How Would You Know?
Can you tell when someone lies? Many people do not know how to lie and can show they are very easily. I am a very bad liar. When I lie, I tend to laugh at the end of my sentence and I make a weird smirk. But, why would I lie in the first place if I knew I would get caught, unless it is to ourselves? Weren’t we taught to never tell a lie?
In the article ‘Learning to Lie’, Bronson writes about how the concepts, procedures, and longitudinal effect of lying as we grow old and go through life. He speaks about how lying can be implied or an accident and how they can be interpreted in different ways that we may not even know. Sometimes, our brains even lie to ourselves about a lie to convince ourselves the event or action wasn’t as bad as it seems. That sounds very confusing, because lies are one of the most confusing and horrifying things to think about.
One odd fact to think about is if lying is as effective as we thought. As we read in Bronson’s writing, parents teach their children to lie because of the constant white lies they tell them.
Now, there are many different lies a parent could tell, one would be the truth about Santa Claus. Is it really a good idea to put these fantasy thoughts in the childrens mind? Even though children need that idea of fantasy and joy in their lives, is this this the most effective way to do so. They want to know the truth about the world and understand what is real and what is not. Lying to them will only make them upset and feel like since they were lied to, they can lie to others too. This specific lie can lead to many problems in a young childs life. Say a child who still believed in Santa and heard from another kid on the playground say he does not exist and made fun of the child for still believing. That makes the child feel bad about himself and upset that he believed in something so foolish. Now the child that bullied the other child wanted the other child feel bad because he felt deprived of those fantasy and joy in his life. Why would anyone want to cause either child to feel this way? One example of a child just wanting to know the truth was the story called, “Yes, Virginia”. In this story, she was told the real truth about Santa Claus. And every word of it was true, and she was completely satisfied with it. See, we really don’t need to lie!
What is considered a lie? Everyone sees lying in different ways. There are the white lies, the child lies, but one that is important is the promising lies. A promise lie is when you are told something like, ‘You are so going to win’ and ‘ Can’t wait to see you on TV’.
Ironically, these are things that people have actually told me. I recently wrote a piece called ‘Rolling With Your Own Punches’ on Medium talking about this particular type of lying. How can these people really say that you will win the competition or be on TV someday? They are not psychics how are they supposed to know? Truly no one knows. But when you hear these types of comments told to you over and over (no joke), you start to believe it yourself. This then becomes of the action of when your brain is starting to lie to itself about future events, real and fake events, and if things will truly turn out the way you thought it would because of these lies. Another way of looking at this would be when looking at your grades. Say you have been procrastinating a project or writing assignment and time is running out before the due date. You really don’t want to have to sit down and do it right now so you convince yourself that you will have time later or another day, when your brain really knows you will end up waiting the night before it is due to do the work. These lies are the most powerful lies that we can not stop, and if they are stopped, I’m sure they will eventually come back
Sometimes our brains can even change the memory of a situation. This is another form of the memory lie. What I am talking about is considered confabulation.
Confabulation is memory disturbance that distorts real memories with fake memories that you believe is reality. It is a form of lying, but it is the form we don’t even realize is happening. This can happen when false information is given and then spread, somewhat like a rumor, or when telling story over and over and eventually is a completely different story than what happened in reality. It is is almost like creating an alternate reality where everything consists of lies. There are four different forms of confabulation; provoked, spontaneous, verbal, and behavioral. All four are shown in different situations and can lead to brain damage and different diseases as we grow old in this untruthful world.
The power of lying is not one we believed existed. We lie about the things we feel we can be judged for or to make situations look better/worse than they seem. But, that is not reality. This type of lying is impossible to fix unless you fix yourself and all the untruthful things in your life.
But, don’t think about trying, because you will end up lying to yourself about it anyways.
