I was brought up believing that honesty is a virtue, and lying is bad.
Life has taught me that people do not really want you to be honest. Most people actually prefer deception.
Social institutions based on deception are doing quite well, and many honest people are not getting anywhere. World leaders, political, religious, intellectual and otherwise, show us on a daily basis that lying is a necessary condition of contemporary social life.
When I was younger, I detested hypocrisy. Yet after being called a hypocrite when I told the truth, I have learned more about people’s needs and the problem of being.
Honesty means telling the truth.
First, there is no one single objective truth for a lot of things.
People choose what truth they want to believe in.
Over a billion people supposedly believe that the world we know was created in seven calendar days.
Even more people believe that the sun rises every morning in the East, and tomorrow the sun will rise in the east in the morning again. Even Stephen Hawking believes that. In The Grand Design, which he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, the sun rising in the east everyday was used as an example to illustrate what is a scientific law (pages 27-28, Bantam 2012).
The truth is that the sun does not rise. Our planet earth revolves around it. We use our geocentric perspective to talk about the sun rising in the east. That’s simply is not true. Even if we allow such self-centeredness, people living in many parts of this planet do not see the sun rising in the east every morning. Talk to people who have lived in or near the Arctic or Antarctic Circles.
I am NOT lying when I say the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning. I am also NOT lying when I say it will not.
In my opinion, politics, organized religion, and many forms of advertising and marketing, medicine, finance, academia, family, marriage, and so on, all require a certain amount of deception. I have been simple and naive for decades, believing that pointing out the “truth” will set people free.
Freud, who was my hero when I was in my twenties, talked about “the future of an illusion” when talking about religion. Religion will always prevail, even when increasing parts of the official storyline are found to be either not true or impossible to be true. Ironically, the future of psychoanalysis, which is supposedly based on reason and quest for truth, has become bleak.
People need lies.
What I once called hypocrisy turns out to be a necessary strategy for being.
I have developed a theory, complete with practice principles and methods, based on understanding people’s needs. After decades of practice, I am still amazed at how people can deceive themselves.
Few people know what they really need, but many of them were taught to want the things others want them to want: getting married and take the risk of dealing with an affair (40% to 60%), divorce (30% to 50%), or simply being unhappy (>60%), a pill to “cure” your hypertension or depression (does not work for at least 40% of the people, and there can be negative side-effects), a designer dress or handbag (the actual utility is usually low), a wedding you cannot really afford (plus the totally unreasonable credit card interest), a university education (which has steadily decreasing market value, while tuition goes up), et cetera, et cetera. How many times have we heard parents who are unhappily married pressuring their children to get married? How many times we see lost, unfulfilled, and unhappy souls trying to convert people to their faith (my favorite writer David Lodge once wrote about soulless people wanting to do that to others – the Picturegoers).
Oh my God!
Given that so many people prefer deception to truth, the people who lie may be doing the world a big service, and I think there is ample evidence that they are duly rewarded.
I do not know why I suddenly think of Larry Summers (former Harvard President, Obama’s Chief Economic Adviser) and the deregulation of the derivatives market. Am I lying here?
There are many people imprisoned, tortured, or murdered for telling the truth, or refusing to change their story.
- Cynicism cannot really save the world.
How about SSLD (just google, you will find it)?
Back to the core of all things: Human needs.
People who prefer deception and people who lie are doing the same thing. They are all trying to address their needs. To get people out of deceiving themselves, or to get people out of lying, the most sensible thing to do is to give them an alternate strategy that can allow them to address their need effectively.
When people can address their needs effectively without lying, they may just do that. If I can make more money without lying than I do with lying, why would I lie? If I have developed sufficient self-esteem to feel valued and respected, then I have no need to deceive myself that people will respect and value me more simply because I am wearing or carrying a designer item that costs three months of my salary.
Am I lying to you when I say that SSLD has a moral vision?
Website: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/honest-god-we-have-lie-a-ka-tat-tsang