Can We Stop Lying All The Time?

Truthfulness is generally considered a virtue. But why is it generally so hard to speak and act the truth exclusively? Furthermore, is it really impossible not to lie at all? Let’s find out.

The Background – Can We Stop Lying all The Time?

As a child, I read about how Mahatma Gandhi decided to speak and act the truth after encountering the life changing legendary story of Harishchandra. This made me curious, but I never really grasped what was so special about speaking and acting truthfully. It didn’t sound that hard to me. Years later, as I got involved into works done by profound philosophers and psychologists (both from the east and the west), I learned the scary level of difficulty and responsibility associated with speaking and acting the truth exclusively. These challenges in turn led to the question we are trying to answer today.

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Do We Even Know What Truth Is?

Human behavior is extremely complicated. One can only speak the truth when one knows the truth. We are genetically designed to lie to ourselves about the truth, when we do not understand something sufficiently. This becomes apparent with children. If you ask a question to a child, and follow a ‘why’ loop of questions, at some relatively shallow point, the child runs out of knowledge. Yet, the child acts as if its last layer of knowledge is the absolute truth. When asked, “Why does it rain?”, a child could answer, “Because the sky is sad, and is crying.” At this point, it appears cute. But this also represents the child’s truth, which could be perceived as a lie. It is far easier for the child to have a mentally made-up model of the world, rather than to embrace the deep void of the unknown and say, “I do not know.”

This behavior does not go away with adults. Instead, it becomes sophisticated to the point that the truth becomes subjective. This realm includes the subset of conspiracy theories like the Anti-Vaxxer campaign. Science and religion try to uncover the absolute truth in this realm, but still, the human ability to convince oneself about the truth (lie to oneself) is very challenging to overcome. One could even argue that this has been coded into the human DNA as a survival trait.

Sophistication in Language and Culture

When it comes to sophistication in any culture or language, words like sarcasm, irony, satire, and humor jump directly into the picture. These are extensions of human sophistication. If a human language or culture is strictly used as it is meant to be, it leads to confusion and annoyance. To prove this point, we can take autism as a convenient example. Certain people affected with autism do not have the capability (mental model) to deviate from the literal meaning of a language, or the literal norms of a culture. Five minutes into a conversation with such a person, and you could find yourself being annoyed and frustrated. Explaining a joke using literal words kills the fun out of the joke. This is because there is a certain lack of intelligence and sophistication that makes it uninteresting for you as a human being. Now is this level of sophistication a form of lying? This ties-in directly with the question: “Do we even know what truth is?”

The Narcissist in Us

Every human being has a certain element of self-admiration coded into oneself. If you are a mother who got woken up by your baby’s crying twice during the night, you narrate the story to your peers the following morning. This time around, it wasn’t just twice that the baby cried, it was FIVE times, and every single time, you jumped out of your bed, rushed to the baby, and comforted her using your SPECIAL, MOTHERLY love. Case in point: you want to look cooler in front of other moms. If you got yourself a new microwave on a sale, you wish to share how PROUD you are about how you managed to SAVE so and so much on the new device. Case in point: you wish to look cool in front of others.

Why do we do this? We could argue that this trait exists in human beings in order to form and sustain social bonds. It is clear that when this behavior is skewed, it leads to mental disorders, but it also remains a fact that every human being has a certain amount of this trait by nature.

The Answer – Can We Stop Lying All the Time?

Considering all of the above valid challenges in being truthful, we arrive at the question once again: Is it really impossible not to lie at all?

I’ve come across a few people who have tried or are trying to be truthful. The common feedback sounds something like: “People around me just don’t like it when I’m being honest. They find it brutal.” While this feedback does have merit, it goes into only a surface level analysis.

From my elaborate research into this topic combined empirical observations and personal experiences, it is NOT apparent to me whether it is impossible not to lie at all. But it requires a very high level of sophistication, conscientiousness, empathy, and self-regulation. To pull this off means also that the person is bearing a very high level of responsibility in life compared to the average person. There are also scenarios where it is next to impossible to tell the truth without significantly hurting the other person, whilst the negative consequences of lying or not telling the truth in that scenario could be significantly lower. Another possible scenario is when one gets into legal trouble for telling the truth, like defaming claims that can be construed out of context. In such scenarios, it really should be questioned whether it is the right thing to do to tell the truth. Therein lies the paradox, ‘telling the truth’ and ‘doing the right thing’ are two separate moral arguments, and are not synonymous. Therefore, while it could be possible that it is NOT impossible not to lie at all, one the one hand it is not apparent, and on the other hand, if one completely gives up lying, it could come at the cost of sacrificing one’s human emotions, which appears to be slippery slope as well.

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