On Truth and Lies

 On balance, it seems to me that it is much easier to tell the truth than to concoct a lie. Still, this assertion, as oversimplified as it may seem, is dependent upon the habits we have formed about truth telling and lying.  It takes real skill to be a good liar, to be able to create a believable story on the spot that others will accept. The problem lies eventually in the fact that, sooner or later, the consistent liar will get caught up in something that does not fit. In fact at one time I knew a woman who was so talented at “making up stuff” (which is just a generous term for lying) that even some of the most implausible facts somehow made sense…until at last the gullible me started checking, only to discover that the fabric of much of her life was based on deception. What was the harm, some might say? To me it seemed a great betrayal. She became inauthentic to me, someone not quite real. What other parts of her life were based on fiction and fantasy?

Real distinctions...

For little children truth telling and lying don’t have any real distinctions until they are taught them. They simply want to get out from under a problem, and an easy lie does the job. (But this is a topic for another blog.) I think that many adults lie when we hold some shame about ourselves or our circumstances. For some reasons we don’t feel quite right about ourselves as individuals or our backgrounds don’t seem good enough, so we invent new ones…Sometimes the tales get spun out so far that we come to believe them ourselves, which can set us up for an existential crisis down the road, promoting a kind of “here-I-am-wasn’t-I” kind of situation.

Little white ones...

We’ve probably all told a few lies…little white ones, perhaps, so that we don’t have to tell someone we love that her outfit looks God awful and should be burned! Not a good idea either because we can become untrustworthy when the lie announces itself…as it usually does when our faces give us away.

Easier to be truthful...

Finally when we become more confident in who we are and who we have become over time, it somehow seems to be easier to be truthful. When what we say matches what we think of ourselves, we become more real, and saying things we think others want to hear does not become important anymore. What becomes more important is the sense that there is no equivocation between ourselves and our words. We are real; we are authentic, and who cannot fail to be attracted to such people, even if sometimes what we say is difficult to hear…and what we can be trusted to hear may sometimes be difficult as well.

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