Lying

by Sam Harris

Lying is the royal road to chaos.

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

Check out this quote.

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 demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.

People tell lies for many reasons. They lie to avoid embarrassment, to exaggerate their accomplishments, and to disguise wrongdoing.

By lying, we deny our friends access to reality9—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate.

Responding honestly to the subtext would not be lying.

Even on so touchy a subject, lying seems a clear failure of friendship.

By reassuring your friend about her appearance, you are not helping her to do what you think she should do to get what she wants out of life.

In many circumstances in life, false encouragement can be very costly to another person.

So there is no conflict, in principle, between honesty and the keeping of secrets.

Stephanie and Gina had been friends for more than a decade when Stephanie began to hear rumors that Gina’s husband, Derek, was having an affair. Although Stephanie did not feel close enough to Gina to raise the matter directly, a little snooping revealed that almost everyone in her circle knew about Derek’s infidelity—except, it seemed, Gina herself.

She was a second-tier friend, and the person who had told her of Derek’s affair had sworn her to secrecy. She also knew women who were closer to Gina than she was—why hadn’t one of them said something?

Stephanie would feel that by remaining silent she was participating in her friend’s ultimate undoing.

As if by magic, the two friends quickly grew apart and have not spoken for years.

She found it uncanny to see someone living under a mountain of lies and gossip, surrounded by friends but without a friend in the world who would tell her the truth.

One of the greatest problems for the liar is that he must keep track of his lies.

But war and espionage are conditions in which human relationships have broken down or were never established in the first place; thus the usual rules of cooperation no longer apply.

It is rumored that spies must lie even to their friends and family.

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 our view of the world.

In this way, every lie haunts our future.