The Most Dishonest Minority
I. Two Kinds of Men: Achilles and Odysseus
Achilles cannot lie because his mind does not split.
I was listening to Michael Sugrue deliver one of his lectures on the Iliad. His voice carried the weight of long study—measured, certain, free from the self-effacing tone that now infects academia. He spoke of the two great men in Homer’s world: Achilles and Odysseus. The former, a force of nature. The latter, a mind sharpened to a knife’s edge. Between them, the entire arc of manhood unfolds. And in that contrast, Sugrue paused to make a deeper point—one that has haunted me since.
Achilles does not lie.
His virtues are few, but they are absolute. When he is angry, he rages. When he is sorrowful, he weeps. When he is hungry, he eats. His actions follow his inner state without deviation or distortion. He reacts without duplicity, and because of this, he is incapable of deceit. He cannot hold a truth and a falsehood in his mind at the same time. He lacks the psychological split that lying requires. So he is honest—brutally, purely. Not by choice, but by nature.
Odysseus is different. His virtue is cleverness. His gift is the lie. He spins tales like a spider weaves silk. He lies to gods, to men, to his own wife. Not out of malice, but out of necessity. His journey home demands cunning. And cunning demands dishonesty.
From Homer’s epics, we glean something elemental. The capacity to lie is bound to mental complexity. Simplicity cannot deceive. Intelligence can. That is the beginning of this inquiry: to ask not merely who lies, but who lies most.
II. The Prerequisite of Lying: Dual Thought
A lie requires two thoughts: the truth and the substitute.
To lie is to fracture the mind. It is to hold two competing realities within the same skull—what is true, and what will be said. The liar must remember both. He must track the real world while spinning an illusion for others to see. He must anticipate how the lie will be received, calculate the risks of exposure, and adjust the story to fit shifting contexts. It is a performance, but more than that—it is a form of intellectual acrobatics.
This is why children struggle to lie well. Their minds are undeveloped. They forget the details, contradict themselves, and reveal the falsehood in their eyes before the words even finish leaving their lips. The complexity required to deceive has not yet taken root. The same is true, in a different way, for the mentally dull.
Lying demands abstraction. It demands the ability to separate appearance from essence, to mask intention behind form. The liar does not speak to express. He speaks to manipulate. That is why animals do not lie. That is why fools speak their minds. And that is why Achilles, who acts more as beast than man, cannot comprehend deceit. He lacks the partitioned self that lies demand.
Dishonesty, then, is not random. It grows in the space between instinct and genius—where thought becomes layered, where motive becomes obscure. Intelligence is its soil. And like all things that grow in secret, dishonesty thrives best when it is neither too weak to form nor too pure to bother. It requires a mind divided.
III. The Intelligence Curve and the Problem of Distribution
Intelligence may be normally distributed, but honesty is not.
Intelligence is not evenly spread. It forms a curve—fat in the middle, thin at the ends. Most people cluster near the average. Fewer are dull. Fewer still are brilliant. This shape governs education, industry, and society itself. Yet when it comes to morality—particularly honesty—this distribution misleads.
One might assume that virtue follows intelligence. That smarter people lie more skillfully. That dumber people lie more clumsily. And that most people lie somewhere in between. But morality does not conform to a bell curve. It curves along a different axis—one tied to self-awareness, not ability.
We have already seen that lying is difficult. It requires cognitive strength. But from that, it does not follow that the strongest minds lie the most. Nor does it follow that the weakest lie the least out of virtue. What follows, instead, is that lying is a skill—but whether it is used depends on character.
So we are left with a question the bell curve cannot answer: which part of the intelligence spectrum is most inclined to deception?
To answer, we must eliminate. The dumbest cannot lie well. The geniuses, perhaps, can—but many won’t. The average? They are neither gifted liars nor natural truth-tellers. They drift with the wind.
That leaves us with two suspects: the dimwits, and the midwits. One group too slow to be average. The other too clever to be wise. If dishonesty thrives in the shadow between ability and conscience, then it is here that we must search.
IV. Why the Dumbest Cannot Lie
The fool is too slow to scheme.
The dullest minds are not honest because they choose to be. They are honest because they must be. Lying is not within their reach. They do not possess the mental scaffolding to build a falsehood, nor the subtlety to support its weight. Their thoughts move in single lines. They say what they see. They feel what they feel. And they speak without disguise.
They are blunt, often crude. They reveal what ought to be concealed. They insult without meaning to. They confess without realizing the cost. Their honesty is not moral but mechanical. They lack the second thought required to edit the first. This makes them frustrating, sometimes dangerous—but not deceitful.
When they lie, their falsehoods crumble under scrutiny. They contradict themselves. They forget what they said. They leave clues strewn behind them like breadcrumbs. Their lies do not persuade. They provoke suspicion.
This is not unique to Homer’s Achilles. It appears across cultures, across eras. In every society, the slow-witted man is known not for cunning, but for simplicity. He is sometimes laughed at, sometimes pitied, occasionally respected—but never feared as a manipulator.
Because he cannot scheme, he cannot deceive. Because he cannot deceive, he cannot corrupt. And because he cannot corrupt, he remains—ironically—the most morally inert figure in the landscape. Not virtuous, not noble, but honest in the same way a stone is heavy or a flame is hot.
