truly good people but always ready and
even the times highly enthusiastic about
telling lies this sounds odd only
because we’re in the grip of a heroic
but indiscriminate and delusional
addiction to truth telling a lot of this
can be blamed on George Washington first
president of the United States legend
recounts how at the age of six he was
given a little axe as a present he was
so excited with the gift that he went
straight into the garden and hacked down
a beautiful cherry tree
his father was furious when he
discovered the chop tree and asked
George if he was responsible
the boy was said to have replied father
I cannot tell a lie
it was I the story is probably
apocryphal but it is stuck because it
encapsulates an ideal to which we are
intensely collectively committed a
devotion to the truth in spite of the
cost that exact on oneself in this
scenario the liar is odious because they
seek to evade a necessary and important
truth for the sake of low personal gain
but good people do not lie for their own
benefit they aren’t protecting
themselves and they aren’t disloyal to
the facts out of mendacity but they tell
lies
because paradoxical as it sounds at
first they love the truth intensely and
out of goodwill for the person they are
deceiving we’re ready enough to admit to
a role for lies in certain situations
you might be visiting an elderly aunt
who pride herself on her talent for
carrot cakes with vanilla icing but her
heyday is long gone now she models up
the recipe and sometimes forgets how
long the butter has been in the fridge
the result is pretty off-putting but
it’s deeply important for her to feel
that she’s still able to please others
that’s why you lie the lie isn’t
produced to protect oneself it’s told
out of loyalty to a bigger truth that
one loves the art that would be
threatened by full disclosure as is so
often the case the great truth has to
pass into the mind of another person via
a smaller falsehood
what makes falsehood so necessary is our
proclivity for making unfortunate
associations it is in theory of course
in
tirely possible to love someone beat li
and at the same time to believe that
they are terrible at baking but in our
own minds the rejection of our cakes
tends to feel synonymous with the
rejection of our being with forcing any
half-decent person to lie to us by the
abducens of our thought processes it is
because the aunt is in the grip of a
falsehood if you don’t like my cake you
can’t like me that we will have to offer
her a dose of untruth
I like your cake by which we can make
sure that a big truth I like you can
remain safe the same principle applies
in more tricky situations suppose a
woman goes away to a conference one
night after a lovely conversation in the
bar she gets carried away and slips into
bed with an international colleague they
don’t make love but they do have a sweet
time they rub their lips together and
entwine their legs they will almost
certainly never see one another again
it wasn’t an attempt to start a
long-term relationship and it meant very
little when the woman gets home her
partner asks her how her evening was she
says she watched CNN and ordered a club
sandwich in her room on her own she lies
because she knows her partner well and
can predict how he would respond to the
truth he would be wounded to the call
would be convinced that his wife didn’t
love him and would probably conclude the
divorce was the only option but this
assessment of the truth would not be
true in reality it is of course
eminently possible to love someone
deeply and every so often go to bed with
another person and yet kind people
understand the entrenched and socially
endorsed associations between infidelity
and callousness so almost all of us the
news I spent a night with a colleague
from the Singapore office which is true
has to end up meaning I don’t love you
anymore which is not true at all and so
we have to say I didn’t sleep with
anyone
which is untrue in the name of securing
the greater idea I still love you which
is overwhelmingly true however much they
love the truth good people have an even
greater commitment to something else
being kind towards others they grasp and
make allowances for the ease with which
your truths can produce desperately
unhelpful convictions in the minds of
others and they are therefore not
proudly overcommitted to accuracy at
every turn their loyalty is reserved for
something they take to be far more
important than literal narration the
sanity and well-being of their audiences
telling the truth they understand isn’t
a matter of the sentence-by-sentence
ferocity of one’s words it’s a matter of
ensuring that after one has spoken the
other person will be left with a true
picture of reality this concern for the
well-being of others
explains why kind people only ever lie
when there’s little chance of their
untruths being detected but they know
that a lie which gets unearthed will
cause proper and unjustifiable trouble
leading the other person to a second and
even more radically false conclusion not
only that you don’t love me first
untruth but also that you lie to me
because you don’t love me a second even
greater untruth it can feel
condescending to hear the logic of the
good Liars spelt out but that’s only
because we don’t like to acknowledge the
fragility of our own minds we may
believe we’re heroically ready to
embrace the truth however painful we may
insist that others should tell us
everything whatever they do but we
thereby discount our own powerful
tendencies to emotional indigestion it’s
why we should not only occasionally tell
untruths but actively hope but from time
to time
others will lie to us and quietly hope
that we will never find out that they have
