One of the most insidious and underrated evils in our society is lying. Lying comes in many forms such as: refusing to be honest about our true motivations; contriving justifications for double standards towards different groups; knowingly misrepresenting the truth to avoid an opposing side racking up political points; saying what we know isn’t true because it’s socially/politically easier; even extreme euphemisms; etc.
The effects of all this is distrust, disunity, isolation, division. It’s poison to causes, countries, and relationships. Practiced liars eventually can’t even see reality at all, and can’t fix their problems because they can’t see them.
This is a fascinating and dangerous account of systematic errors in how we raise children. Lies are damaging because they make truth harder to find -- the opposite of a lie is almost never the truth. But, once revealed as lies (a key problem), they are highly informative about the state of mind of the liar.
What the essay suggests in various ways in describing how we lie to children is that we are afraid of conflict. The world is full of conflict and violence though we wish it were not. But we can wish it away for our children for a short while.
Which leads, I think, to the underlying reason for Paul's discomfort with these lies. The way to resolve conflict is to engage with it in a highly choreographed way. There aren't many, but there are some ways that society has devised for dealing with conflict in non-violent ways. The constitution of the U.S. of A. is an example. Litigation and contract law are others.
Unreflective lying is thus counter-productive to a long-term goal of raising children that have the right combination of courage and humility that is necessary to repeatedly engage in conflict without resorting to violence.
A few other thoughts on specific passages:
"Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things."
The thing that "very smart adults" have in common may not be selective ignorance, but rather strong skepticism. They haven't "learned" because they remain skeptical long after the rest of the world is satisfied with the lies they've been told.
"You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true."
The way I understand what you're getting at here is through the distinction between a public good and a natural monopoly. Some people naively assume that all public goods have the natural monopoly characteristic of declining average total costs of production. This is not true. Natural monopolies occupy a middle point in the temporal-spatial spectrum. At the low end, we have black markets that operate in small geographical regions for short periods of time until legal firms can enter. A black market may have a natural monopoly, but it is not a public good. At the other end of the spectrum, we have religion and political ideology, which are neither non-rivalrous nor non-excludable, and yet may have natural monopoly characteristics in how their doctrine are established and disseminated. The bizarre payload can be explained by the leverage these natural monopolies have over their followers. Incidentally, I am a Christian, and believe that learning and practicing Christian doctrine would be of benefit to everybody. But I am acutely aware of the bizarre payload that the church as an institution has accrued over many years. That bizarre payload is a problem for people like me to try and fix, not a reason not to adopt and practice Christianity.
In the end, I connected with this essay because I find the author engaged in what I consider to be one of the more difficult and important human endeavors: becoming free. Freedom cannot be had by force. It grows up in the detritus of shattered false beliefs about self and others. Its growth is fostered by the sun of social acknowledgment, but can wither under the same sun when not also watered down and washed off by humble listening and a habit of self-criticism.
This article is brilliant. Lies play an enormous role in this culture. I could go on and on about the topic, but I think one quote from A Language Older than Words by Derrick Jensen says it best:
"In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities."
A baseball bat to the head makes your head hurt for a while. Lying makes hundreds of thousands of people refuse to vaccinate, which puts millions in more danger of diseases. Lying makes people die from refusing cures that owrk and going for glorified sugar pills.
And I mean lies from both sides - from those who will sell you the sugar pill and from those who represent the medical world and by lying and bullshitting made it hard to trust it.
Lies are toxic and accumulates in society. In an increasingly complex world that depends on mutual trust between people and organizations, this is an existential threat. I think that what's most likely to end our civilization is not war or disease, but this bullshit 'the world runs on' spilling over and drowning us all.
Some Hogfather vibes. Believing small lies make you ready to believe the big ones. Yes, they are useful, till they are not, when following the lie instead of the truth is really harmful. Will we face that kind of situations? or we will prefer to believe that it won't happen?
Honestly, I find it both empowering (oh the data I can find if I know where to look) and reassuring. Why reassuring? Because it reminds us that lies can and will be discovered. Some people like to think they'll get away with one but it's only a function of how much someone else cares. But reality is self-consistent and in the Great Web of Causality falsehood is just damage that needs to be routed over.
Conversely, lying is a malicious act. It'sdirectly sabotaging the model of the world and reasoning capabilities of other human beings, with recursive damage being dealt as that person propagates or reasons from false information. Unless placed in life or death situation (std::jews_hiding_in_your_basement), you really shouldn't do it. It boggles my mind how lightly people treat spreading falsehoods.
When (repeated) lying is tolerated in official positions and to official organs of the state, the whole nation itself is in grave danger. In this case, the whole world is in grave danger.
True. But it's also true that cognitive dissonance is a real thing. People actively feel discomfort when confronted with truth that conflicts with established belief, and some people just can't handle the truth - so they seek out more lies, and help to spread them as a coping mechanism. The lies are soothing. The truth is too hard.
> "Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies—"
This is just the “religion might all be made up but it gives people comfort/morality so we shouldn’t look too closely” argument in another form. A useful lie eventual causes side effects (eg: in this case, causing managers to base career trajectories around bunk personality categories).
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