Philanthropy Through Lies, Or, The False Memoir

Few have been able to escape recent discussion of Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea and its inaccuracies/lies/libel, and likely much more insightful things have been said than I will produce here, partially because I must admit that I have not read Three Cups of Tea and did not intend to either before or after the scandal. If you want accurate information about the story you can find it here or here or here. I do have some things to say about the purposes of lying, however, and I also wonder what my readers think. Mortenson's book, about founding schools for girls in Afghanistan, has helped his foundation, also created to run schools in Afghanistan, raise millions of dollars. In order to help sell his book, Mortenson apparently made up a story about being nursed back to health by Afghani villagers after a failed attempt to climb K2. Or perhaps you would like me to rephrase: in order to raise awareness about the need for schools for girls in Afghanistan, Mortenson embellished a story about the kindness of strangers and overestimated the number of schools formed out of his life-altering experience. It is undoubtedly true that Mortenson has worked to found schools in Afghanistan, many of them for girls, so should we care that he wasn't nursed to health or kidnapped by Taliban?

It's difficult to say. Perhaps the whole issue should be a matter of where money is currently going and how effectively it is forming and maintaining schools. My blog is not about philanthropy, however; it is about lies. People lie, embellish, exaggerate, falsify, and prevaricate "for good" all the time, and in many cases we just assume it is happening. Is Greg Mortenson's dishonesty worse than James Frey's, for instance, because Frey only duped Oprah and got millions of people to buy a really crappy book, while Mortenson acquired actual money on potentially false pretenses? Is the main issue money, then? Should we distinguish among who lies to us in what contexts for what goals?