Lying

by Sam Harris

Elisions of this kind can be forms of deception, but they are not quite lies.

To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.

To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one’s beliefs about the world are true. Nor does truthfulness require that one speak the whole truth, because communicating every fact on a given topic is almost never useful or even possible. Of course, if one is not sure whether or not something is true, representing one’s degree of uncertainty is a form of honesty.

But it is in believing one thing while intending to communicate another that every lie is born.

But it may take practice to feel comfortable with this way of being in the world—to cancel plans, decline invitations, negotiate contracts, critique others’ work, all while being honest about what one is thinking and feeling. To do this is also to hold a mirror up to one’s life—because a commitment to telling the truth requires that one pay attention to what the truth is in every moment. What sort of person are you? How judgmental, self-interested, or petty have you become?

I’m not denying that tact can play a role in minimizing conflict. Holding one’s tongue, or steering a conversation toward topics of relative safety, is not the same as lying (nor does it require that one deny the truth in the future).

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).

Failures of personal integrity, once revealed, are rarely forgotten. We can apologize, of course. And we can resolve to be more forthright in the future. But we cannot erase the bad impression we have left in the minds of other people.

Communications like these can still be awkward, but a wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can generally be avoided by following a single precept: Do not lie.

If lying seems the only option, given your fear or physical limitations, it clearly shifts the burden of combating evil onto others.

Of course, if I had been carrying illegal drugs, my situation would have been very different. One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts you at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.

Lies beget other lies.

In fact, suspicion often grows on both sides of a lie: 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.13

To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us. The temptation to do this is often born of an understanding that others will disapprove of our behavior. Often, they would have good reason to do so.

The need for state secrets is obvious. However, the need for governments to lie to their own people seems to me to be virtually nonexistent.

If we shorten the time horizon to a few days, or a few weeks, or even a few months, it can appear to undermine the rationale for living truthfully. Many people seem to feel that if we have only two weeks left together, it’s probably better to live a consoling lie, but if we have 20 years left, then we might want to put our house in order and live truthfully.

When your model of yourself in the world is at odds with how you actually are in the world, you are going to keep bumping into things.

A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many walks of life, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making the world much less good than it could be.

Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.20

This is one of the most noxious things about religious faith and about any community based on it. Whatever its imagined virtues, faith is the enemy of open and honest inquiry. Remaining open to the powers of conversation—to new evidence and better arguments—is not only essential for rationality. It is essential for love.