LIES


Lying is one of humanity's most common traits.

When the Greeks brought the gift of a large wooden horse to their enemies 
the Trojans, they did not reveal that inside the horse were soldiers who 
would capture Troy. "Beware the Greeks bearing gifts."

In the fourth chapter of the book of Judges is told the tale of the death of 
Sissera at the hands of Joel. The Canaanite general trusted the Israelite 
woman and went to sleep in her tent, upon which she drove a tent peg 
through his skull and saved her people from defeat by her lies.

Othello's life was ruined and Desdemona's destroyed by the lies of Iago.

In ordinary life in our own times, we lie on our income tax forms to save 
money, lie to our children to spare them the harshness of reality, and lie to 
our lovers because it is too hard emotionally to tell the truth.

We lie as professionals-as clergypersons, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and 
counselors-because we think we know best for those who seek our 
services.

We lie as business people because we assume that the truth would not sell 
our product.

We lie as politicians fearing that the truth would get us thrown out of office.

We lie in a time of war because, in Churchill's telling phrase, "in war-time, 
truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of 
lies."

Martin Buber called lying "the specific evil which humanity has introduced 
into nature." 

Lying seems to be part of who we are.

A minister was walking down the street when he came upon some boys 
surrounding a dog. Concerned lest they harm the dog, he asked very firmly, 
"What are you doing with that dog?"

One of the boys replied, "This dog is just an old neighborhood mutt. We all 
want him, but only one of us can take him home. So we've decided that 
whoever can tell the biggest lie will get to keep the dog."

The minister was quite taken aback. "You boys should not be having a 
contest of lies!", he exclaimed. Then he launched into a sermon about the 
evils of lying, beginning with "Don't you boys know it's a sin to tell a lie," 
and concluding with "Why, when I was your age, I never told a lie."

There was silence for a long time, and then the smallest boy sighed and said, 
"All right, mister, you get the dog."

Telling lies is part of the way we are.

Lying is intentionally speaking an untruth, leaving a truth unspoken, 
deliberately hiding or masking a truth, avoiding or evading a truth, allowing 
a known falsehood to stand without correction.

What matters is the intentionality. If we say something that we believe to be 
true, even though it is not, that is not a lie. That is just ignorance. 

Deliberating misleading someone, lying, is wrong. 

It is wrong because it hurts the person who lies.

Liars do not just lie to other people. They lie to themselves. We all probably 
lie to ourselves at times and it does us no good. If we cannot even be honest 
about our own lives, we are unlikely to be able to be honest with anyone. We 
are unlikely to be able to lead a very happy or productive life.

If we are criticized by someone-our partner, our boss, our friend-and we 
choose to ignore the criticism, lying to ourselves about what we have done 
or failed to do, we are not going to improve as a worker or grow as a person. 

If we think of ourselves as the eternal victim, picked on by everyone and 
responsible for nothing, we are going to be unpleasant to live with and not 
terribly useful. We will never be better or more than the person we are now.

How can we ever make good decisions about our lives if we are forever 
telling ourselves untruths? We should not lie to ourselves about our abilities 
lest we futilely pursue the wrong career. We should not lie to ourselves 
about an addictive problem, a disease, or emotional pressures because they 
will only get worse not better through neglect.

We hurt ourselves when we lie.

We hurt others when we lie as well.

The glue of social relations is trust. If people lie to one another, trust is hard 
to establish and hard to maintain. If we are to relate well to other people, we 
must have confidence that they are speaking the truth to us.

Erik Erikson taught us that trust is the most fundamental need of human 
beings, that we develop it or not at very early ages, and that trust is built 
upon truth not lies. The small child needs to know that there will be food 
when it is hungry and warmth when it is cold and comfort when it is 
distressed. Let the parent lie about these things and the child can be damaged 
for a lifetime.

As the child grows older, there is no less need for parents to be truthful: 
truthful about explaining, however awkwardly, the bad things that happen in 
life, like a friend or relative or pet dying; truthful about the necessary if hard 
things we must do, like go to school, like deal with the biological changes 
that come with adolescence, like write thank-you notes to those who give us 
gifts.

