They don’t lie to you because the truth will hurt your feelings. They lie to you because the truth might provoke you to make choices that won’t serve their interests.
They don’t lie to you because the truth will hurt your feelings. They lie to you because the truth might provoke you to make choices that won’t serve their interests.
A lie is an interesting construct.
It starts with the proposition that the recipient is able to be deceived.
The magician lies to you as they make an illusion happen right before your very eyes. They tell you something is going to happen and when it does, you are sold on the miracle of something that would be impossible. In that illusion comes the opportunity to plant a seed of a false truth in the mind of others, so as to convey the impossible. We are all willing participants in such an illusion and when watching a magician perform, we opt to suspend our belief in order to appreciate the excellence within which the magician performs. I personally have never explored magician’s secrets. I love the fact that when they are performing, I am able to be reduced to such wonder as to enjoy the incredible artistry with which they create the impossible… right before my very eyes.
Most lies are less benevolent than the magician. In most cases, a lie is formulated in the mind of someone who has an agenda. That agenda could be a plan to serve needs on the part of the person telling the lie, or to serve an agenda for those whom the liar is lying on behalf of. In either case, it is clearly an agenda, otherwise, who would waste time telling an unnecessary untruth?
The agendas vary from personal to professional to societal. Regardless of whom the lie is serving, its construct starts with the premise that in saying such things, another person or people will have an expected reaction to this lie. Those reactions are calculated by the liar to assist them in whatever is giving them cause to construct such a fallacy. In that calculation comes a wager that if they violate the truth in the course of the discussion, they will avoid whatever repercussion said truth would have brought upon them.
Lies are more often than not taught by an older sibling at a very early age. In that moment, a younger child learns that their sibling avoided punishment by saying something to the parent that was not accurate. In watching this example, and seeing their sibling get away with whatever they did wrong, a formulation is created that lasts a lifetime. This is not regulated to a sibling, as it can be learned from a parent, a friend, a relative or from any form of media, be it a book, tv show, video, movie or other.
As we grow older, we witness countless lies, and eventually in a moment of need, we find ourselves resorting to using them ourselves. They may be very small lies, to avoid having to attend an event, or they may be white lies which are most often told to avoid hurting the feelings of another. They may take the form of self deception, in order to lie to ourselves about a truth we do not wish to face. Or they may be heinous in their origin and have a deeper reason that is designed to create an outcome of darker origin.
In the larger landscape of society, lies are told by the minute. They are proliferating at such a rapid rate with the advent of social media and YouTube, TikTok, and others as to leave us living in a world of massive untruths which serve countless agendas, far too disparate to delineate here.
The deepest truth about a lie is that it is a tool. It is designed to hurt recipients and maintain a control that enables the originators of the lie to continue to act in their own self interests, while dominating others who are less fortunate to understand what is being perpetrated upon them.
If you are educated, and willing to dig deeper than what you are exposed to at face value, you will uncover so many lies as to make your head spin. You see them all over the news and watch as forces which hope to dominate society, battle for our very freedom.
Lies will enslave you, if you are not fully awake. They will destroy you if you are not cognizant of their potential existence. Keeping a strong vigil internally against them by always asking yourself, “what is the cause for this person or entity to be proclaiming whatever it is that they are proclaiming?” is your first best line of defense. If you are not always watching for who is lying and anticipating why they would lie to you, you are walking (most likely) directly into a trap that can be your ultimate demise.
Happy Tuesday!
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