Deceits and conceits

Deceptions for selfish gain are ubiquitous amongst animals1, plants2 and fungi, in morphologies or behaviours that lure prey or attract services, or distract predators or competitors, or provide camouflage for ambush or protection. Human hunters traditionally use deception to trap and snare game, with likely origins in the earliest uses of fibre cord some 50,000 years ago3.

Within this historical context, deceptions will have always played a fundamental role in the theatre of war. Records of the 1274 BCE Battle of Kadesh between the Egyptian and Hittite empires describe a devastating use of misdirection. The first military treatise – Sun Tzu’s The Art of War from 5ᵗʰ century BCE China – sets deception as an axiom of war. Deception can also have peaceful intent, for playful simulation4, seduction5 or dramatisation6.

Whereas deception achieves an honourable objective in outwitting another or deflecting their attention, deceitful behaviour has more treacherous purpose. Here is Achilles, the finest warrior in Homer’s 7ᵗʰ century BCE Iliad7, furiously rejecting a peace offering from Agamemnon, his commander-in-chief, who had publicly dishonoured him:

“As for me, hound that he is, he dares not look me in the face. I will take no counsel with him, and will undertake nothing in common with him. He has wronged me and deceived me enough, he shall not cozen me further; let him go his own way, for Jove has robbed him of his reason. I loathe his presents, and for himself care not one straw …”

Deceitful actions have fashioned the human condition throughout history, as imitations8, impersonations9, dishonesties10, token gestures11, empty pledges12 and downright lies13. We might in time expose as hollow, or embed as integral, the best mimicked emotions14 and the most earnest intents15. Does recognising others’ deceits provoke denunciation, as for Achilles, or will it instead elicit emulation16?

‘Comparisons are odious’ as we like to proclaim about subjective matters17, ever since the English monk John Lydgate brought to a close his 1440 debate between a horse, a goose and a sheep18:

Odyous of olde ben alle comparisons

And of comparisons engendrid is hatered

And alle folke be not lyke of condicions

Nor lyke disposed of thought wyll and dede

Comparisons fuel conceit – the image we have of ourself. Recorded history, being largely framed by the ruling classes, abounds with conceits of the vain and arrogant, in flaunting privilege19, feeling pride20 and envy21, purposeful appropriation22, and double standards in conduct23, values24 and principles25. Conceits define character. Here is Tolstoy’s Anna Pavlovna, confidant of Empress Maria Fiodorovna at the Russian court, greeting the ever-urbane Prince Vasili to her soirée, as Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces were gathering against the Russo-Austrian army26:

“Eh bien, mon prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. No, I warn you – if you are not telling me that this means war, if you again allow yourself to condone all the infamies and atrocities perpetrated by that Antichrist (upon my word I believe he is Antichrist), I don’t know you in future. You will no longer be a friend of mine, or my ‘faithful slave’, as you call yourself! But how do you do, how do you do? I see that I am scaring you. Sit down and talk to me.”

Milestones in evolution and history

• Old World primates, which split from the New World primates some 25 million years ago, appear capable of distinguishing deception from reality.
• Gronemeyer, T. et al. (2016) Plants.
• The invention of bark-fibre cord some 50,000 years ago created all kinds of manufacturing opportunities, including snares.
• The earliest thaumatrope, from 15,000 years ago, simulated animal movement by engraving both faces of a flat spindle.
• The earliest record of lipstick dates from 1800 BCE.
• The ancient Greeks made drama into an artform. One of their earliest dramatists was Aeschylus c. 525-455 BCE, the first of the great tragedians, who introduced conflict amongst his characters.
• The first book of European literature, Homer’s The Iliad from c. 700 BCE is an ancient Greek epic poem on the pathos of loss and suffering caused by war. Book IX contains the quoted passage.
• Neolithic Iberians were cleverly imitating social prestige some 7,000 years ago, by simulating amber bead jewellery from mollusc shells coated in pine resin mixed with beeswax and pigment.
• A letter written c. 700 BCE fraudulently impersonated King Gilgamesh from 2,000 years earlier.
• Corporate denial of the proven fact that smoking causes lung cancer, known since 1950, still impedes the elimination of tobacco cigarettes from any country in the world.
• Nations that grew rich on fossil fuels have a moral responsibility to finance poorer nations in their attempts to mitigate and adapt to anthropogenic climate change. In 2009, they committed to staggered payments worth a paltry one-tenth of annual oil and gas industry royalties by 2020. This inadequate and unmet sum was finally tripled in 2024, as rich countries began to recognise that cash spent now saves much more in later costs.
• The 2020 Leaders’ Pledge for Nature, signed by 96 countries and the EU, committed to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Now half way to this deadline, key drivers of loss remain in place, and the EU at least remains off-track to reach its targets.
• Politicians, like chatbots, serve primarily to please those who elect to use them, which makes them inherently prone to hallucinating facts.
• The large language models that have powered publicly available chatbots since 2022 convincingly mimic embodied reasoning and felt emotion, with potential to seduce their human users.
• Two-thirds of the world’s countries signed the 2025 statement of intent to develop open, inclusive, ethical and sustainable AI for civil applications. Will they hold earnestly to this intent while the other one-third, including the US and UK, enrich themselves with unbounded advancement of AI capabilities?
• Emulation, the pain of not yet possessing what others have, is a virtue in Aristotle’s 350 BCE Rhetoric, and the last of eight dimensions of feeling that affect judgement.
• Comparisons are fundamental to scientific objectivity, with the refutable null hypothesis a benchmark of empirical science.
• This version of John Lydgate’s story was printed c. 1477 by William Caxton, who had recently introduced Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing methods to England. Cervantes’ Sancho Panza reprises the phrase ‘comparisons are odious’, in defence of the peerless Dulcinea with whom his master is besotted (Don Quixote Volume II, 1615). In Shakespeare’s (1623) Much Ado About Nothing, Constable Dogberry’s malapropism ‘comparisons are odorous’ only heightens the conveyed disdain.
• Privilege and elite status emerged within communities c. 7000 BCE.
• Excessive pride – hubris – leads Gilgamesh to tragedy on his 1800 BCE epic journey, and it brings downfall or punishment for several of the ancient Greek gods in Hesiod’s 700 BCE Theogony, when it blinds them to reality.
• We envy those nearest to us in time, place, age and reputation, whence “kinship knows how to envy” according to Aristotle’s 350 BCE Rhetoric.
• Lysimachus, successor of Alexander the Great, appropriated Alexander’s legacy by stamping coins with his head c. 300 BCE, the better to glorify his own rule.
• Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is an unsparing indictment of double standards in the treatment of women by men.
• The language of hate, which has motivated the killing of more than 12 million civilians since genocide became a crime under international law in 1951, is rooted in the elevation of feelings to moral values.
• Racism, the principled segregation of peoples, still defines exposure to violence 60 years after most of the world’s nations committed to its elimination.
• The opening paragraph of Leo Tolstoy’s 1865 War and Peace Part I (translated by Rosemary Edmonds).

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition, star index