A Form of Communication
Lying is a great form of communication. Unfortunately lying creates a void between you and your fellow truth-telling man, which (like I said) unfortunately makes you a deviant. Lying lives in the tricky world of having both positive and negative effects. Lying also has many different forms, some of which are punishable by law, while others are relatively harmless and not at all offensive to society. For instance, perjury or lying under oath can generate a lengthy stay in prison, while telling a scary story around a campfire has almost no repercussions as a lie. But since both are technically lies, performing either act makes a deviant out of the performer. But why as a society do we allow some types of lies while others are considered much more serious offenses? When is lying a good idea and when is it wrong?
Lying lands in a large pile of acceptance in certain situations. One of the most common instances of an acceptable lie comes about through the art of performance. Actors, comedians, television stars are all misrepresenting their true identity for the benefit and amusement of millions of people. We don’t usually think of actors as people lying to our faces, but that is indeed what they are doing. Telling a story that didn’t actually happen to that particular person while making seem as if it did is a pure form of deception. Impersonating another human and speaking for them helps our culture spread the ideas of a single person through the voices of many. This type of lying is used for great purposes and never intends to be the cause of damage, but only as a way of entertainment.
Another type of acceptable lie is one I have used probably a billion times this week. Exaggerations make our world more interesting and keep people from being too literal and annoying. When a person exaggerates, they often do so to express the importance of a certain detail or to express an emotional reaction to an event. For example, a person who was just chased by a whole hive of bees might claim the number of bees to be well in the millions when in reality there may have been as few as fifty actually buzzing around after them. The exaggerated truth helps the listeners of the story understand how stressful the bee attack was without having been around the bees personally. We don’t view lies like this as wrong, yet the liar is still a deviant in the strictest standards.
A different type of lie that our society as whole makes little fuss about is using lies to protect the innocence of a child. Parents will tell their kids about all sorts of mythical people in order to make a child happy. The tooth fairy, Santa Claus and the Easter bunny are all fictitious concoctions designed to get children to behave and act in accordance with other societal norms. Children are often not mature enough to understand the real reasons behind religious beliefs or physiological occurrences, so these simple explanations will make more sense to an imaginative child. Proof that these are harmless lies lives in the sheer amount of children that have heard these lies and continue to pass them down generation after generation. This type of deviant behavior has become so embedded in much of the culture that it is almost more deviant to tell the truth about these subjects to a child too early. However, not all lies are bordering acceptable and deviant behavior, many of which are clearly a negative consequence of nonstandard actions.
Maintaining the Lie
When more and more people are caught lying, each lie pushes individuals away from each other. In this sense, lying has terrible effects because every discovered lie makes people more skeptical of the word of their common man. Without this intrinsic trust in our fellow man being whittled away by every lie, as a whole we could eventually have nothing left to base relationships on. It’s a simple matter of “the boy who cried wolf” where each lie puts our society further away from believing each other when it counts. Lying in the news and other media as well as politicians holding office has already left scars on our society which honest officials and media people are sucked into and forced to work extra diligently to overcome.
Not telling the truth can destroy a personal relationship in the same manner that mass lying can jade the society as a whole. If relationships are to be built on trust, clearly the opposite of truth will break them down. Lies cannot be untold, and every lie told will almost certainly lead to another, especially if the first tend to be harmless. Lies often have a snowball effect in which more lies are needed to cover up the obviousness of the original lie. Anyone who has ever been in a failed relationship can easily seed the downfall of the connection back to a whole vault of lies that grew between the two people.
On an even more personal level, every lie told eats away at a person’s intrinsic moral worth. This sense of dignity keeps people honest and without it we become careless and cold. If keeping a great sense of dignity isn’t a high priority for individuals, everything breaks apart rippling outward. Lying to another person also will give a false sense of the other person’s worth. If you lie to a person and construct a false reality surrounding yourself, you must continue to show that fake reality every time an interaction occurs. This puts the liar at odds with the intelligence of the other individual, and as big-headed as many people are, people will obviously think small of those who believe their lies. Lying creates this artificial sense of dominance in society, which can give liars a phony sense of superiority, which at any moment can disintegrate into fear or anger.
Lying has many faces. It can be used for good such as protecting a child from growing up too fast, entertaining the public and making stories more expressive of emotions. On the other hand, lying makes humanity skeptical of all speech. It also degrades an individual’s self-worth and can destroy personal relations. In any case, even the smallest lie can be considered deviant behavior, regardless of the intent of the lie or the length of its lasting effects.
Do your designs lie?