We can't make bricks without clays

Let’s face it. We love to lie.
Lying is almost an inherent part of being human. We lie to friends when the truth is too harsh to reveal; we lie to parents when the truth is too wrong to divulge; we lie to ourselves when the truth is too difficult to deal with. But no matter who you lie to, what you lie about and when you decide to lie, there is one truth that stands.
We lie.

But before we condemn ourselves for the inherent untruthful part of our species’ nature, we must ask ourselves the following question:

Why do we lie?

And the answer to this, I believe lies, in another, similar question:

What on earth is truth?

Any talk about dishonesty must first be matched with a discussion on the implications of honesty itself. Truth is a difficult term to define. What is truth? Who defines it? What drives us toward believing in it? These are questions left for the philosophers and thinkers to answer. But in my amateur opinion, truth is arbitrary. What I hold as my truths will differ from a young Muslim boy living on the streets of Istanbul, or an old Christian woman retiring in her home in Switzerland. In essence, eternal truth does not exist, nor does it matter in the grand scheme of things. Truth, in its entirety, is solely defined by the thinker and only the thinker.

So why then do we lie?

The answer is surprisingly simple.
We lie because we believe our own truths does not match what others’ hold as truths. We lie in order to search for the truth of the majority – the truth that a lot, if not most, of the human beings on the planet believe in. Truth, in contrast to what most people think, can only be found when enough lying has been done. We will only differentiate between falsified information and truthful accounts of experience once we’ve received enough falsified accounts.

Remember: we cannot make bricks without clay.

Now before you accuse this blog of teaching children the wrong thing, let me clarify. I’m not supporting lying, or at least not in the nitty-gritty sense. Lying is not good. Lying is the wrong thing to do when your objective is only to put responsibility that you should’ve owned up to on someone else’s shoulder.
I’m not talking about that type of lying.
I’m talking about fiction. Lying on the grander scheme. Lying in order to ultimately find a greater goal – a greater truth about life, yourself and those around you. A friend’s white lie in order to find out the truth about a situation. An author’s fictional element in his own autobiography in order to get his own point across. Or a father’s lie to his son in order to stress the importance of a concept, idea or rule he’s teaching. These lies are those that guide us to a truth – a betterment of the scenario around you. And these are the lies that are – to some extent – supported by good conscience