I’ve been wondering lately about human deceit | Whale’s Tales

Published 11:00 am Tuesday, March 17, 2026

I was watching a teleplay of Shakespeare’s Macbeth a few weeks ago when the the Scottish King Duncan reflects on a despicable act of treachery.

“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,” said the King of the traitorous Thane of Cawdor. “He was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust.”

Of course, the irony is thick — because the ambitious Macbeth, whom the weird sisters had just prophetically hailed by the traitor’s former title, will in short order hear the king himself bestow that title on him, and then in short order go on to murder his king in Macbeth’s own castle.

Hearing Duncan pronounce those words, I flashed back to a painful lesson I’d received on human dishonesty and masking many years earlier. From no murderous character out of literature, however — from a flesh-and-blood local man who’d let his false front drop for a moment when no one else was around to see and hear it but me.

I had always regarded this man as a friendly sort. Highly intelligent. Easy going. Pleasant to chat with. My parents shared my high opinion of him.

But all of that ended for me on an early fall afternoon when the man dropped by the Whale home to visit my parents for some reason I have long since forgotten. We all talked pleasantly in the front yard for a while before my parents went inside, leaving us alone.

Once out of their earshot, the man wasted no time telling me what he really thought of me. Called me every vile name he could think up, none of which can be repeated in this newspaper.

And when my parents returned, the guy deftly snapped his mask back in place and resumed what we had all taken to be his normal, friendly self. It was one of those occasions when I was so shocked by what had happened I was speechless. And my parents didn’t believe me when I later told them what he’d said.

It’s all set me wondering lately about human deceit, especially at a time when highly-placed officials regularly parade across our screens concocting the most brazen lies as they go. And what’s even more distressing is that a significant portion of the American public believes them, no matter how obvious or ridiculous the falsehood.

Of course, on the continuum of human deceit, what that man showed me that day was fairly minor, given the astonishing examples of, say, psychopaths like Ted Bundy, or Gary Ridgway, or Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler. All these men could mimic human comportment, and pretend empathy they neither possessed nor understood.

Sometimes I think that the lies we tell ourselves are the worst of all: that we’re always right, and cannot ever be wrong.

As Buttercup sang in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “HMS Pinafore”:

“Things are seldom what they seem

Skimmed milk masquerades as cream…”

Indeed, it does.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.