Lying by Sam Harris
by Parker · 26 things on Twos
- Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment.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.
- Endless forms of suffering and embarrassment could be easily avoided by simply telling the truth.
- To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.
- People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being depends upon a correct understanding of the world—the more consequential the lie.
- The intent to communicate honestly is the measure of truthfulness.
- It is in believing one thing while intending to communicate another that every lie is born.
- The liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to almost never shares this view. The moment we consider our dishonesty from the point of view of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.
- You can be honest and kind, because your purpose in telling the truth is not to offend people: You simply want them to have the information you have, and would want to have if you were in their position.
- Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. Without recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others’ noticing.
- Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former far more harshly.
- False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
- Honesty demands that we communicate any uncertainty we may feel about the relevance of our own opinions. But if we are convinced that a friend has taken a wrong turn in life, it is no sign of friendship to simply smile and wave him onward.
- The more basic truth is that you love your friends and want them to be happy, and both of them could make changes in their lives that might lead to greater fulfillment. In lying to them, you are not only declining to help them—you are denying them useful information and setting them up for future disappointment. Yet the temptation to lie in these circumstances can be overwhelming.
- When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world.
- Failures of personal integrity, once revealed, are rarely forgotten.
- We cannot erase the bad impression we have left in the minds of other people.
- A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoided by following a single precept in life: Do not lie.
- To agree to keep a secret is to assume a burden. At a minimum, one must remember what one is not supposed to talk about. This can be difficult and lead to clumsy attempts at deception. Unless your work requires that you keep secrets—which doctors, lawyers, psychologists, and other professional confidants do routinely—it seems worth avoiding.
- In those circumstances where we deem it obviously necessary to lie, we have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. In other words, we have judged the prospects of establishing a real relationship with this person to be nonexistent. For most of us, such circumstances arise very rarely in life, if ever.
- What does it mean to have integrity? It means many things, of course, but one criterion is to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse.
- To truly have integrity, we must not feel the need to lie about our personal lives.
- Confusion spreads unnecessarily whenever people in positions of power are caught lying or concealing their conflicts of interest.
- 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.
- By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make—and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.
- And by lying to one person, we potentially spread falsehoods to many others—even to whole societies. We also force upon ourselves subsequent choices—to maintain the deception or not—that can complicate our lives. In this way, every lie haunts our future. There is no telling when or how it might collide with reality, requiring further maintenance. The truth never needs to be tended in this way. It can simply be reiterated.
- Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste—everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.