What is a lie?
‘That was a great dinner’ … hmm, really?
‘I’m calling in sick, I’m a bit under the weather.’ … LOL
‘I’m on my way’ … Aren’t you? Why are you still in the bathroom?
‘On it,’ in response to an email you’re yet to open.
White lies, blue lies, yellow lies, or red; deliberately omitting or embellishing certain aspects while describing an event? Saying the opposite of how you feel so as not to offend others? In whatever shape or form a lie takes, it mostly involves the liar, the truth, the lie, the motive, and the one being lied to — one here used loosely to mean anything from other individuals to corporations to ourselves.
Can we lie to ourselves? We’ll get to that in a bit.
For whatever it is worth, lying is an integral part of being human. It is a skill we develop very early on in life to cope with difficult situations. It is hard-coded into our DNA for survival. Developmental psychologists say that lying is part of natural development in children and it is instinctive for some of us. We don’t have to deploy our full intellect to deflect or make up a ruse. It just comes to us naturally.
Whether heathen or believer; young or old; regardless of race, gender, status, or inclination we are all liars. Or more mildly put, we all have the capacity to lie and we’ve all lied at some point or another in our lives.
What is the Truth?
The truth is what a thing is, devoid of our tampering. It is what science seeks to find with its probe of objectivity, and what our soul seeks to discover in its search for the divine. In the most practical sense, the truth of a thing does not change, at least not until the thing itself changes. And how we define a thing (or fail to define it) does not void its truth.
The truth is the truth.
But it’s not that straightforward.
If someone told me that a white ball is blue and I went about telling everyone that the ball is blue. Would I be lying since what I know of the ball is what I learned about it in the first place even though the ball isn’t blue?
What if in a conscious effort to obscure the truth, I went about telling everyone that the same white ball I know is blue is white? Would that be a lie because I have deliberately misrepresented what I know as true even when my misrepresentation is the true nature of the thing?
Well, I’ll try not to stray into Kierkegaardian territory.
The emphasis here is that lies usually have a little string tied to their bushy tails called a motive.
What is Motive
A motive is why people lie.
It might be to stay alive in a life-and-death situation, avoid repercussions or get out of trouble. It might be to save themselves from emotional or physical trauma or avoid confrontation. They might lie so as not to offend the sensibilities of others or decline to go into lengthy details they’d rather not share. Whatever the motive, liars are often aware of why they’re lying to those they are lying to. It is mostly a conscious decision on our part as the liar to obscure the truth for our own utility.
But as you’d see from the white ball, blue ball analogy, it is not every time we lie that it is deliberate or motive-driven. Sometimes we lie compulsively, caught in the habitual cycle of not saying things as they are, even when there’s no clear motive. At other times, we deceive ourselves by training our mind to believe what we need it to believe, and when we commit the lie to memory for long enough, the truth is forgotten. And each time our memory reaches into the past in search of that ‘truth,’ it finds the lie we buried in its place. This synaptic glitch is how we lie to ourselves.
At the root of this human tendency of training itself to believe a lie is rationalization.
What is Rationalization?
Oxford languages define rationalization as the act of justifying [our] [actions] with logical reasons, even if [they] are not appropriate. Rationalization is what is happening in our heads when one-half of our inner person is warring against itself and we catch ourselves trying to justify the reason for an action we are about to take — in this case, lying or bending the truth for our utility.
Case in point: To avoid an undesirable outcome (divorce, dishonorable discharge, shame) a person lies about their involvement in a situation (an affair, unethical practices, immoral behavior.) The truth is that they KNOW that they were involved in that situation but because of the undesirable end state of not being discovered they lie. The part of their mind that KNOWS the truth contends with the part of their mind that seeks to obscure it. To resolve this internal conflict, one half must find a reason good enough to keep the other half silent and that is why rationalization comes in.
We might say about an affair, “It’s not like I’m doing anything wrong, we are just friends.” About our wheeling and dealing at work, we might tell ourselves, “It is not like the company cares for me anyway. Everybody does it.” On our closet addiction to porn that is disrupting every other aspect of our normal life, we might say, “It is nothing. I watch those videos to learn to be a better lover.”
Don’t
But the mind is like a dog whose loyalty is inclined toward the hand that feeds it. It is hedonotropic and it bends in the direction of our pleasures. Worst of all, it forgets. And herein lies the danger of telling ourselves what we clearly know as not being true. After a while, we start to believe our own lies, and as a result, we modify our behavior to continue doing that thing we knew as undesirable. The only difference being that with time, it now no longer feels as undesirable as we thought it to be. To the point that we might even consider our actions, appropriate; when the mind has forgotten the truth and the voice of our conscience is no longer heard.
The fact remains that the truth of whatever it is we are doing (or not doing has not changed.) And our immersion into our illusory world of lies is merely isolationist and often temporary. When the affair or the wheeling and dealing or our porn addiction is made public, the evaluation of our actions will not be premised on our well-constructed logic of justification.
The question that everyone will ask is:
What is the truth?