What About Lying?

Some people have a thing about the truth. They believe we should always be honest, tell people the brutal truth about what you believe even if hurts people’s feelings, damages relationships, closes doors to collaboration that would be ultimately beneficial to all parties. The truth has to be that it’s complicated.

I don’t like to lie and I dislike liars. At the same time I don’t like to be unkind in the face of ignorance. I think that one should be willing to admit when one does not know something rather than offer assurances regarding matters on which one is not qualified to offer an opinion. It is much more honest to say that one is not qualified to offer an opinion rather than offering empty assurances just to make people feel a little better about a situation which is fraught with negative possibilities.

I am excluding situations of outright efforts to deceive and people who lie like they breathe. We all understand the potential evils inherent in this.

And we live in an era when lying has become a political tool, and misinformation has become a political program for nations, political parties and politicians. Get in there with your lie as fast as you can, repeating it as loudly and as often as you can, across the greatest number of  media channels you can access.

 How do we go about dealing with that? What can one do when those who wish to hide the truth, shelter themselves from the consequences of the truth, label everything that you have to say as “fake news”? The truth is that it is exhausting to live in the face of all this stuff that so many actors in the public space are pushing at us.

So many of the lies we face and live with every day have long historic currency. We were told that all monarchs received  their right to rule by divine right, by the will of the creator of the world.

We have been told that all Whites are truthful, honest, virtuous, superior by birth and destined to rule the earth.

We have been told about the threat of Asians and Islamics. What about Trump lying like he breathes, with his border-crossing Latino rapists? Now he has his election scam that is believed by millions and become his Party’s policy. Hail the Chief!

We have been told the lies that all Blacks are stupid, lazy, violent, and worthy only of the tasks assigned to them as slaves.

We have been taught that Jews are stingy, sneaky, rich, control the world, and, according to Mathew’s story written a hundred years after Jesus’ death, Jews were the ones who killed him rather than the Romans. That lie made it easier to attract Romans into being Christian when the Catholic Church was getting organized in 300 C.E. This eternally defamed Jews. How many Jewish Jesuses have paid the price since he passed this way? What about the lies they are telling about Israel?

 I find it very hard to forgive and forget. The Pope closed his eyes to what was happening outside his window when they were sending Italian Jews to their death.

The world we live in is full of lies that at one time or another became the laws of many lands. They were promoted to the general public to serve the interests, often, of those who happened to be in power.

The horrible truth is that truth as a principle is a more modern feature of our societies rather than a historic characteristic, in spite of it being a commandment. That’s why we have it as an aspiration. Whether having their origins in religious dogmas purporting to spread the “truth”, or societal regulation aimed at upholding political powers of those with the might to maintain it, what is dispensed as truth is so much a sometime thing upholding somebody’s current version of reality.

During my lifetime I believed that truth-telling was something by which one judged the character of people . People caught in a court of law lying in their testimony went to jail for perjury. Politicians caught in a lie resigned public office. I was taught that that was gospel, and gospel means truth, right?

Things in this respect seem to have changed radically, if, as we have seen, that was ever true.  These days lies are they are shrugged off even when  the proof of lies is caught in the public record. And those telling the truth are harassed and threatened with bodily harm. And some public figures have been encouraging such behavior and have exposed truth-tellers to abuse.

We know what we want! We know we seek truth in our daily lives. We want to avoid the company of people who lie whenever we have the misfortune to come in contact with them. We want people to be kind but not to the point of lying about the obvious. We are talking about what we might call misplaced “good intentions”.

We want truth to be at the heart of our daily lives, but, sometimes we lie to our kids without thinking about it, to ease things, avoid conflict. Our kids soon find us out, and we learn quickly that is not a good policy. Not if we want their respect. The sometimes uncomfortable truth always seems to work best.

What’s happening at your house?