Q: What Are The Implications Of Softening The Truth?
The Sunday Age
Sunday April 20, 2008
IT'S so easy to slip into a little lie. That dinner party you were supposed to go to, the interview you're late for - why is it so hard to tell the truth? Try it: "I'm not coming to dinner because I'm just tired; I'm late for this interview because I started out 15 minutes after I should have."
These truths look rather more harshly personal than the novelistic inventions you have to come up with if you lie: you must create car troubles, put elderly relatives in hospital, exaggerate the traffic, croak down the phone as you bestow a contagious respiratory ailment on yourself.Just like political lies, social lies preserve a facade that allows liars to do exactly as they wish without disapproval: they present us to the world as ethical and reliable (but very prone to flu) and spare the feelings of the person we're lying to - until the truth comes out. The friend who's been cooking all day will feel slighted if your absence from dinner isn't because of something drastic. You will undoubtedly suffer in the estimation of the interviewer for being late at all; an untrue excuse, you hope, just might make them forgive you. The trouble is, although human beings lie as easily as breathing to smooth over social dilemmas, we seem to be hard-wired for honesty. Unless one is a psychopath, lying will create physical stress as the brain struggles to make sense of the disjunct between what it perceives to be true and the other reality that it is creating through lies. But we can develop a habit of lying that makes it easier to do. Once one makes a decision that removes the inner prohibition against lying (the polygraph picks up the conflict nevertheless), there is a danger of descending ethically, becoming manipulative. It's one of the most potent natural defences that humans have against evil, which flourishes when a bad thing is called something else. We can't quarantine our social dishonesties; the tendency spreads into public life and affects everything. Bland fictions of benign functionality cloak chaos and dysfunction. Thus rainforests and whales are said to be "harvested" rather than "obliterated" and "slaughtered"; otherwise we might feel we have to do more about it. So quite apart from the inner stress lying creates, there is an innate injustice in lying, and the more serious the matter, the more serious the injustice. For example, an unfaithful partner will usually lie about the adultery, rationalising that it's to spare the cheated partner's feelings. But that false information deprives the partner of the opportunity to make a decision based on the facts. And that's not fair.When it's about lighter matters like not wanting to go to a dinner party, we still need to think hard before opting to lie. Are you lying because the relationship with the person is not equal or robust enough to take a simple, if unflattering, truth about the rank they hold in your priorities? It's understandable. But you may find you have to cover your tracks later with more lies of the "tangled web" variety.And it's that tangled web that we often find ourselves struggling with in wider society: when we give ourselves permission to create an alternate, easy reality that conceals our selfishness, we're preserving that selfishness from proper challenge. But when we test reality from inside and outside ourselves, coming up against our needs and others' needs honestly, we open up the possibility of change.Juliette Hughes is a Melbourne writer.
© 2008 The Sunday Age