Brad said this morning that he wants to write a book called “Lie!”. He realized that – with few exceptions – everyone, everywhere lies all the time about almost everything.
We know that the government lies to us, our employers lie to us, our vendors lie to us, our customers lie to us and we lie to one another in our personal relationships.
Lying is so pervasive that it seems at best quaint or naive to expect honesty.
A little less than a year ago, I realized that I was not as honest as I thought. I really didn’t like that. In fact, I hated it so much that I made a promise to myself to always tell the truth. I’m not doing this for anyone but me. I just decided that the person I want to be is a person who is 100% honest. When I look back on my life, I know it will give me satisfaction to know that I lived, talked and acted honestly.
I never actually liked lying – it just seemed to be the best of several bad alternatives. Now that I have made a commitment to myself to always be honest, I like myself better. And that makes me wonder – are there really people in this world who are not bothered when they lie? And if that is so, wouldn’t that be the very definition of a psychological pathology?
How is it that we are able function with so much dishonesty in our world?
What toll does it take on us mentally, emotionally and spiritually to be so saturated in lies?
Is lying necessary?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Lying, IMHO, is the most comfortable response to the recognition we fall short. It’s short-sighted and disintegrates relationships. Having been intoxicated by its power to cover our shortcomings as a society, we are left with no easy alternatives.
We can tell the hard truth, (that black people are statically more violent, that CEOs of multinational corporations are just as generous or miserly as poor social workers, that labor only worth what someone else is worth paying for it, etc) but because we’ve ingested so many lies to the contrary to this point to make ourselves feel better, we will vehemently reject and rebel against the truth. It is a longer game to tell the truth, but one, I believe, is ultimately much more worth playing.