Lying is easier than telling the truth. Have you ever tried it? Lying? Most people have at one time or another. Oddly enough, it is more satisfying than telling the truth. And more fun. It gives you a rush of power. There is also something about living in a fantasy, even if only for a moment, that is deeply invigorating. Humans love stories they make up. 90% of our lives are made up of such stories.
It is rather astounding that we don’t lie all of the time. Why not? As long as we don’t look insane—telling someone you drive a red car when they are looking directly at your blue car is usually not a good idea. But if you can get away with it, why not? Particularly if lying helps you in some way, even a little bit. And it’s even fun, most of the time. The truth is often boring. Put a little zing in your life.
So, why tell the truth at all? For some reason, truth has become sacred. Did the “good” idea of telling the truth start with the Bible? John 8:32. Jesus said it. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” He was speaking to the Jews who had believed in him—about himself. Know him, the truth, and that truth will set you free. I don’t know if Jesus was talking about telling lies, but maybe indirectly he was. He was stating that knowing, thus telling and speaking, the truth would set you free. Free from what? Lies, of course. Tyranny. Untruths from others with power will indeed imprison you; the lies become the chains that bind you. Those who speak the most powerful lies—the most powerful speakers—will control you, and that’s the whole point.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Why can’t ordinary people just tell lies? Well, usually lies get found out. As much as we seem to grapple with this on a daily basis, there is an objective reality out there. And when you make something up that doesn’t fit that reality, people will usually eventually see it. The objective reality typically doesn’t change and transform itself into the lie you made up about it. When this happens, the people you lied to stop trusting you. And trust is an important thing if you are going to get through life without more suffering than you can handle. But that isn’t the only reason we shouldn’t lie.
The odd thing about “back in the day” is that lying was both easier and harder. Easier because there were no cameras, no emails, no paper trail, no playback. Harder because you lived in a face-to-face world. Reputation was the currency. In a village of a few hundred, a liar didn’t need a fact-checker. He needed neighbours. Once your word went bad, trade, marriage, credit, and even simple conversation got expensive. Aristotle supposedly put the practical punchline this way: Asked what liars gain, he said they gain this—that when they speak the truth, they are not believed.
That’s the social reason. The philosophers went further. They treated truth-telling as something that held the person together, not just the village.
It was the thing that kept a human being from coming apart. Socrates would rather drink the hemlock than recant. Aristotle said the liar’s real punishment is that when he finally tells the truth, no one believes him. Augustine called the liar’s heart “double”—one thing known, another spoken—and said the mouth that lies slays the soul. Aquinas put it dryly: Truth is the mind matching the thing. Kant went further and said even the kind lie, the one told to the murderer at the door, is vandalism against trust itself; once we grant an official exception, promises and contracts start to rot. Different centuries, same hunch: A lie does not just fool the neighbour. It splits the speaker, and if the biggest speakers do it well enough, it splits the world.
I like Aquinas’s quip: “Truth is the mind matching the thing.” Implying that the mind is flexible, fluid, filled with imagery, and “the thing” is solid, objective, material. Whoa. So true. At least in a certain way it is. Today “the thing” is about as flexible and fluid as the mind. It is difficult to tell objective reality from AI slop, that’s for sure. Today reminds me of Orwell’s 1984 in so many ways (ha, ha, really?)—particularly the illusory part, the “tell the truth” part, you know, with “2+2=5” and all that. In the book, the wars themselves were a kind of stage set. Oceania was always at war with somebody, Eurasia or Eastasia, and the enemy could flip overnight—“We have always been at war with Eastasia”—because almost no one ever stood in the actual war zone. The front was far away, the bodies were unseen, the records were rewritten at the Ministry of Truth. If you cannot put your own feet on the ground, you cannot check the story. The story becomes the ground. Sound familiar?
Come to think of it, there really is no reason at all to tell the truth if you have big power, because no one will know what the truth is. And if you think you know what is best (like these leaders undoubtedly do), why tell the people something that will confuse them? And who says any of these people care a hoot in hell about “the people”? All they care about is themselves. Does anyone out there believe governments care about the people they govern? They are so far from that it isn’t funny. Do you believe Zelenskyy cares about the Ukrainian people? He may care about the country Ukraine, because without Ukraine he would have no power, money, and whatever else his position brings him that makes him happy. Do you think Mark Carney cares about the Canadian people? He cares about them as long as they are the ones who have the power to elect him. He cares about Canada for the same reasons Zelenskyy cares about Ukraine. Do you think Trump cares about the American people? People thought he did. That is why they voted for him. I think most of those people now believe he betrayed them. So, they all lie, lie, lie.
I’ll tell you why you should tell the truth and not lie. Because it is the right thing to do. If you are decent and have love in your heart, you tell the truth. You don’t tell the truth so people will trust you, or so you will get your way, or so “your mind matches the thing.” You tell the truth because a person of good character tells the truth. And it will, indeed, set you free.
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Your last paragraph is literally the "bottom line". We should tell the truth because it is the right thing to do. It has nothing to do with whether we get caught in the lie or not. We do not steal, because it is wrong to do so; it does not matter if we could do it and not get caught.
In the past I used to teach Medical Ethics. We are guided by some Ethical Principles: Beneficence, Non-Maleficence, Autonomy, Truth-telling, Confidentiality, Justice. Sometimes these principles are in conflict with one another. This is the nature of an ethical dilemma; like when my concept of beneficence gets in conflict with the patient's autonomy. In these situations, one principle needs to override the other. In the above example, autonomy overrides beneficence. Truth-telling always overrides everything else.
"The lie I tell ten times gradually becomes a half truth to me. And as I continue to tell my half truth to others, it becomes my cherished delusion."
- Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind