The Lies We Tell
I've heard the book The Things They Carried (Wiki) is outstanding; the gist of the eponymous short story -- that what soldiers were allowed to carry into battle said more about them than words might have. (I don't know that I will ever agree with that truncation of communication ... to me a well-thought-out statement, verbal or written, is worth a proverbial tonnage in gold.) Seems to me that, much more than the contents of pockets or emotions kept locked within hearts and minds, if I were to infer information about someone, I'd be far more inclined to believe what the lies people tell say about them than anything else.
Whatever a person feels moved to "spin?" A person feels moved to hide. And what a person feels moved to hide? Well. That right there is the truth, or as close to it as you'll get from someone who runs from anything that's not carefully groomed and spun and inserted to complete a picture, no matter how fake.
Recently, I've gotten a lot of negative reinforcement around truth, and the telling of it, and about Truth as a general precept of a life well-lived -- that larger ideal, a sense of honesty that we all "say" we value but in fact most spend a great amount of time obfuscating and dodging. I have found that not many people really desire the truth, and a far smaller subset of that actually deserve the truth. You see, anyone supposedly following the "golden rule" but telling layer after layer of thick lies? That person must clearly desire to be lied to.
People don't want to be told the truth if it's not sanitized, plasticized, and modulated. They don't want to hear they are overweight. They don't want to be told that they are sedentary couch potatoes just like their parents and thus they will likely die of the same ills that felled the parents. They don't want to hear that others find them obnoxious and do not believe the endless stories they tell. They don't want to know that their spouse doesn't love them anymore, and they are the only ones who apparently don't realize this. They don't want to know that the preacher has faults, the boss is stealing, that their children are thieves or on dope. If the truth is unpleasant, then by all means, lie to them. Because there is no reward for telling the truth. There is no pat on the back for trying to help someone extract their heads from the sand or from their own asses. Oh no -- once accustomed to breathing dark, rank air, people seem to grow comfortable with it. They are "fine." Don't mess up the pretty, fragrant la la land they got so flexible in order to reach.
Unfortunately for me, I prefer truth. Unvarnished, unspun truth. Don't spin facts to me; don't try to spin me. I dislike bullshit, and I dislike bullshitters even more, and lately I find my life replete with both. It seems bullshitting is endemic to the human condition! Which makes me even more alien for working hard to avoid liars, to avoid lying to others, or be party to group-fakery.
So here's a head's up -- if you make it a regular practice to lie to the people in your life? You aren't going to be in mine much longer. The odds suggest that you will eventually lie to me, or worse -- you already are.