I Lie, You Lie, We Lie — It’s Great!
On Humanity: The Lie Liability (Abridged)
I lie. I don’t mean to, I genuinely mean to accomplish x,y, and z, but sometimes I can’t control what k, a, and t are going to do to my plans. I’ll let you know that Elon Musk lies too, just in case you feel offended by this; you’re a liar! Yes, you. That’s a very good thing, here’s why:
Once you doubt your abilities, you are immediately exposed to an opportunity to learn. Doubt is the natural mechanism which enables you to cope with your fallibility as a human. It conveniently coexists very well with your ability to lie to yourself and others about the world you experience, and how you would prefer to have things proceed based on those experiences. This is because you find lies to fill up the percentage by which you doubt certain knowledge or the outcome of anything really. Whereas you’re conscious of your lies when you plan out how your day will go or the size of the universe, you can be down right arrogant when it comes to how much you know some things.
You are not meant to know a 100% of anything; you’re just an animal, remember? This is a fact that is very important, and even though you may know this at the back of your head, you don’t realise this as much as you should. You’re just a speck that is part of all kinds of energy you have no control over, let alone knowledge of. This may be the hardest truth you’ll have to live with; the most liberating hard truth. Liberating because there is less pressure in living when you realise that whatever knowledge, experience, proof, and convictions you may have are not “100% truths” — there’s more knowledge/life to be lived. It is a hard truth to stomach because you feel the pressure to question the very important knowledge, convictions, and values you live by. How do you know when to change then?
You’re a special kind of animal, you choose to be. Throughout the generations of change, you happen to be directly and actively involved in this generation of existence. You happen to be the combination of “coincidences”, iterations and alterations that have exposed you to this very moment. Right now, you are combining this very experience with all the other experiences that your mind deems relevant to this one, and you don’t even have to give permission. You’re also a part of the species that is most aware of how to manipulate the perceivable world — the species that has turned rocks and dirt into pocket computers and skyscrapers. With this awareness of self and the environment comes the need to believe that what you have perceived strongly is the real ‘reality’ — more so that which you have physically manipulated. A challenging responsibility also comes with this ability; the responsibility to remember that there is no way in which you can know 100% of the answer to any question. Consider the limits of your knowledge and you will know that this is true; your culture, your weather, your skin, your education, your religious influences, your IQ — they all limit what you are able to know at a given time. Amidst these fallible influences, how do you when to change? The answer is that you don’t know, you just live as you feel inspired to live.
The mere fact that you are one among endless probabilities proves that you just have to be yourself: your ever growing self. This is where lies hold you back. Start lying less and allow doubt to be a reminder that you don’t have to know. Understand that being wrong is an essential part of who you are. Remember that percentages of certainty are only meant to inform your intelligent intuition about reality, and what’s really important about your short stay in this life. Your intuition and doubt are crucial to making worthy decisions as you grow. What happens when your intuition leads you to grow away from the status quo? You come into a lot of disagreements with your fellows. This is where our collective lying as society groups can get in the way of collective growth as the human society.
Our big problem is that we can’t agree on when it is appropriate to disagree. John Stewart Mill once said that the only way to gain more knowledge is by contrasting what you know with a different view because most of the time, neither view is completely “right”. After such clash of knowledge, in the form of dialectic and empirical experiences, we should expect to have more advanced and truer knowledge. However, it will not be all “correct” knowledge. We will still have people professing to have a more advanced version of the communal knowledge as well as those clinging to what has been “disproved” as beliefs that progress the society. The question arises: are we doomed to always have a “left”,“right”, and “independent” in any of the important societal beliefs or topics about existence?
A harmonious world would be the ideal — if there ever was one to be intended there would have to be no lying. Most religions say that this harmonious existence is what we encounter after we die and maybe there’s a reason for that. We probably integrate into some other forms of energy where there is much less/more autonomy about where we can go or what we should do, it “feels” like a harmony. So with much less despair, we just obey “the supreme” (God/Allah/Yahweh) about the significance of our scattered existence.One implication of this idea is that we’ve been alive way before we even realised it. Another would be we’re always in heaven, but if we fuck up the earth, there is a great chance that we will have a shitty heaven (because our death would be on a shitty earth). A few might be lucky to get outside of the planet somehow, to a more harmonious existence: aka, the chosen ones. If we stopped lying that we should possess the truth all the time, this integration of ideas about existence and our place in it would happen so much quicker. (This spiritual theory, for example, would be the product of a combination of heaven and reincarnation beliefs if they were to be pitted together in a dialectic fashion to test for lies in each.)
The big problem facing knowledge integration is that communal/collective lies have led us to believe in the idea of permanence. This has greatly set us back in developing the world the way we know we should be; because “God” essentially opened our eyes to that part of the plan through our conscience and reason, but not a 100% of it because we’re clearly so irrational in our existence. Wars, pollution, extinctions, induced environmental degradation, and other such things have all occurred to preposterous extents because we somehow lied to ourselves that the knowledge we possessed was absolute and permanent. And we did everything in our power to go against the nagging truth that the knowledge was not permanent, nor should be treated as such.
You’re just a part of an era. Imagine how much eras before have shaped the way we see the world? The real question is, in your significance, how do you want to participate in this era? Then, stop lying, and begin to live your life towards that ultimate way you would like to participate.
