Edited 20/10/2023
Lying Autumn 2023
“Lying is the royal road to chaos.” Sam Harris
“Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.” Sam Harris
“Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship”. Sam Harris
For some time now I have wanted to write something about lying and cruelty, which are often connected and can be related to trauma processes. Reading Lying by Sam Harris, PhD, has offered me the opportunity to touch upon one of these themes today. I’d like to mention there are more perspectives and routes to approach the topic of lying, but I have mostly focused on the areas discusssed in the book. Hopefully, the next post will be related to cruelty, as I’m currently reading On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It by David Livingston Smith.
At the beginning of the book Harris writes: “And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.” He goes on to define lying, discern types of lying and discuss the consequences of lying. He challenges readers to rethink their assumptions about honesty and truthfulness and how these can contribute to a more honest and fulfilling life, while creating less suffering and chaos for others. He argues that most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled, and also, sustained by lies, and that most acts of betrayal, corruption and fraud, murder and genocide are all made possible by lies. Lying, he writes, has prolonged or precipitated wars.
Harris defines lying as intentionally misleading others when they expect honest communication, .believing one thing while intending to communicate another. To lie is to intentionally lead others to form beliefs and opinions that are not true, and “the more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.” I could add that outright lying and manipulation of reality are two aspects of gaslighting, in which one attempts through lies and other means to micromanage a group of people or another person and to sew self-doubt, confusion and fear in their mind.
Throughout the book, Harris explores the moral and practical implications of lying and gives suggestions of how to navigate many situations where we might be tempted to tell white lies to spare others from pain or ourselves from discomfort. He provides examples of situations when people might face difficult dilemmas or when lying might be the lesser harm, and emphasizes the importance of cultivating a commitment to honesty and to developing the courage to speaking truthfully.
Harris distinguishes between truth and truthfulness and explains that a person may be impeccably truthful while being mistaken. He claims that to speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs in the moment. Of course, we understand that this may not necessarily be true for many reasons, such as, lack of information and ability to access the whole truth of one’s experience and one’s level of presence in that moment. Our beliefs about the world are not always true or correct and our beliefs or opinions might change as we grow or learn more. Actually, telling the truth can reveal ways, in which we have not been fully present, ways we want to grow or things we need to look at because honesty can force any dysfunction in one’s life or any abusive dynamics in relationships to the surface. We might find that certain relationships cannot be honestly maintained.
The measure of truthfulness, Harris asserts, is the intent to communicate honestly and to represent one’s degree of uncertainty. We can always reconsider facts and change our views and it should be okay to openly discuss our confusion, conflicting ideas or doubts. He claims that “a commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.” Also, he clarifies that holding one’s tongue, or steering a conversation toward topics of relative safety or not revealing everything about oneself, is not lying. A commitment to honesty does not necessarily require that we disclose facts about ourselves or others that we would prefer to keep private. He says, in this case, the truth could well be “I’d rather not say.”
Harris discerns two types of lies. He also considers two categories of ethical transgressions: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). Lying can be both the deliberate falsehoods people tell or spread, but also, the things we don’t tell that could protect someone, or empower them to act on their own and others’ behalf, or find solutions. He focuses more on lies of commission: “lying at its clearest and most consequential,” but states that most of what he says is relevant to lies of omission and to deception generally.
One type of lies explored in the book are what we refer to as white lies. These are the lies we tell people with the intention of sparing them discomfort or pain, at least in the short term. These are the lies that good people tell while imagining that they are being good in the process, Harris says, but adds that we have no reason to believe that the social conventions that happen to stabilize in primates like ourselves at about the age of eleven will lead to optimal human relationships. In fact, there are many reasons to believe that lying is precisely the sort of behavior we need to outgrow in order to build a better world.
Harris asserts that in telling them – irrespectively, of whether we think that we are lying out of compassion for others – sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs. Also, he says, it is difficult to spot the damage we do in the process or the long term consequences. Additionally, by lying or not telling the truth, we deny our friends access to reality and the resulting ignorance based on falsehoods may not help them act wisely or solve a problem, and can actually harm them in ways we did not anticipate. Lying he suggests is to infringe on the freedom of those we care about.
Another type of white lie he discusses is false encouragement, which he believes can be a kind of theft because it steals time, energy, and motivation that a person could put toward some other purpose. Harris also asserts that dishonest feedback or insincere praise is like treating others like children, “while failing to help them prepare for encounters with those who will judge them like adults.” He believes that unless someone is suicidal deciding how much he should know about himself seems the quintessence of arrogance. At this point I need to add that we do need to be very careful and aware of our deeper motivations and intentions, to be able to discern any envy, biases or misperceptions on our behalf because we don’t want to be “candle blower outers” [Brené Brown’s phrase]. There seems to be a pandemic of this already; therefore, we want to be thoughtful. Harris clarifies that we need to be aware that our judgments aren’t always correct and honesty demands that we communicate any uncertainty we may feel about the relevance of our opinions. We need to be careful that we are not undermining people’s dreams or work and we also need to take into account whether someone can handle the truth, and to consider the best ways we can help someone see more of reality or become more willing to re-evaluate their experience.
