if no one lied about anything, this would not be such an evil-laden world... evil seems to need sentient beings to lie, in order for it to survive and thrive... deprive it of all varieties of dissimulation and it will lack the fuel it must have to go on consuming the good mankind is capable of, but only rarely indulges in, compared to the amounts of its counterpart we commit... here's just one version of my take on the subject of truth: and here's another, in essay form, for anyone who're interested: http://saysmom.com/maia/content.asp?Writing=131
I have trouble imagining how you can claim that there are only absolute moral positions...I have to be only entirely good, or absolute evil? Surely a few seconds of thought would throw up a moral scenario that cannot be so easily rendered as absolutely just and good, or absolutely evil. Lying is absolutely necessary to the way society functions. Its one of the earliest things children learn how to do - to lie, to manipulate others, to exert dominance by deception. I think the way we as humans essentialise everthing (love, justice, evil) leads to complications that can only be resolved through lying, albeit lying in the name of reinforcing these abstract and essential concepts. We mythologise things like love and evil until they become things that no one can really relate to, and yet we are expected to conform to them, so we lie about what we do andhow we feel in order to be better understood by other people. The way I feel about my partner is infinitely complex and variable, but this essentialised, mythologised 'love' is what society insists I am feeling, so despite the other, potentially contradictory emotions, I conform to this, honestly or not. Same goes for things like 'evil', or 'good'. No one is absolutely good or evil all of the time, but its easier for us as a society to obscure the truth and sayMother Theresa is 'good', even though we know so little about what she actually thought or felt (although recentish publications of her journals reveal she was hardly the devout Christian she was painted to be, and certainly no more inherently 'good' than any other person). I have to go to a test now....but this is an interesting topic, revive it!
i deal with this question in depth and at length in many of the works on my site... it's too much to debate here, but if you want to browse my work and have any questions, feel free to email me... love and hugs, maia maia3maia@hotmail.com
Ahh, this is a nelly of a question. White lies are the most justified, as they are often commited in the name of diplomacy...though it can be a bad thing, if done habitually. A lie is a temporal thing. Deception has a short life-span, but truth lives forever.
That's a really good point. If we grew up with a mixture of insults and compliments--really honest ones--we might be okay with it. Is the sensitivity to insults because we were taught that way or is it a natural thing? No one likes being insulted, after all.
But again, this is one of those 'essentialisations' we love so much. The truth does not exist somewhere, its not a physical thing, and as much as the philosophers search for it, it is never found. So, if you accept that truth is relative, then you have to start to ask, who decides what the truth is? What are the alternatives to the things I hld to be true? If truth is just one dominant discourse, then you have to ask, what other discourses are being subjugated by this one? For instance, it was once the dominant 'truth' that black people were inferior to white people. Obviously, there is no inherent truth in this, it is simply one opinion, one discourse, spread and widely supported and successful at stamping out competing discourses (that black people are the same as white, that racial difference does not imply dominance). Its not as if someone "found" this truth and the whole world changed. It was a matter of building a competing discourse and enacting it to change te way people think. The fact that racism still exists today shows that truth is never absolute - simply because something is the dominant idea, doesn't mean everryone will listen to it. Consider things like democracy. Democracy, as a word, has positive connotation forvirtually anyone in the Western world; it says peace, equality, fairness, every voice counts. And yet, none of those things are inherent to democracy, they are not truths absolute. They are things that, over the years, we have been instructed to feel about democracy. Everyone is taught the Athens myth in school, where the invention of democracy is seens as this amazingly fair and revolutionary thing (in reality, it was anything but fair, but thats another story), and over the years positive notions about it have been reinforced again and again (conversely, when you think of Communism, there are almost exclusively negative connotations). So, the truth is not something universal, something that lives forever in the hearts and minds of men. It is something that is fragile, easily manipulated, easily hidden or altogether destroyed.
while that may be true of people's 'interpretation' of abstract concepts and what you are calling 'truths' none of that really relates to the conscious act of lying, does it, aaron?...
Of course people don't like being insulted, nor should they. There's a big difference between insulting someone and giving them pure, honest feedback.
But sometimes, no matter how pure and honest the feedback is, it's still insulting. I don't think Gigi meant insults like someone deliberately insulting someone, I think it was more meant as a mixture of things that people would find insulting, regardless of how it was presented.
This subject crosses over many of my theological veins, and I'm trying really really hard not to derail this thread with them. But what an intriguing discussion this is! I find it very interesting that so many feel that the ability to lie is an inherent and defining part of being human. While it is certainly true that lies are a very common feature in humanity, I'd like to think there were other options. People have also been saying that choice is the essence of humanity. Another interesting thought... So, what would happen if you CHOSE to be INCAPABLE of lying? Are you following the paradox here? Would you be less human for not lying? less yourself for limiting yourself? Or would you be more human and more yourself because you were able to choose what you wanted to be...? An even bigger question comes to mind. What would be the difference between an experienced liar making that choice, and someone who couldn't lie from the beginning?? Could you fully know and choose truth if you didn't know what a lie was? Can you really know me if you don't know who I am not? Perhaps there is a role for lies...
Very interesting point. Just like the whole theory that you can't appreciate or know the good without experiencing the bad, maybe we wouldn't be able to understand the concept of truth without lies. Of course, if people were incapable of lying, would there even be any need for the concept of truth? Everyone would just know that the things they were saying/hearing were true.
You are right. If there no one lied there wouldn't be much of a concept of truth. So without lies existing somewhere, there is no concept of truth. But without a concept of truth you can't choose, and without choice you can't really be free, and so in order to be free you must be capable of lying? The ability to lie seems to be the gamble taken to gain freedom. But the latter gives us the ability to leave the former behind (if you can find out how). That's what l call a 'beautiful paradox'. And still we feel sorry for ourselves and wonder why our parents lied to us...
I find it profoundly interesting that there is a running theme in the answers to this post that the ability to lie is somehow inextricably linked to the concept of free choice. In both versions of the question, the terms of the query indicated that all humans would be unable to lie, not just some or one. This was changed in many of the responses. Curious. There is an unmistakable feeling of... offense in the idea of having the ability to lie taken away from oneself akin to how some Americans feel about the right to bare arms. How jealously we guard this ability for subterfuge. How many slight derailments to the terms of the original questions (for there were indeed many derailments, both slight and grave) in order to justify why lying is necessary. Intriguing. Emic data and etic data do not usually evince the same answer, but it seems in this case, they have.
Well, she certainly confused me with her phrasing. An insult is designed to intentionally offend someone...whether an insult is honest or not, it's neither a mature nor effective way to teach people anything. Feedback doesn't have the same malice behind it. If she meant this, and not a deliberate insult, then I still don't understand what she means...not everyone takes offence to constructive feedback, and some people DO like it...
Depends on what the feedback is about. Someone may want constructive feedback about whether or not they need to lose weight, how they should go about it, etc...but this doesn't mean that hearing the feedback won't sting at first. I think all Gigi was asking was if we were hearing a harsh truth and had never known lying, then would even blunt, harsh truths not bother us the way they tend to now? Or would they still bother us, regardless of whether we had grown up hearing them or not?
