“Yes. Each night before we fall asleep we lie to ourselves in a desperate, desperate hope that, come morning, it will all be true.”
As children, we have always been told by the adults keeping watch over us never to lie. Somehow we have been made to believe that lying is as good as digging your own grave, or securing your place in hell, or maybe purchasing a one-way ticket to South Korea. Lying has always been deemed as wrong. And that my friend, is one big lie.
As much as I would like to think that I’m a person who strives for the truth and a world free from pretensions, I have realized, after reaching a semi-crisis, that lying may have its merits. As a matter of fact, there can be that situation where lying may be speaking the truth. Confusing, I bet. It’s just a matter of who you’re lying to.
It’s just a matter of lying to yourself.
When you lie to yourself, the first person you deceive is who else, but you. However, once you have deceived yourself and you yourself are under the false impression that the idea or thought or whatever bit of information you have forced into your head is actually true, then it’s not really lying when you pass on this information to other people.
Okay so it may still seem like lying, but I guess to be a completely valid defense (or helpful mechanism), you must be such a great liar that you may even deceive yourself. And trust me, though it may take years before a person can master such art, such really can be done.
But why would a person lie to himself? Sometimes in life there are just situations that we don’t want to think about, and for various reasons. Some seem too overwhelming for us to handle, or maybe some are just too distracting it takes so much our time worrying about it, or probably some are just things that we don’t want to care about, when all the signs seem to signify that we should. Whatever the reason is, a person resorts to lying to one’s self as a protective mechanism so as not to be made to deal with all the unnecessary drama that has to come with confronting the truth. If a person keeps on denying the existence of something, chances are “that something” would in fact cease to exist, at least as far as the person in denial is concerned.
You may not admit it (of course you wouldn’t), but everyone resorts to self-deception every once in a while. Acts such as refusing to find out answers to exams right after taking one, or relaxing in an expensive café, sipping the priciest latte on a perfect Friday afternoon while practically suppressing the fact of extensive corruption and immorality of the present government: we do them so often, but then, we’re not even aware of them. Duh, we’ve lied to ourselves about it.
The bad part comes once you rediscover the truth, and suddenly it isn’t so easy going back to the protective shelter of your lie, unless you’ve mastered it so well, going back to that protective shelter is effortless. The revelation is almost life-transforming, and the fact you have been trying to deny has now become even more overwhelming. This is when you confront it, and resolve the issue despite its being larger-than-life. This is when you overcome the lie, conquer whatever crisis, and learn to deal with the truth.
And in the end, you won’t have to live that lie.
1 comment:
I was brought up to believe in the truth. It was probably the most important ethical precept I was taught growing up. And yet, from a very early age, I lied. Mostly it was to protect myself – "No, it wasn't me," when it was – and frequently I was found out and punished. That punishment never stopped me. I simply became a better liar.
As I grew older I did find that I nevertheless had a greater appreciation for the truth than my contemporaries. It mattered to me that there was such a thing and it became important for me to ascertain the 'truths' concerning all things.
What I discovered what that these truth were not always pretty things or even satisfying things. Truth comes with a rider. So as an adult I started to realise that one could get by with 'fuzzy truths' quite happily. 2 + 2 = 4 – that's true but in the real world we can get by quite happily with 2ish + 2ish = 4ish. I don't need to know. Knowing usually = hurting.
The reason I found your post is that I run a literary blog called 'The Truth About Lies' and I get notifications from Google is any blog is posted with those words in it. The reason I chose that as a title is because I'm a writer and all writers are liars. By that I mean that we write fiction. Fiction is made up and therefore untrue which makes me a liar. And yet, for all I lie all the time on the page, it is amazing what truths can be conveyed via those lies.
Truth is not a simple concept. It has absorbed me for years. You can try and look at truth from a causal perspective but what I've found is that there is rarely one cause behind any given effect and any single cause can have many effects. Truth is multi-faceted. There are no easy answers and a lot of time can be wasted looking for them rather than getting on with our lives.
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