George Santos: The da Vinci of our Time

The truth is tricky. Our relationship with the truth is even trickier. As evidence of this tricky relationship, take that great receptacle of human invention and fanciful thinking—the résumé. According to the results of a survey conducted by Resumelab published earlier this week, seven in ten workers admitted to lying on their résumés. The survey also identified how the workers lied, with 52% of respondents saying that they embellished their job responsibilities. 52% of respondents also confessed to inflating their job titles to make them sound more impressive.

Truth in a résumé is pliant, and it’s massaged and it’s sculpted to fit the idealized image the job applicant wishes to project. Responsibilities are dramatized. Accomplishments are hyperbolic. Glib bullet points buttress fancy-sounding job titles. Words and phrases like “strong work-ethic,” “proficiency,” “interpersonal skills,” “highly motivated,” and “enthusiastic” abound. It’s as if the applicants are worried about the skepticism of the faceless HR departments, and as a result lean heavily on participles like “proven” and “demonstrated.” Track records aren’t just track records. They are “proven” track records. Abilities aren’t abilities, but “demonstrated” abilities.

Almost 600 years ago, the first extant résumé was written, and who should have written it but Leonardo da Vinci. It’s fitting, in a sort of sad and ironic way, that someone with as fecund an imagination as da Vinci should be credited with the first résumé because, as the findings of Resumelab suggest, résumés are often works of the imagination.

Da Vinci was thirty years old at the time he wrote his résumé. He was seeking a position in the court of Ludovico Sforza, the de facto Duke of Milan. In his proto-résumé, da Vinci presented himself as a military engineer nonpareil. He created a list of devices that he could build for the Duke’s benefit. These devices highlighted da Vinci’s different engineering abilities.

Da Vinci says that he can build mortars that can “fling small stones almost resembling a storm.” He says that he knows how to “use paths and secret underground tunnels, dug without noise and following tortuous routes, to reach a given place, even if it means passing below a moat or a river.” He knows how to “dry up the water of the moats [during a siege] and how to construct an infinite number of bridges, covered ways, scaling ladders, and other machines for this type of enterprise.” He can construct “fire-throwing engines,” ships “that will resist the heaviest canon fire,” and in describing a vehicle that miraculously anticipates the modern tank, da Vinci says that he can “make covered vehicles, safe and unassailable, which will penetrate enemy ranks with their artillery and destroy the most powerful troops; the infantry may follow them without meeting obstacles or suffering damage.” At the very bottom of his résumé, almost as an addendum, da Vinci mentions that “in painting [I can] do any kind of work as well as any man, whoever he be.”

While da Vinci’s assertion about his artistic ability was certainly true—although there was little artwork to back this assertion up yet—the rest of his résumé was nonsense. It was chimerical. As da Vinci biographer Walter Isaacson writes,

“These boasts were aspirational. He had never been to a battle nor actually built any of the weapons he described. All he had produced thus far were some elegant sketches of concepts for weapons, many of them more fanciful than practical. His letter to Ludovico is thus best regarded not as a reliable catalogue of his actual engineering accomplishments but instead as a glimpse into his hopes and ambitions.”

Aware of the knowledge and skills that would appeal to a beleaguered Duke—Sforza was facing constant threats of rebellion and invasion—da Vinci, like a majority of job-seekers according to the data from Resumelab, lied on his résumé. And if da Vinci is the author of the first résumé, the progenitor of all subsequent résumés, then it’s almost like lying was built into résumé writing from the very beginning.

Salvador Dalí, the great mustachioed surrealist painter, most widely known for his painting of melting clocks in The Persistence of Time, was deeply influenced by da Vinci. He was a student of da Vinci’s paintings, and he was an admirer of the great scope of da Vinci’s interests. Dali would draw on elements of da Vinci’s style in his own work and soon establish himself as one of the foremost painters in the surrealism movement. In the same way that Dali was a descendant of da Vinci the painter, U.S. congressman George Santos is a descendant of da Vinci the résumé-writer. And in the same way that Dali elaborated on da Vinci’s paintings when forging fevered, new surrealistic art, Santos took what existed before him and pushed it to its extremes. As Santos once said, “a lot of people overstate in their resumes, or twist a little bit,” and “if I disappointed anyone by resume embellishment, I am sorry.” But Santos didn’t just “overstate,” or “twist,” or use some “embellishment.” He pushed the art form, and bent and twisted the contours of truth until it wasn’t the truth, until his truths resembled not a little the distorted scenes present in Dali’s art.

Santos claimed to have attended institutions like Baruch college and NYU when he had attended neither. He claimed to have worked for Goldman and Citigroup, and, again, both claims were baseless. Da Vinci’s résumé at least contained a kernel of truth, insofar as da Vinci was truly capable of designing advanced military machines. Santos, instead, almost eschewed the truth entirely in his résumé and thus elevated the art of résumé fakery to a new level, and for this reason, and for this reason only, Santos should be regarded as an innovator on par with da Vinci .

The truth in a résumé is slippery. Fact and fiction are interwoven until a new kind of truth emerges, the almost truth or the very nearly truth. This almost truth, or very nearly truth, is added to our growing repertoire of types of truths. A few weeks ago, people defended comedian Hasan Minhaj, who, it was revealed, had laced his comic anecdotes with lies, by saying that his lies weren’t lies but “emotional truths,” emotional truths that spoke to the alienation and discrimination Muslim Americans experienced in the paranoid Patriot-Act-filled years after 9/11. GOP presidential nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, who sells merchandise covered with the word "truth," including a $35 cotton twill hat on which the word “truth” is blazoned across the front, has campaigned on telling the “truth.” And on his campaign website he lists his ten truths, which, for the sake of clarity, we will refer to as Vivek truths. Truth number three on Vivek’s list of the ten Vivek truths is that “human flourishing requires fossil fuels.”

Truth is a hard thing to nail down. “Fake news” and other such put-downs are bandied about so recklessly that the truth is hard to locate. Soon people just give up on finding the truth, and it’s this resignation that allows sweater-wearing charlatans like Santos to continue lying with impunity. It’s our ambivalence about the truth that allows Senator Bob Menendez to plead his innocence and remain in office despite calls to resign. It’s our ambivalence about the truth that enables, if not encourages, seven in ten people to lie on their résumés.

The alarming frequency with which people lie on their résumés could be symptomatic of a broader malaise. The alarming frequency suggests a culture of tolerating almost-truths, a culture estranged from reality. It’s time to reorient ourselves to the truth, to call a spade a spade, and a liar a liar.