Mean Girls and Dissimulation

In “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Friedrich Nietzsche brings up the concept of lying and discusses the difference between lying to maintain social niceties and lying to defraud and harm others. Nietzsche distinguishes between the two by saying that lying to maintain relationships is regarded neutrally, or even somewhat positively, while lying to defraud and harm is regarded negatively.

According to Nietzsche, people use dissimulation, or a form of deception where truth is concealed, often out of “boredom and necessity.” In other words, in order to prove an individual’s worth and standing within a group, the individual must deceive others in the group by concealing those negative aspects about themselves that they do not wish the others to know. It’s interesting that Nietzsche mentions that this act is not only done out of necessity, but boredom as well. This would imply that the act of dissimulation is not just an act of survival, but an act that some people enjoy and find amusement in.

In 2004’s Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey, Cady Heron, the protagonist, moves from Africa to an American high school and makes friends with a group of outcasts. Cady and her new friends decide to have Cady infiltrate a clique of popular girls at the school. Not only must Cady lie in order to fit in the new clique, but she witnesses the lies the girls tell each other to keep the peace within the group and eventually finds that she’s beginning to believe their lies and act like the popular girls. In the following clip, Cady’s outcast friends confront her about her dissimulations and how they’re affecting her friendships:

This clip marks the part of the movie where lying has suddenly moved from maintaining social niceties (albeit for a revenge scheme) to harming others. Nietzsche describes this harmful type of liar: “He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him.” Cady’s lying is no longer a source of amusement for the group, so she is rejected.

Nietzsche explains why the group has suddenly begun to hate Cady for escalating the same action that they all initially wanted her to do by pointing out that the group doesn’t hate the action, but the consequences of the action. In other words, people don’t hate lying until it affects them negatively.