What friendship or marriage is not damaged, and sometimes destroyed, by 
lies. Adultery conducted in secret, once revealed, is a terrible betrayal that 
shakes the roots of most marriages. How much worse it is if the adulterous 
person outside the marriage is a close friend of the party in the marriage who 
has been betrayed. Financial dealings by one partner without telling the 
other can lead to disaster in an intimate relationship. 

Lies are bad for business. We need to know that when we make a 
purchase-of clothes, food, insurance policies, and other things-that the 
good or service we are buying really is what we are told it is and that it will 
really do the things we are told it will do. When that does not happen, when 
we are lied to, it creates anger, resentment, and frustration, and in my case at 
least, a refusal to deal with that company again.

Society needs truth. Our relations with others can only be damaged by lies.

One final reason lying is wrong is that it makes democracy impossible.

The essence of the democratic spirit is an informed electorate. The 
information we receive must be true if we are to make good decisions about 
the people we want to elect to office and the opinions we want to share with 
these elected officials when they are facing an important vote.

A society cannot function democratically without truth.

Think of the devastation wrought upon our country by the lies of Watergate. 
A tawdry little burglary set in motion by a wildly insecure president that led 
to almost two years of daily headlines distracting us from the affairs of state 
and of our own land, while one figure after another was found out in his lies 
till only the president stood there, naked, alone, disgraced. 

The election of 1972 was fraudulent because the American people did not 
have the truth about Watergate and Mr. Nixon's involvement in it.

The Iran Contra Scandal tainted democratic processes in the late 1980's, 
including the election of 1988.

Mr. Clinton's silly lie about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky led to 
similar distortions of our democratic life as news about that sad little affair 
kept us from looking at more important matters.

In the last year or so, the damage done by lies has been pointed up by a 
number of books from both the right wing and the left wing of our political 
spectrum. Whether you are sympathetic with Ann Coulter's right-wing 
views or Al Franklen's left-wing views, what both of them and a host of 
other authors are pointing to is the bed-rock importance of truth-telling for 
democracy to function.

Politics in America does not have a good reputation. Will Rogers once 
observed that "if you ever injected truth into politics, you would have no 
politics."  If that is so, then we have no democracy. Hype and spin and the 
various other forms of chicanery and corner-cutting with the truth do us a 
great disservice.

Lies harm democracy, as they harm social relations and personal lives

Why then do we lie? Why does lying seem to be so deeply ingrained in the 
human experience? 

We lie because sometimes we feel we have to lie in order to defend 
ourselves or to defend some goal we consider important.

Sometimes this is less unworthy than others.

For example, social life depends in some measure on the little white lies we 
tell day by day.

We greet each other with certain rote phrases without thinking much about 
them. There are times when someone inquires after our health and when we 
say, "I'm fine, how are you, " when we are anything but fine. But to say 
otherwise could lead us down conversational paths we do not have the time 
or energy to engage in. 

Or perhaps the person who has greeted us is not someone with whom  we 
would want to share our woes of that day.

Or maybe that individual is someone who already carries heavy loads and 
does not need further evidence of how miserable life can be.

Or it may be that we are trying to climb out of a funk and are pretending to 
be happier than we feel so that maybe we can feel as happy as we pretend to 
be.

Surely such lies are to be accounted on the side of virtue, however light their 
weight.

Such lies would include the silence of those who receive confidences from 
people--doctors, therapists, ministers, attorneys, and sometimes close friends 
To speak to anyone of what we have heard is wrong. Even when it might 
appear that speaking would serve the ends of the person whose confidence 
we hold, it is wrong to do so. It is better in confidential situations to not be 
truthful except to the person who has trusted us.

There are times when lying is the right thing because life itself is at risk. 

In 1804, Baptists in Kentucky posed this dilemma with regard to native 
tribes who threatened their homes. The question was whether they should lie 
if asked if they had children, and thus very likely spare them, or tell the 
truth-which the Baptist moral code demanded of them-and beg for mercy, 
which they were not likely to receive. The Baptists were not able to resolve 
the issue, so they broke into two fellowships, the "Lying Baptists" and the 
"Truthful Baptists."

