Would You Believe Me if I Said I’m Lying to You?

Have you ever told a lie? I am confident the answer is almost certainly ‘YES’. Have you ever knowingly told a lie? You may answer this question with a ‘NO’ and I might believe you. Are you a liar? Well, that’s an interesting and pointless question the answer to which only makes sense if it is ‘NO’, irrespective of whether you are a liar or not.

So, why do we lie? The glib answer is self-preservation. Animals do it all the time by making themselves look bigger than they are to ward off competitors; pretend to be dead in order to entice a prey close enough to grab it; or change their colour or shape, as in prey mantis and stick insects, to appear like an object of no interest to the predator so it would seek lunch elsewhere. However, we people have elevated the topic of lying to extremely impressive levels and for more complex purposes.

Like animals, we learnt to lie out of necessity in order to survive. We lie to bluff our way out of trouble; we lie to mask an unpleasant truth about us; we lie to promote ourselves or a view point we hold dear; we lie to protect others we care about; and we lie to gain unfair advantage on our competitors or protagonists.

Lying at work is probably the most fertile of all types of lying. It goes on all the time by almost everyone. We do it at individual, departmental and corporate levels. What’s more, we know we are doing it, we know it is being done to us, we accept it, we encourage it, and we like it! After all, the world’s $600 billion advertising industry is at least partly based on lies. May Mercury, the God of Commerce have mercy on all of us.

There are, of course, inveterate liars who do it for no apparent reason. They just do it because they can or because they enjoy it as though it was a sport. I know people who, on day-to-day basis are honest, hard-working and generally lead an honest life however, if you ask them an innocuous question like: “when did you get back from China?”, they will give you the wrong time and date when there is absolutely nothing to be gained or lost by the content of their reply. They must surly know that a close examination of their answer would reveal the lie within a couple of minutes but, they do it almost automatically. There are also those who tell white lies out of kindness to flatter a friend, comfort an ailing patient, or reassure a child. In my view, both of these liars are harmless and not sinister so, I will leave them be. My interest is in the other types below.

Continually, we are bombarded with alternative facts, fake news and other interesting euphemisms that amount to the same thing: LYING. So much so, it is often almost impossible to distinguish between truths and untruths. From the old-fashioned alteration of our appearance by using makeup or wearing clothes that flatter and accentuate, to social media that allows us to electronically alter our images or give us a platform to claim certain unsubstantiated facts, to CVs that almost always claim the person is ‘dynamic, forward-looking, team-player, leader, creative who is looking for a fresh challenge that can harness and utilize his immense potential’. I am yet to meet anyone (including myself in my prime), who fits this impressive set of descriptions.

All of these reasons are understandable if not always forgivable mostly because they are about survival and making our way in life. With the advent of technology, social media, blogging, 24-hour news, lying has firmly claimed its part of the everyday discourse that all of us, liars and truth-tellers are spreading lies without necessarily knowing that’s what we are doing. Although there is a difference between a liar and one who tells lies, the difference is only a moral one but the effect of both is the same on the total sum of misinformation.

There was a time when a single truth and a lie competed for our attention and judgment because of the limited sources of information available to us. Sir Winston Churchill once said ‘a lie gets half way around the world before the truth gets a chance to put its boots on’. Nowadays however, we are constantly subjected to an avalanche of truths and lies who are all fully clothed, not just boots, and it is nigh on impossible to distinguish one from the other. Because all of these competing truths / lies are picked up by others and pushed along at neck-breaking speed that the original prophecy of ‘if you repeat a lie often enough, you begin to believe it yourself’ is being fulfilled millions of times each and every day of our lives.

I fear this situation will only get worse as time goes by.

Although I am not a Catholic, or even a Christian, I am going to perform a ‘Mea Maxima Culpa’ and confess to a wrong doing. I started this piece by asking you if you ever, knowingly or otherwise, told a lie. I think it is only fair that I should pose these questions to myself. My answers are: ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’. Here is the dichotomy though: although I confess to have knowingly told lies, I consider myself to be an honest person. It is entirely possible that I could be delusional and if that was the case, I have succeeded in telling the ultimate lie of all; I lied to myself.

I hope you believe me.