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