There are many instances in the literature of Judaism, Christianity, and even 
the philosophers where this question is raised and answered, albeit without 
uniformity. Kant, for example, believed that truth-telling was an absolute. 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that "only the cynic...claims to 'speak the truth' 
at all times and in all places to all people in the same way." 

Kant is wrong. Bonhoeffer is right. Lying can sometimes be justified. 

It is justified when the lie is inconsequential, when it protects a relationship 
of trust, and when it saves a life. These instances would surely pass the test 
suggested by Sissela Bok in her groundbreaking study of lying a quarter 
century ago: that we are willing at some point to go public with the reasons 
for our lie and feel certain that a group of reasonable people would agree 
with our decision.

These are not unworthy reasons for lying, but most of the time lies have a 
less noble origin.

One reason is found in something Sam Keen pointed to some years ago, 
namely how much harder it is to tell the truth in situations of inequality.

We begin life in a radically unequal position relative to everybody around 
us. As infants and small children, we are totally dependent on the adults and 
older children with whom we live. We learn to lie, Keen suggests, to protect 
ourselves and our developing sense of identity. Rules are forced on us that 
offend us and may even threaten our sense of autonomy. We speak untruths 
so we can do what we want and not be punished. 

Four small boys showed up for school quite late one morning. When 
queried, they said that the car they had been riding in had had a flat tire and 
so they were delayed by several hours. The teacher sympathized with them, 
and then told them they had missed a test. She said they had to make up the 
test immediately. She sent each boy to a different corner of the room and 
instructed each of them to answer one question silently in writing: "Which 
tire was flat?"

It may well be true, as Lewis Thomas asserted, that "lying is stressful...It is, 
in a pure physiological sense, an unnatural act." But psychologically, Keen 
is also correct: we feel less than capable in a world of events we cannot 
control, of people who are bigger than we are, of constant threats to our 
sense of self. 

We lie out of a sense of inadequacy, and keep lying because it has become a 
habit.

We also lie out of fear.

We lie out of fear that we will be ostracized. How many of us knew that kind 
of fear as teenagers and so ended up doing things we did not like doing but 
feared not doing lest we be laughed at. In my case, it was drinking beer, the 
smell and taste of which I despised and still do. But I drank some beer with 
my buddies because it seemed the thing to do to stay in with that group of 
friends. 

I gave up this lie in my 20's and have been much happier-and thinner-
since.

We lie out of fear that we will fail.

A businesswoman of my acquaintance once told of starting a business in the 
small town where she lived. Other local business owners advised her that the 
only way to succeed in a small business in that town was by cheating on her 
books. If she was honest about the money she took in and expended, taxes 
would wipe her out. They fudged their books and were successful. They 
liked her and told her she had better do the same. She did not follow their 
advice, and indeed her business did not do well. But she was free of the fear 
that the other people lived with that led them into a lie, and the fear in lying 
that they would be caught and punished.

We lie out of fear that we shall be exposed for the foolish, weak creature that 
we are. 

Martin Amis has written a powerful account of the tyranny of Josef Stalin in 
the Soviet Union. It is called KOBA THE DREAD. Truth was an 
irrelevancy in Stalin's USSR. Lies were the staple diet of a people 
mesmerized by a man who lived in terror of his own miserable existence. He 
lied about his relationship to Lenin and his place in the Revolution. He lied 
about his family, who came to despise him. He lied to his closest associates 
whenever he felt like it. He lied because he was so frightened of living, of 
people, of the truth about himself ever becoming known to others, even to 
himself.

We lie out of fear.

We lie out of greed.

Enron is one of too many large companies that were built on a tissue of lies 
in order to make money, lots and lots of money. The top executives at this 
company used a "different type of accounting" to hide the machinations that 
made them rich. They lied to their investors. They lied to their employees. 
They lied to the federal regulators. They even lied to themselves, as did a lot 
of other people in those boom years of the 90's. 

