People often pride themselves on their ability to spot a lie. "You just know," is what they will tell you.

Before Susan Smith confessed, I wonder how many people "just knew" that she had sent her two boys gliding into a lake to die. Or when Ronald Reagan was recounting to Yitzhak Shamir how as a member of the U.S. Signal Corp he recorded German atrocities, did the Israeli leader know that Reagan actually spent the war in Hollywood?

People lie all the time. They are better at it than most people realize.

There used to be a great game show on television called, "What's My Line?" Three people pretended to have the same line of work. The contestant (and the viewer) had to determine, through careful questioning, who was telling the truth. More often than not, the liar won the shiny new Oldsmobile behind the curtain.

That people lie is not particularly alarming or interesting. The question worth worrying about is, who has a right to the truth and when?

In America, there has always been a healthy tension between society and the individual. Rights and power flow back and forth between the two as the world changes and as we respond to those changes. When it comes to matters of truth, however, it seems the balance of power has shifted to the side of society.

The truth and the search for truth are, on the surface, easily defensible concepts. Of late, truth has been considered of paramount value. Whether it be prosecutors, employers, or insurance companies, anyone looking for truth, for whatever reason, automatically appropriates the high moral ground. This situation has hidden implications.

It’s conceivable that insurance companies may soon require clients to take a DNA test. With a genetic blueprint in hand, a company could determine the probabilities that a person might develop a horrible disease.

They then could change insurance rates according to the more accurate assessment of an individual‘s health risk. Do they have a right to that "truth"?

Drug testing of workers has become accepted. Checking for impairment seems fairly reasonable. But a person can have various and copious amounts of chemicals in his bloodwithout being impaired.

If a company tests for anti-depressants and finds them, should that be information it should be able to use? In the process, the company might discover that someone is taking protease inhibitors (drugs for H.I.V.). Is that germane to the company interests?

The same issue arises on the personal level. If someone asks you an inappropriate question do you have a moral right to lie?

Say you were asked if you've ever had a homosexual experience, or if you have ever spanked your child, or if you have ever cheated on your spouse, or if you have ever lusted after a teenager. How do you respond?

The stock response of the inquisitor would be if you have nothing to hide then you'll tell the truth. It is an argument that misses the point.

The truth doesn't necessarily belong to the one asking questions. Somehow we have begun to assume that it does. I am inclined to believe the person facing such questions should answer any way he or she wants or is able, with the truth, with lies, or with some combination of the two.

The problem, of course, is that the mere asking of the question stains the person being asked. How the individual responds is almost irrelevant. As soon as the question is asked, doubt and speculation float into the air. Judgment is soon to follow.

Tact and propriety have traditionally been what has kept private lives private and public discourse somewhat civilized. But these are qualities that are fading from our lives.

Shock value rules now. It is a cancerous little attitude that we learned from the media, both the tabloid and the less tabloid. If it doesn't shock, it doesn't sell.

Some day, when you are home sick, watch Jerry Springer or Sally Jesse Raphael. No truth is off limits. People love it. The audience goes wild when some poor sap suffers through some horribly awkward and embarrassing situation.

When an issue comes down to society's need to know versus privacy rights of the individual, the judicial world divides the world into public and private figures.

As we have learned ad nauseum from Bob Packwood and Bill Clinton, public figures are fair game for anything. People respond by saying, "just don't run for office".

The problem with this argument is that the distinction between public and private is dubious at best.

Judges often ask two questions when deciding privacy cases: Is the information being published newsworthy, and would the publication be offensive to a reasonable person?

What is newsworthy depends on how one defines his community. What is newsworthy in Ketchum may not be in New York. So a scurrilous story about a business leader here might qualify as being newsworthy, while it wouldn't in other places. And, once something is published other media simply report on the publication event itself.

The big news organizations play this game all the time. If a story is a little too racy or flimsy in fact for them, they will simply wait for The Enquirer to publish it. Then NBC or ABC can report the fact that The Enquirer is doing this. This way they get the story in their news hours while ostensibly maintaining their reputations.

As to what is offensive to a reasonable person, who knows what that means? There are reasonable people living in Shoshone, Idaho and Soho, New York. I bet there are some wildly varying opinions on what is offensive.

We are all potentially subject to irreverent prying. Everyone, sooner or later, is famous for something or other, in some pond, big or small.

So we had better resolve how we feel about the fuzzy subject of truth. The different shades of truth -- the exaggerations of it, the withholding and revealing of it -- are the narratives of our lives. What a person shows to the world, what he doesn't show, are the ways he defines himself. It is where personality is born.

The danger comes about when in our self-defining moments we stray a little too far from reality. Solipsism is not a viable way of life on a planet with five and a half billion people. Just beyond solipsism is insanity. It is a slippery slope, but one worth negotiating.