🐉 Why And How We Lie To Others

“If we are true to ourselves, we cannot be false to anyone.”

— Shakespeare

“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

— Unknown

Why do we lie to others? Why do we even desire to hide things from others? And what is so terrifying about revealing the Truth?

At a young age, when we discover our freedom to do as we wish, we quickly understand that it means we can disobey, transgress and disrespect the rules we were taught. It would also mean that the darkness of loneliness would become favourable in the effort of hiding. And in hiding, transgressive behaviour would reign free without obvious consequences, that is - one can do anything one would like in the dark because in the dark no one would know, and if none will know there would be no punishment.

A child quickly understands this, but how does he deal with this freedom later on in his life? Most ‘fully developed’ adults still operate under this paradigm, perhaps more significantly than children because their capacity for evil is greater. We ‘hide’ behind our thoughts, fabricated emotions, and highly decorated words. We also do things in the ‘dark’, whether it be alone or with another - it is all the same if the intention is hateful or inappropriate. What defines the space as being ‘dark’ is the fact that it is sought after, with the full intention of committing evil, knowing that in this ‘darkness’ no one who has the capacity to punish will know, and will ever know. This punishment feared is always some form of shame or physical harm, but mostly the shame.

The instinct to avoid shame has steered us to naturally believe that all shame is determined and thrown into existence by the authority. However, the real situation is that, especially in the case of the adult, the shame is always self-inflicted. Even though others may attempt to shame us, the actual shame is a result of projecting authority under pretence. The adult, never learning to love himself in the right way, feels ever more needful to ‘hide’ himself and sees the threat of shame in the eyes of the panopticon.

At an early age, the child begins by doing things in hiding, understanding evil as disobedience and transgression. But as the child develops (some more quickly than others), the idea of evil becomes then transgression of identity, of personhood. The adult rejects himself and hates himself in the way of transgression. And the adult ‘hides’ by merely pretending to be someone else, or more accurately, normal. Normality is really the ultimate form of hiding and lying. As Oscar Wilde says, “Whatever is popular is wrong” to highlight that every person is individual and should be different and distinct in their interests. Permeation of culture is a roundabout way of describing the loss of individuality, and the removal of original thought.

Why Do We Lie To Others ?

Because we lie to ourselves. We subscribe to narratives which limit us, destroy ambition, and instil negative emotions.

But more to the point, we lie to ourselves about our own faults, our own shortcomings, our own weaknesses and fears. And this we see happening in those moments when we feel this justification for judging others and analysing their faults with an ever precise gaze. The need to judge others, envy others, hate others, and be triggered by others is a result of a lack of introspection.

Here, behold the most productive thought we can have whenever we feel the urge to judge or criticise: “How in my life do I act in the same way as this person, if not to a greater extent?” And behold the most productive thought whenever we feel the need to envy: “This person has showed me that the path to success which I want is possible, and so it must be possible for me aswell!”

Why Are Most of Us Afraid of Confronting Truth?

This is what lying is all about: the avoidance of the truth, or being uncomfortable speaking, hearing, or acknowledging the truth. The truth has become to us something weird to utter and speak about, because most of our lives are lived in flight from the truth.

Though, in retrospect, we are really afraid of ourselves. Our being is such an unexpected gift, a gift totally unasked for, and something we are completely undeserving of. The reality is that everything we have is a gift. We don’t deserve anything, as much we try to lie to ourselves. Nothing is really for any particular reason, but everything, the good and the bad is really a blessing, because we never deserved anything in the first place.

The Bible hits to the core of the matter when it says: “We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19). Everything that we do proceeds from this fact, that God created us because He loved us, and we can do nothing but love as a reaction to His love. Yet this is disturbs us to no end because all the things that we possess or strive to possess is vanity; all the things we do for ourselves to fulfil anxiously and speedily is just a distraction. All our pride, our hurt, our complaints, our pain, our suffering - to see it as wrong or a burden, or meaningless, is nothing but a denial of His love and the blessings which He has given us. To realise that without God, we would never exist, nor would we ever desire anything, or suffer anything at all - nor would we ever have the privilege and the honour to be an individual person, unlike any other, is the least we could do as a reaction to hearing one's own breath breath every moment, or the constant beat of the heart that, without which, death would immediately follow.

Everything we do is in reaction to God’s grace, and most of us react in denial, seeking the business of life as a band-aid.