The question was: How do I navigate between subtle lies?
My Extended Answer (the answer on Quora is shorter and doesn’t delve into points A, B and C as illustrated below):
You don’t—unless you want to engage in them; you tell those around you that your enemies and crazy people lie to you, not those who would like your trust.
When we love someone, we don’t lie to this person—not because we don’t want to or can’t—but because love cannot, does not, will not include deception. That’s part of what makes love what it is.
Lying to a loved one is thus impossible–because loving someone is putting this person on a par with oneself; now, some say it is putting the beloved first–but as nice as that sounds, it is a recipe for self-neglect and self-abuse; it also bores the other person, and causes him or her to lose respect for you–engendering prince- and princess- syndromes. We shouldn’t put those kinds of lessons into people–and thus the community.
Therefore, putting the beloved on a par with yourself means,
you hold this person in such high regard that, as Robert Heinlien said, this person’s ‘happiness is necessary to your own’; so, would you lie to yourself(?)–as–this brings us to one of my favorite parts of this dissection: many people do.
Many people lie to themselves. And why? Is it because there is something wrong with them? Maybe (I think so), but more importantly, how do they get this way? Well–we teach them to, in three important ways:
A) in religion
B) in politics
C) in confidence-building
A’) In religion, we teach people from a young age that certain things which we know are untrue or unproven (or both) are true. This becomes part of their trust in themselves, because we connect what we “believe” to our own self-esteem–so we wind up lying to ourselves about things we know make little or no sense. Then, we connect those lies to our identity–making ourselves liars.
B’) Politicians lie to hold on to power, especially in political systems where money and votes are their gateways to that power–and as with religion, we attach our own interests to politicians, so must believe that the lies are not lies and those mis-truths become inextricably tied to our identities via the political groups we affiliate ourselves with.
C’) Confidence-building starts in childhood, like religion; our guardians tell us “little lies”, “white lies”, about things they want us to believe they can do, about the group we hail from, about our religion, community, nationality–so we will love them and feel protected and proud in our tribe, creating a sense of security. The origins of this are said to be love; they are more primal than that. Love is a decoration for this. Love would teach appreciation for benefits and wariness of hazards, instead of creating myths that derange us.
We may not have to lie to ourselves to believe these narratives, as we take them for granted, and this is where trust is built on delusion, which becomes pattern-recognized in us and applied to ourselves and others around us. This is where prejudice comes from–because our guardians have already divided us by titles, so someone we come across who wrongs us is not an individual but a representative of a group, like the group we were trained to be proud of.
We put embellishments on our resumes and are taught that lying is okay in business, too. ‘These adjustments to the truth keep the economy going.’ As Professor Uval Noah Harari says, ‘we tell ourselves stories; money is a story, the fantasies about our loved ones are stories, nationalism is a set of stories.’ These stories build our confidence. But they are false confidences, aren’t they? At least some of them are.
Professor Jordan Peterson thinks the narrative stories of religion and other mythologies are necessary to our moral fiber–which I think is severely misguided and only true in the case of otherwise incorrigible persons. Most of us can be taught to accept the universe at is and learn to be compassionate and honest without fantasies and overblown biblical fears, laced with the most horrendously immoral stories from over 5,000 years ago. That path–proven by history up to the present day–is far too risky, bloody and damaging.
I say those religious stories used to be useful, in the main–as a form of government and spiritual guidance, but now they are mostly a hindrance and only useful to us insofar as those who depend on them can weed through them and take out what is survivable despite their surrounding detritus—next to our post-enlightenment ethics–in the age of science, empiricism beneath it, human rights and reason.
Today, we are able to benefit from secular spiritualism and mindfulness; we don’t need these falsehoods any longer; we can respect ourselves and others and stop treating ourselves and others–especially our children–like fools. Let’s stop lying.
Someone who lies to one she or he thinks he or she loves is severely mistaken. This person is not filled with the joy of love and friendship—but the concerns of ego and control. Love is not control. Love is the fostering of well-being, which can be accomplished honestly.
The joy of love only creates a pure feeling of sincerity in us–directed toward those we care about. If you don’t feel that–you’re not in love. You may be feeling other emotions in relation to this person who is the object of your supposed affections, but I would challenge you to think it is love.
And so–there is this crazy idea in the world that says ‘lying is okay’; it’s not—unless one is lying to a mortal enemy–someone who wants to take advantage of, hurt or kill you and/or those you care about.
So–no caring relationship benefits from lies; in fact, you’re not in a relationship when you lie; you’re in a transaction, wherein one or both parties are using one another.
Show me a liar, and I will show you a sociopath. Unless this lie is going to save the mind or body of the liar. Otherwise, misrepresenting the world to someone is like removing break fluid from his or her car, pouring sugar into its gas tank and blindfolding its driver.
For those who think it is necessary to lie in order to maintain a surprise or soften a blow, the problem is a lack of creativity and originality—as well as a lack of compunction not to mislead.
Don’t lie and don’t tolerate lies; their damage goes deep, like roots under a plant; and lies are weeds, not another variety of plant, like flowers–which add color. Lies never flower, but rather make grey, everything, or falsely color narratives like spotlights do, whose energy fades and whose hues pale with time–and create confusion and heartbreak over pictures that can no longer be discerned.
One of the worst things about lies in a relationship is not only in the fact that they make a fool of someone–but in that they create a scenario in which the fooled person makes a fool of him or herself in having trusted the liar. This, to me, is a form of psychic violence. When we trust someone to represent the world we cannot see, and this person recasts the picture falsely, they ask our trust to see what is not there. Then we lose trust in our own judgement. We’ve been poisoned.
Be an adult—or aspire to be one—and begin with honesty, first with yourself, then with others. Lying in either domain corrupts the other; this is the beginning of the unraveling of mental health—which depends on facts, knowing them and telling them.
CA
New York
Copyright 2024 Carl Atteniese / All rights reserved
