This post discusses “You Can See Everything” in some detail. If you have somehow avoided spoilers to this point but are also interested in seeing a highly touted three-hour documentary, I would strongly suggest you go see the movie first before reading the article. The upside is that if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to or don’t care about spoilers, I think you should understand the article and its argument just fine. Consider yourself spoiler-warned!
At one point in the brilliant new documentary “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder is pressing Elizabeth Holmes on her honesty, and she preposterously proclaims not only that she was honest about everything that happened with Theranos but that she’s never lied, ever, about anything.
In this moment more than any other we can see that she must be a truly sociopathic liar, because nobody would say something that obviously false. And Fielder really presses her: You never told a white lie? You never said you couldn’t make it to a party because you were feeling sick when actually you just didn’t want to go?
She kind of relents at that point, suggesting she didn’t really mean that kind of lie.
Which is striking because her insistence on her own honesty deprives her of the best possible defense of her conduct, namely the clear reality that lots of successful entrepreneurs lie.
Whatever line divides Elizabeth Holmes, a criminal, from any number of successful and celebrated tech C.E.O.s, it cannot actually be that she said things about her product and her company that aren’t true. Just as we’ve all told white lies to get out of awkward social situations, basically everyone in Silicon Valley is telling some whoppers.
In other words, while almost everyone agrees that lying is bad and you shouldn’t do it, it’s also the case that everybody lies. That’s true to the point that the most obviously dishonest thing a person could do, genuinely, is claim to never lie. And yet, despite the universality of this behavior, I think we’ve come to a point where we’re too tolerant of dishonesty — and, even more so, willfully misleading behavior.