ere is a rather poignant truth: Technology has done next to nothing to enhance telling the truth.  That is, it would seem that people are lying more now than ever before.  Flip-flopping, as they say, has become a part of our social reality.  By every indication, people simply say what is convenient.  This is rather striking when one considers that just about anything uttered can be recorded and often is recorded—especially in the case of individuals who are public figures. 

In view of this technological reality, one would have thought that there would have been an "insurgence" in truth telling.  Not so, however: lying is very much à la mode.  The question, though, is this:  Why has lying increased to such a phenomenal extent in a world where it has become a part of reality, at least for public figures, that what is said is recorded?

My explanation is that technology has very much occasioned a kind of disunity of the self.  And we have becoming increasingly adept at wrestling with a set of multiple selves.  Let me explain.

I have a Second Life account.  And while my Second Life activities are boring to the point of shadowing utter non-existence, the point of the matter is that there are a great many people who seem to have genuine alter egos on c—they live a fictitious life that they would not want a soul to know about.  But one hardly needs a Second Life account to pursue an alter ego.  Two cell phones will suffice.  One cell phone will be for me and my wife; and the other will be for the sexual escapades that I will have from time to time.  Like the other women, I need not bring the other cell phone home. 

Technology has made being devious an art form.  Let us see, with an email account that my wife knows nothing about and some anonymous surfing programs, I can engage  in heretofore unimaginable activities on line.  Add a tracphone to the mix, and one can easily enough take one’s on-line acquaintances to the “next level”. 

On my view, these things have contributed to the disunity of the self precisely because they have contributed mightily to people engaging dissimulating behavior in order to keep some activities hidden from others. 

Merely doing something in private is not at all the same as keeping activities hidden from others, though in both cases the activity is kept from the view of others.  There are lots of things that I do in private, where it is not the case that I am hiding the fact that I engage in these activities.  I go to the bathroom in private, though I hardly hide the fact that I go to the bathroom in private. 

Again, people who are romantically involved tend to have sex in private; and they might very well drop a hint that this is what they have done or will be doing at the next available moment: “We will be busy if you know what I mean”.  They do not hide the fact that sex is a part of their lives.  Rather, they are merely private about having sex.

Technology has masterfully exploited the seeming similarity between hiding an activity in which we are engaging and doing that activity in private, as both involve keeping the activity from the view of others.  It is hiding the activity, though, that involves duplicity. 

Technology has made it increasingly easier for us to keep unseemly behavior from the view of others; and thus technology has made it easier for us to be duplicitous.  It was technology that masterfully facilitated the duplicitous behavior on the part of ex-governor Eliot Spitzer. 

Now to the above, we need only add that technology has made it possible for us to doctor images and sound bites with such finesse that we can make things seem other than what they originally were.  I myself as a mere amateur can modify and mix music with sufficient skill that the changes I have made are utterly imperceptible.  I am sure that what I can do with music pales mightily in comparison to what others can do.  What this means, of course, is that it is some instances it is possible to make it appear that a person said just the opposite of what she or he in fact said. 

And with images, one can make a person look pleased when she or he was expressing dismay or the other way around; and so forth. 

So look at what we have.  On the one hand, technology has mightily facilitated the ability to engage in dissimulating behavior.  On the other, technology now makes it possible to alter images and sound bites to such an extent that what counts as fact and reality is readily called into question.  When we put these two things together what we get is that technology has masterfully undermined the commitment to truth in society. 

Or to put the point another way: The will to be truthful is being slowly but surely undermined.   Modern technology and self-disassociation go hand-in-hand together.  This means that the unity of the self that was marvelously valorized by Plato and Kant is being torn asunder by the combination of modernity and technology.  Increasingly, what we are is turning to be no more than what we appear to be at the moment.  A form of multiple-personality disorder is fast becoming the norm.  And perhaps the most poignant proof of this is just the fact that increasingly people seem to think that they are accountable only for what they say at the moment rather than also for what they said in the past.  It is as one is a fool for expecting consistency out of a person. 

This gives an entirely new meaning to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s claim that “A foolish consistency is hobgoblin of little minds”. 

What he meant, surely, is that only a fool would attach more importance to being consistent than to bending with reality.  He did not mean that reality amounts to no more than what a person declares it to mean.  That idea would have made no sense when Emerson penned those famous words.  Technology has allowed precisely this idea to have a heretofore unimaginable resonance in our lives.  What shall we do about it?  What can we do about it. 

We will be too much in the throes of the affliction of a kind of multiple personaliity to rescue ourselves?  I fear that we will be.