His honesty is not a sign of goodness. It is a symptom of limitation.
V. Why Geniuses Tend Toward Sincerity
The genius lies easily in theory, but rarely in practice.
At the opposite end of the curve, we find those with immense intellectual power—thinkers capable of seeing ten moves ahead, of grasping patterns invisible to most. These are the minds that could lie with ease. And yet many of them don’t.
The reason is not moral superiority. It is neurological. Autism—the ghost that haunts the high end of intelligence—reshapes the social faculties. And while not all geniuses are autistic, a disproportionate number are touched by its traits. The distribution is concave. The autistic are rare among the average, but common among the extremes—especially the high.
Autism limits one’s ability to lie effectively. It impairs social manipulation. It removes the instinct to smooth over tensions, to mask discomfort, to tell people what they want to hear. Instead, it produces brutal candor. Facts are stated whether they offend or not. Feelings are disregarded. Truths are spoken when silence would serve better.
These are not the habits of a skilled deceiver. They are the habits of someone uninterested in pretense. Someone who sees lying as a useless complexity. The autistic genius may be capable of deceit in theory, but in practice he finds it irritating, unnecessary, or even immoral. He may not grasp why others lie. He may not care.
And so, once again, we find a kind of honesty born not from virtue but from nature. The genius, like the dullard, is often sincere—though for opposite reasons. One cannot lie. The other will not.
In both cases, dishonesty fails to thrive.
VI. Why Average People Tend Toward Convention
The average man repeats what he hears and fears what he thinks.
The average man is neither too dull to deceive nor too bright to see through the game. He sits in the center of the bell curve, surrounded by others like himself, all speaking the same language, holding the same opinions, reciting the same slogans. His mind is not barren—but it is not original either. He lies, but not to create. He lies to conform.
His dishonesty is borrowed. He does not invent falsehoods. He absorbs them. He repeats them. He clings to them as shields against disapproval. If the lie is popular, he believes it. If the truth is dangerous, he forgets it. What matters is acceptance. What matters is being seen as normal.
So the average man lies by omission. He remains silent when he should speak. He nods along when he should protest. His lies are quiet, passive, woven into the habits of politeness and consensus. He tells them to avoid trouble, not to gain advantage.
This makes him less dangerous than the liar who schemes. But it also makes him complicit. His silence props up the manipulations of others. His cowardice becomes the soil in which more active deceivers plant their seeds. He is not the architect of deception, but he becomes its maintenance worker.
Thus, the average man is not the most dishonest. He is dishonest enough to obey, but not brave enough to challenge. His lies lack imagination. His truth lacks conviction. He does not lead the lie. He follows it.
VII. Dimwit vs. Midwit: The Final Contenders
The midwit understands how to lie and why it works.
We are left with two groups—the dimwit and the midwit. Both sit near the edges of the average, one below and one above. Both are intelligent enough to lie. Neither is intelligent enough to transcend the need.
The dimwit lies poorly. His deceptions are shallow, reactive, and born of embarrassment. He lies to avoid shame. He lies to hide weakness. But his lies lack structure. They collapse under pressure. When questioned, he stammers. When cornered, he contradicts himself. His dishonesty is impulsive. It does not grow from a strategy but from fear.
There is no premeditation in it. No performance. No deeper aim. The dimwit lies the way a child lies—badly and without foresight. He wants to escape blame, to deny what has happened, to salvage dignity. But his mind cannot hold the threads together. His lies are crude tools, and he wields them like a man with gloves on.
The midwit is different. His lies are sharper. More adaptive. He lies not only to others, but to himself. He lies to climb, to signal, to conceal his mediocrity beneath a polished surface of intellectual mimicry. He reads the approved texts, adopts the latest jargon, and dresses his insecurity in the garb of insight. His lies are not desperate—they are cultivated.
He is not lying because he has failed. He lies because he is afraid he will be found out.
And this is the difference. The dimwit lies because he is slow. The midwit lies because he is ambitious.
VIII. Why Midwits Are the Most Dishonest Minority
Midwits lie to survive the meritocracy of appearances.
The midwit lies with intent. He lies with purpose. He lies because he must. Of all the minds along the curve, his is the one most dependent on perception. He is smart enough to know how others see him. But not wise enough to stop caring. So his entire posture becomes a kind of performance—an endless attempt to appear more capable, more insightful, more important than he is.
He is terrified of being mistaken for average. Terrified of being dismissed as stupid. And so, he overcompensates. He dresses his language in complexity. He parrots expert consensus with the urgency of a man clinging to a life raft. He cites studies he hasn't read. He deploys buzzwords he barely understands. All of it to construct the illusion of superiority.
But beneath it all is fear.
The midwit’s lies are not wild inventions. They are socially sanctioned. He lies in the direction of approval. He lies in the name of credentials, institutions, and popular narratives. He tells the kind of lies that earn applause, promotions, tenure. The kind of lies that become policy.
And because of this, his dishonesty is more dangerous than the dimwit’s. The dimwit fails in small, obvious ways. The midwit succeeds in misleading. He rises through the ranks. He shapes discourse. He trains others to lie like him.
Midwits are the most dishonest minority not because they lack intelligence—but because they have just enough to imitate brilliance, and not enough to rise above deceit.
Their lies are their ladder. And they will not stop climbing.