In theory, there is nothing complicated about telling the truth. When you answer a question or volunteer information, the words you write or speak should always represent the facts as you understand them.
But what if a killer enters your home and asks where your children are hiding? Or, more realistically, a loved one asks for your honest opinion about the meal he spent hours preparing? In the first scenario, it’s clearly more important to protect your children than tell the truth; nobody in their right mind would see such a lie as a moral failure. The second scenario is a bit trickier. The truth might be that you found the meal to be disgusting, but there could be a way to offer a gentle critique without being entirely dishonest: “Maybe a little less salt next time, and the chicken could have been cooked a tad longer.”
Many times a day, good people are tasked with deciding when to tell the truth and when to soften or withhold it. They are guided not by whether they personally stand to lose or gain, but by what other good people past and present would deem “the right thing to do.” The complexity of some of these problems can be so overwhelming that people feel a sort of moral or ethical paralysis. While they want very much to tell the truth because honesty is a pillar of their character, they also can’t bear to hurt others unnecessarily. An honest person will be challenged in this way many times over the course of their life. They will forget the times when they made the right decision and be tormented by the times when they got it wrong.
Conversely, there are plenty of people for whom lying is not only easy but part of who they are. They lie to avoid embarrassment, to impress others, to undermine those they consider enemies, to deflect blame, to minimize or exaggerate the effects of their actions, to make more money, to gain popularity, to erase or alter the past, and on and on. They lie about silly things that don’t really matter and big things that harm people, including those they care about. They lie about the lies, to themselves and others, and bury the truth so deep that even they can’t find it after a while A lot of times, their lies are actually wishes: They so want to believe something that they try to make it real by sheer force of will. Sometimes, in the right place and at the right time and with the right people listening, those wishes actually do come true. Lies deemed preferable to truth are not just accepted but propagated to the point where truth itself becomes an abstraction.
Meanwhile, the people who are not taken in by the lies – mainly because they have nothing to gain by believing them – feel as though they’re witnessing not only the unraveling of society but of humanity itself.
The trouble today isn’t so much that more lies are being told and believed, but that truth and the pursuit of truth have been devalued. Lies that comfort are accepted and facts that don’t are discarded, even by people who otherwise cherish honesty in their everyday lives. The result is a sort of cognitive dissonance en masse – behavior at odds with beliefs – and its accompanying frustration, anxiety, anger and hatred.
For as long as human beings have communicated with one another, they have debated what is and is not truth. That is how ideas are born and knowledge gained. But when one side challenges the inherent value of truth itself, there is nothing left to discuss. There is no path forward.
It may sometimes be difficult to tell the truth, but it can be even harder to break free of the lies you hear and want to believe.