even the times highly enthusiastic about
telling lies this sounds odd only
because we’re in the grip of a heroic
but indiscriminate and delusional
addiction to truth telling a lot of this
can be blamed on George Washington first
president of the United States legend
recounts how at the age of six he was
given a little axe as a present he was
so excited with the gift that he went
straight into the garden and hacked down
a beautiful cherry tree
his father was furious when he
discovered the chop tree and asked
George if he was responsible
the boy was said to have replied father
I cannot tell a lie
it was I the story is probably
apocryphal but it is stuck because it
encapsulates an ideal to which we are
intensely collectively committed a
devotion to the truth in spite of the
cost that exact on oneself in this
scenario the liar is odious because they
seek to evade a necessary and important
truth for the sake of low personal gain
but good people do not lie for their own
benefit they aren’t protecting
themselves and they aren’t disloyal to
the facts out of mendacity but they tell
lies
because paradoxical as it sounds at
first they love the truth intensely and
out of goodwill for the person they are
deceiving we’re ready enough to admit to
a role for lies in certain situations
you might be visiting an elderly aunt
who pride herself on her talent for
carrot cakes with vanilla icing but her
heyday is long gone now she models up
the recipe and sometimes forgets how
long the butter has been in the fridge
the result is pretty off-putting but
it’s deeply important for her to feel
that she’s still able to please others
that’s why you lie the lie isn’t
produced to protect oneself it’s told
out of loyalty to a bigger truth that
one loves the art that would be
threatened by full disclosure as is so
often the case the great truth has to
pass into the mind of another person via
a smaller falsehood
what makes falsehood so necessary is our
proclivity for making unfortunate
associations it is in theory of course
in
tirely possible to love someone beat li
and at the same time to believe that
they are terrible at baking but in our
own minds the rejection of our cakes
tends to feel synonymous with the
rejection of our being with forcing any
half-decent person to lie to us by the
abducens of our thought processes it is
because the aunt is in the grip of a
falsehood if you don’t like my cake you
can’t like me that we will have to offer
her a dose of untruth
I like your cake by which we can make
sure that a big truth I like you can
remain safe the same principle applies
in more tricky situations suppose a
woman goes away to a conference one
night after a lovely conversation in the
bar she gets carried away and slips into
bed with an international colleague they
don’t make love but they do have a sweet
time they rub their lips together and
entwine their legs they will almost
certainly never see one another again
it wasn’t an attempt to start a
long-term relationship and it meant very
little when the woman gets home her
partner asks her how her evening was she
says she watched CNN and ordered a club
sandwich in her room on her own she lies
because she knows her partner well and
can predict how he would respond to the
truth he would be wounded to the call
would be convinced that his wife didn’t
love him and would probably conclude the
divorce was the only option but this
assessment of the truth would not be
true in reality it is of course
eminently possible to love someone
deeply and every so often go to bed with
another person and yet kind people
understand the entrenched and socially
endorsed associations between infidelity
and callousness so almost all of us the
news I spent a night with a colleague
from the Singapore office which is true
has to end up meaning I don’t love you
anymore which is not true at all and so
we have to say I didn’t sleep with
anyone
which is untrue in the name of securing
the greater idea I still love you which
is overwhelmingly true however much they
love the truth good people have an even
greater commitment to something else
being kind towards others they grasp and
make allowances for the ease with which
your truths can produce desperately
unhelpful convictions in the minds of
others and they are therefore not
proudly overcommitted to accuracy at
every turn their loyalty is reserved for
something they take to be far more
important than literal narration the
sanity and well-being of their audiences
telling the truth they understand isn’t
a matter of the sentence-by-sentence
ferocity of one’s words it’s a matter of
ensuring that after one has spoken the
other person will be left with a true
picture of reality this concern for the
well-being of others
explains why kind people only ever lie
when there’s little chance of their
untruths being detected but they know
that a lie which gets unearthed will
cause proper and unjustifiable trouble
leading the other person to a second and
even more radically false conclusion not
only that you don’t love me first
untruth but also that you lie to me
because you don’t love me a second even
greater untruth it can feel
condescending to hear the logic of the
good Liars spelt out but that’s only
because we don’t like to acknowledge the
fragility of our own minds we may
believe we’re heroically ready to
embrace the truth however painful we may
insist that others should tell us
everything whatever they do but we
thereby discount our own powerful
tendencies to emotional indigestion it’s
why we should not only occasionally tell
untruths but actively hope but from time
to time
others will lie to us and quietly hope
that we will never find out that they have
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