes subvert or misrepresent objective reality to suit our own needs is fundamental to communication.

In the evolution of deceit, language only came about quite recently, billions of years after more basic and more effective tools of the con. Yet there’s some debate that humans may have developed language specifically to manipulate each other in new and cleverer ways. It’s just the latest innovation in a billion-year-old chess game. As Robert Trivers, professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers University, put it: “our most prized possession—language—not only strengthens our ability to lie but greatly extends its range.”¹

Consider: when you lie with your scent, your pattern, or your petals you can only lie about what you are, and you can only lie about the here and now. Lie with words, and you can lie about anything, anyone, anywhere; you can rewrite facts past, present, and future.

Human speech allows deceptions to transcend space and time.

Learning to lie is one of the earliest developmental milestones children have to hit to be considered functional. Because once we know there is truth, the next stage of normal development is to attempt to hide, misrepresent, or swap out that truth. Lying is one of our fundamental building blocks. It’s a big part of not just who but what we are. When it comes to humans, dishonesty is a feature, not a bug.

These first three chapters explore mechanisms of deceit—how we lie and how lying works—through the lens of three of the world’s oldest and most basic cons: the Big Lie, the Shell Game, and the Bait and Switch.

The first, the Big Lie, exploits people’s theory of mind through their intrinsic capacity for disbelief simply by employing a lie so big that to disbelieve it would threaten our collective sense of objective reality. If that’s too bold—and big-lying is a con for the very bold—you can also manipulate another’s physical perception; as the Shell Game exploits hardwired flaws in our perceptual cognition. Last, because it’s natural to believe our own eyes (even as the Shell Game teaches us we should not), a Bait and Switch allows real evidence to misrepresent fact, leaving the mark to believe whatever you want them to believe.

Deception is an evolutionary tool no different from any other. Whether you’re the liar or the dupe, you are acting on instincts, cognitive processes, and abilities billions of years in the making. As we examine these three most basic cons, we will explore not only the nuts and bolts of deception, or how a lie actually works, but also why it works, from its evolutionary function and form to what it reveals about our own. Part I, Lies We Tell Each Other, examines the mechanics of lying, the evolution of deceit, and asks the question How do you tell a lie?

Now relax; you were quite literally born to do this.

The Big Lie’s power lies in its audacity.

Humans require a shared idea of reality to function—for instance, if you drop a ball, it will fall down, not up. Time moves forward. Things are mostly what they appear to be (wet, solid, broken, etc.). Liars are bad; crazy people seem crazy. We all believe these things together, and our faith in a universal objective reality is necessary, even if it’s not always accurate. In the final analysis it does us far more good than harm, but the fact remains: belief in a shared objective reality can be exploited just by flagrantly lying.

We’ll talk more in this chapter about what creates this shared template and expectation that we call “reality,” how we come by it, and why we need it to function, let alone to believe or disbelieve anything at all. But for now the most important thing to remember is that the tighter we adhere to the very normal and very necessary idea of a shared objective reality, the more susceptible we actually are to its subversion.

Mostly fortune.

Alas, MacGregor found that there was not enough of either to be had in the Royal Navy, so in 1811 he ditched it and sailed to South America to fight under the command of the legendary Simón Bolívar, El Libertador, in the Venezuelan war of independence against Spain. Bolívar granted MacGregor a commission, ostensibly on the strength of his record in the Royal Navy, or what he claimed was his record in the Royal Navy. It was harder to fact check people’s resumes in 1811.

MacGregor, though neither a good soldier nor a good leader (he was said to occasionally cut and run, abandoning his men when the odds looked bad), was charming, daring, and flamboyant. He made a name for himself and made his way up through the ranks quite rapidly. So far up the ranks, in fact, that he married Bolívar’s daughter. But having no discernible ideology, nor personal loyalty, MacGregor abandoned La Revolucion and moved on to fight in various other skirmishes throughout the region. And by 1820 he’d discovered actual pay-for-play killing when he took a job as a mercenary on an expedition against a Spanish settlement called Portobello, on the Mosquito Coast of Panama.

It was there he claimed to have encountered the pristine paradise of Poyais, an undiscovered country, found and founded by MacGregor himself, on the Caribbean coast near what is now Nicaragua and Honduras. While Mosquito Coast sounds horribly buggy, it was actually named after the Miskito Amerindians, who dominated the larger region—not the insects. Mosquito derives from the Spanish mosca, or fly. And so in Spanish mosquito means “tiny fly.” The fact that the Miskito kingdom was also full of mosquitos is just one of those creepy coincidences that make you question whether or not retro-causality is really that far-fetched.

Seeing the potential in this marvelous, idyllic new New World, MacGregor persuaded the local potentate (after getting him blind drunk) to sign over to him 12,500 square miles of territory along what is now Honduras’s Black River and to formally acknowledge him as Gregor I, Cazique (prince) of Poyais.² Or possibly he named himself Gregor I, Cazique of Poyais. The latter seems slightly more likely, but it’s impossible to say, as one man was blackout drunk and the other was a really big liar. Either way, in October 1822, after over a decade of fighting and traveling through the jungles of South America, Gregor MacGregor returned to England from this paradise found. But he didn’t come home as mere soldier or even a decorated war hero; MacGregor returned to London as Gregor I, prince of the Caribbean nation of Poyais.³

MacGregor even brought a real-live person back from Poyais, whom he declared an ambassador, as well as a copy of the Poyaisian Constitution and the very land grant and proclamation that made him Cazique of Poyais. He claimed the natives were friendly, that the cities were brimming with culture, and that the land was ripe for development and a Christian colonial ruler—a proposition that was particularly appealing in his native Scotland, as the country had no colonies of its own.

Should anyone require a second source, he pointed them to an entire book published on Poyais, written by one Captain Thomas Strangeways, titled Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, including the Territory of Poyais.^* The captain’s account not only confirmed but expanded on MacGregor’s description and fantastical claims that Poyais was a land of plenty, brimming with untapped natural resources. Most promising, Strangeways’s book described a land of endless summer and triannual harvests, with a tropical climate so warm and inviting that fruit was falling off the trees year-round—and yet remarkably not so hot or wet as to host the sort of biting insects and tropical diseases Europeans had learned to fear.

In addition to the almost unbelievable potential for agriculture, prospecting, or just lying on the beach eating tropical fruit, there were urban opportunities as well, for Poyais already had a capital, called Saint Joseph—a small but fully Western city with roads, houses, public buildings, a bank, a civil service, and even an opera house.⁵ So if neither ...