The short answer

I've been here posting for a month or so, now, and every day I get visitors who arrive by asking Google or a similar search engine "Is it wrong to lie?" 

I imagine that most of you searchers found a litle more than you were looking for in the philosophical posts.  Actually, one of my regular readers has also complained that ethics is not really this complicated, and I go on for too long about it all.

For you, I have created this short version of what I predict my eventual answer will be in the long version.  I reserve the right to change this page, in the likely event that my opinion changes.

So, what happens when you tell a lie?

The problem with lying is that it violates the trust which is an essential part of any human relationship.  Because we are mentally isolated from each other, all that we can really know about each other is what is revealed through communication, and verbal communication is a large and important part of that.  Our communication sets up bridges, or links, if you like, to other people, so that we and they are no longer quite so alone in the world.  This process depends utterly upon trust that the other is not lying.  Your ability to connect with others depends upon your reputation as someone who can be trusted, someone who tells the truth.  When you screw with that, the result is that you become even more isolated in an already lonely world.  People never get to see the real you, and they do not know you well enough to trust you with revelations about themselves.  And life is more difficult when undertaken alone.

This does not mean that you always need to charge forward with your true opinions about things.  Sometimes, the business of establishing and protecting relationships requires us to keep quiet about things if revealing them will harm another person.  Harming others is naturally at least as dangerous in relationships as lying is, and probably more.

Building a reputation of scrupulous honesty is a good thing, even if it sometimes means telling the truth at times when it might be more comfortable to lie.  Once people realize that you are capable of lying, everything else that you utter becomes at least partly suspect.  The more lying that you do, the worse this situation becomes.  The damage can take years to repair, in my experience.

I see happen this in my work with addicts.  Addiction pushes people into behaviors that they would normally never consider, because the urge to get and consume more of the drug becomes more important than everything else.  When addicts start lying to get their drugs, people who used to be able to trust them begin to believe less and less of what they say until the relationship deteriorates to the point where nothing at all that the addict says can be taken without a pound of salt.  The addict is usually oblivious to this process until they actually stop using the drug and stop the lying.  Then they discover that everyone treats them with suspicion.  The addict's first reaction is irritation:  "But, I'm not using now" they will say.  Eventually they realize that there is nothing they can do about the suspiciousness with which they are treated.  And this suspiciousness can last for a very, very long time.

You can also see the results of a relationship with liars in our attitudes towards advertising.  We have become so skeptical of advertisers, because we have heard so many stories of people who tried to make fortunes off of misrepresenting their products, that we easily look the other way when confronted with a certain type of cheaply constructed ad.  We know without looking any closer that the claims are probably not true, that the models photographed were probably never overweight in the first place, that penis enlargement without surgery is an impossible dream.  We are cautious with even more sophisticated advertising.  Somehow some people still fall for these things, I suppose, but I am sure that you, my dear readers, do not.

I won't even get started on the subject of politicians.  Suffice it to say that if you type "lies liars" into your search engine today, the vast majority of results which come up will reference either a political leader or a political commentator.  It has become very difficult, in this country, to really know what goes on behind the closed doors of government offices.  We try to trust, but that trust has become blind, as the saying goes.

Because this is supposed to be short, I will stop here, and give the floor to some of my commentors:

Phillip says:  "What do you think? Better yet what do you KNOW to be true about lying? Consider the child who lies and how it is a learned skill. Your first attempts are weak guilt ridden evasions of the truth (which you know), to save your butt from some imagined or real consequence. But with a little practice one can become a rather accomplished liar. So what? Well unless the person is pathological there is a tremendous amount of turmoil living with lies, keeping them straight worrying about being found out as a fraud etc..."

And John says:  "I can envision situations where telling a lie not only seems all right, but seems to be the better course. Those little white lies that are told to children to protect them from some harsh reality, where exposing the truth would be more frightening than the lie. And no one gets hurt. Needless to say, telling some lies is not only wrong, it could be unforgivable."

1. Real lies are motivated by other qualities: cowardice, greed, jealousy, anger. . . . These are things we learn, and they're a sign of mental illness. In our terrible modern world, maybe we're all mentally ill. Maybe, having become separated from the rest of the world in so many ways, we're all homeless. Probably, constrained by systems and rules and resource limitations and strait-jacketing social structures and 'a world that is trying its best, every day, to make us everybody else', we're all prison inmates, asylum inmates. When you're disconnected from everything that makes you human, when you're homeless, when you're cooped up in a horrible place with sadistic jailers and no hope of escape, it warps you, corrupts you, it makes you behave in unhuman and inhumane ways, it makes you lie, to yourself and others. We've just been in denial for 30,000 years about what we've done to ourselves and our world. The lies just pile up, mountains of them one on top of another, until we can't see them or understand what causes us to lie. Lying is a manifestation of our collective mental illness just as a cough is a manifestation of physical illness.
2. So my answer to your question 'what happens when you tell a lie?' is the same as the answer I would give to the question 'what happens when you cough?'. The answer is, you show those who hear it that you're ill. What happens then? If everyone else is healthy, you'll either be shunned or given treatment. If everyone else is as sick as you, the answer is the same as that given by the young man in your blog: nothing.
   

Tell me what you think and I might add it here.  Click the little envelope below the link to this page to send e-mail.  (Please put 'about your blog' in the subject line so that I know you are not a spammer, and include no attachments.)

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