He also discusses the common experience of people being deceived by family members or / and medical professionals about medical diagnoses. He refers to his own mother, who was diagnosed with MS when she was in her 30s. He writes: “Rather than feeling grateful and protected, I felt sadness that we hadn’t come together as a family to face her illness and support each other….” In these cases, hiding the truth or telling white lies can deprive us of opportunities for deepening love, compassion, forgiveness, understanding., sharing of wisdom, telling people the things we need to say, and making choices that we would not otherwise make. We are also in some way infantilizing people. Of course, context matters and there are times when telling the truth may not be the best course of action, so while we may be committed to honesty, we also need to be sensitive to each situation.
The consequences of lying are many. Lying erodes trust. Harris writes that suspicion often grows on both sides of a lie and that research indicates that “liars trust those they deceive less than they otherwise might—and the more damaging their lies, the less they trust, or even like, their victims. It seems that in protecting their egos and interpreting their own behavior as justified, liars tend to deprecate the people they lie to.” He further claims that the erosions of trust are especially insidious because they are almost never remedied.
Consistent lying also requires mental accounting, which refers to the process of keeping track of lies. For many people lying will create some dissonance and discomfort, and lies often generate other lies and they must be continually protected from collisions with reality. Harris writes some people are better at this than others, and psychopaths can assume the burden of mental accounting without any obvious distress, but lying unquestionably comes at a psychological cost for the rest of us.
There is also a chapter in the book with the title Big Lies, in which he explores the big lies that have undermined our trust in governments, corporations, public institutions and in people in positions of authority. Harris writes: “Given the fact that corporations and governments sometimes lie, whether to avoid legal liability or to avert public panic, it has become very difficult to spread the truth.” Harris discusses how conscious attempts to lie, distort facts, rig the data or withhold trial data have generated distrust in the public, and how once lies have escaped into the world it is hard to abolish them. He writes: “The lies of the powerful lead us to distrust governments and corporations. The lies of the weak make us callous toward the suffering of others. The lies of conspiracy theorists raise doubts about the honesty of whistle-blowers, even when they are telling the truth. Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.” Finally, when people with authority and power lie it makes lying acceptable and it legitimizes lying and deception as social practices.
Lies and disinformation emanating from those with power also generate confusion and fear, which lead to people becoming passive and disempowered and can be an obstacle in their making choices that could better serve them and humanity at large. We see this with the wars that are going on around the globe at the moment, where disinformation and lies serve to distract or turn our focus on the immediate horrors of each day, which are almost always the result of the culmination of a long course of oppressive and invasive tactics and policies of injustice, elimination or impoverishment Lies and half truths about historical facts and the complex causality of events do not only lead us further astray from the truth, but also do not contribute to the cessation of violence, nor do they foster peace, growth and development.
Therefore, Harris asserts that where we deem it necessary to lie, we should have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. He provides examples and says that for most of us, such circumstances arise very rarely in life, if ever. He also refers to war and espionage, where the usual rules of cooperation no longer apply, and where “human relationships have broken down or were never established in the first place.” He writes that the moment one begins dropping bombs, or destroying a country’s infrastructure with cyber attacks, lying has become just another weapon in the arsenal. He clarifies that although the need for state secrets is obvious there is no need for governments to lie to their own people. As for the rest of us we need not consider whether our every utterance could compromise national security every time we speak up about something. Additionally, in relation to espionage he writes that “The ethics of war and espionage are the ethics of emergency—and are, therefore, necessarily limited in scope” and that the role of a spy strikes him as a near total sacrifice of personal ethics for a larger, real or imagined good, and this is a kind of moral self-immolation. On the rare occasion that I’ve watched a spy film I’ve felt that to be a spy requires an annihilation of the self and a deadening of emotions, in some sense a giving up of many aspects of being human.
The book includes an exploration of the benefits of honesty. Firstly, dishonesty and lying are not things that we want others to do to us, so it is only fair that we try, to the best of our abilities, to cultivate honesty. Harris says that if we “consider our dishonesty from the perspective of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.” He refers to what we already know from our own experience, but also from research findings, whcih is the fact that trust is deeply rewarding and that lying is associated with less satisfying relationships. He also mentions that honesty is a source of power and a gift we can give to others, and that honest people are a refuge. He writes: “Once one commits to telling the truth, one begins to notice how unusual it is to meet someone who shares this commitment. Honest people are a refuge.”
I will conclude with a few of the main takeaways or points made in the book:
Lies have the power to kindle and sustain private and public injustices and miseries. Even white lies can often cause suffering and rob people of their ability to protect, heal, solve problems or grow. A commitment to honesty and to speaking truthfully require courage, but they are necessary for living an ethical and fulfilling life, as well as, building a better society. Honesty is something we can cultivate through becoming more present and aware of our blind spots and biases, but also, through setting an intention. Context matters and there are times when telling the truth is not the best course of action, and there are situations where lying might prevent a larger harm.