Jonathan Knee, writing about Enron and other scandals from the vantage 
point of a corporate executive and professor of finance, tells of how many 
deceived themselves in those years, thinking that "stocks...could continue to 
go up indefinitely. This belief was often coupled with a conviction that we 
were personally responsible for the inexorable rise in value. Many of us 
arranged our business and personal affairs consistent with these delusional  
expectations." 

Greed led to these lies.

In the most ordinary of daily business dealings, lying can be very tempting. 
A woman stopped at a deli on the way home from work to buy a chicken for 
her family's supper. The butcher reached into the barrel, grabbed the last 
chicken he had, flung it on the scales behind the counter, and told the 
woman its weight. She asked if he had a larger one. He turned back to the 
barrel, deposited the one chicken he had to sell, fumbled around for a few 
seconds, then withdrew it and put it on the scales. He told the woman that 
this chicken weighed one pound more. She thought a moment, and then said, 
"I'll take both of them."

Greed can lead us into lies.

So too can a sense of our own importance, a sense that either who I am is so 
important that I can choose whether to tell the truth or not or a sense that the 
work that I am doing justifies not speaking the truth. Put another way, we lie 
because we think that the end justifies the means.

Professional people particularly can be guilty of the first kind of lie.

Physician Sidney Werkman wrote a book about his wife's death from 
leukemia. He and her doctors agreed she wanted hope not doom, so they lied 
to her and told her that she had anemia. Werkman boasted that this was not 
deception but decency.

Not deception! Assuming the right to hide the truth from a woman about her 
own life? Of course, what he did was deception. Wanting hope, she was 
given an illusion. Her husband lied to her, dishonoring her in the process and 
shaming himself by his arrogant paternalism.

That is a lie that damages an individual. Of greater scope are the lies told by 
political leaders that lead nations into disasters like war.

In 1846, President James Polk lied about Mexican troops crossing the Rio 
Grande in an unprovoked attack. He claimed they had "shed American blood 
on American soil." He ordered American forces into action, and deceived 
Congress into declaring war on Mexico. Polk lied and got the war he 
wanted. The House of Representatives censured him for his lies, saying that 
the war had been "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun." President 
Polk was not re-elected.

The Tonkin Gulf incident of 1965 drew American forces deeper into a war 
about which Lyndon Johnson had told us in his campaign the year before, 
"I'm not going to send American boys to fight the war that Asian boys 
should be fighting." We lost some 58,000 men and women in that war. 
Hundreds of thousands were physically and mentally damaged. Two million 
Vietnamese lost their lives. President Johnson was not re-elected.

Now we have our military in Iraq, in a war that we were told was necessary 
because the dictator of Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, had close ties 
to Al-Qaeda, and was an imminent threat. Tony Blair even said that Britain 
was at risk of an attack at 45 minutes notice.

It was all lies. That war has now taken several hundred American lives. 
Several thousand have been wounded. Close to 10,000 Iraqi civilians have 
been killed and countless others harmed. The most optimistic assessment of 
the present situation is grim.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently made the point 
that "people too glibly acknowledge that truth is the first casualty of war, as 
though truth is a luxury we must do without on occasion, to be restored 
under more normal circumstances. Is it not more accurate, asked Williams, 
to say that peace is the first casualty of untruthfulness? Truth...is not a 
luxury we must sometimes do without, but the very ration upon which we 
live."

People lie because they think they are bigger than the truth or that the cause 
they are promoting is so meritorious that truth does not matter.

But truth does matter. There is no integrity without truth. There is no growth 
without truth. There is ultimately no hope without truth.

Is lying wrong? Yes, it is.

It is wrong because it hurts us when we lie. It damages social relations when 
we lie. It makes democracy impossible when we lie.

Nonetheless we lie, to defend ourselves or some purpose we consider 
worthy. Sometimes that is correct, like lying to save a life.

Mostly we lie for unworthy reasons. We are weak or afraid or greedy. We 
feel important enough to think that the end we seek justifies the use of any 
means, including lying.

In the end, only truth can serve us. May we all learn to turn our backs on 
lying and turn our faces towards truth, together, with love,
 sharing in the search for truth.





























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