Does Lying Sometimes Help?
If asked, surely most of us will say that we hate and cannot tolerate lying. We generally approach the topic from a moral point of view and therefore condemn any behavior associated with falsehood. The curious thing is that we all lie from time to time : “pious lies”, we say to justify what we so repudiate.
This question may baffle us: What would happen if no one lied? For example, if you meet someone who says, “Wow, you are ugly”! Or a boss who greets you saying, “You’re an idiot and I’m looking for an opportunity to fire you.” Or you invite someone to your house for dinner and, at the end, instead of thanking them, they say: “You can’t cook, what a tasteless food!”
These are some cases of extreme sincerity that might be called rudeness. Just as we say we don’t like lies, we need to recognize that we don’t like certain truths either . In some cases, lying is not cheating in the moral sense of the term, but avoiding unnecessary conflict.
Is the lie valid?
As in almost all human behavior, the most important thing is not the behavior itself, but the intention behind each act. There are those who pride themselves on being absolutely sincere and go around telling everyone truths without the slightest consideration. Is it your intention to tell the truth, or to hurt people using a moral pretext?
Likewise, there are people who lie with a laudable intention. Some time ago a reporter said that his mother was sick and the doctor called him to give the diagnosis: pancreatic cancer. He asked the doctor not to tell his mother, because she was an extremely impressionable person and this could affect her too much.
But the doctor, taking into account professional ethics, told the woman what the diagnosis was. She was very nervous and a week later died of a hypertensive crisis. This news caused her so much fear and suffering that she couldn’t resist. The truth did greater harm than ignoring your illness. A lie can often help, until we find an opportunity to tell the truth.
Thus, a lie can only be accepted when taking into account what motivated it and its consequences. If the intention is to avoid a greater evil, we can set aside the moral issue and focus on the consequences of a truth. The lie is not always reprehensible.
lie to get something in return
That kind of lie only helps those who tell them. Instead of avoiding unnecessary suffering or conflict, they end up causing more pain. The same happens when we lie out of fear of facing the truth or taking on some responsibility. This is not a good formula for keeping a situation under control, but a poison that is polluting everything around you.
There are other types of lies that are used in some types of therapy. These are phrases that people repeat to themselves to act as an auto-suggestion. For example: “I’m fine and I’ll get better and better”, although the reality is different. In this case, it is a mechanism similar to that of some advertisements by which “a lie repeated a thousand times can become a truth”.
Sometimes we deceive ourselves in order to survive a difficult time or because we are not prepared to face the truth. The problem is that this process is not always conscious; we believe these lies and are stuck with them.
Undoubtedly, in some cases the lie helps a lot, but in most situations the truth helps a lot more. Anyway, don’t forget that lying has a price. If you tell someone who cooks badly that you like your food, you’ll keep eating what you don’t want. If you tell a more compromising lie, the price could be higher and it could end your relationship. Is it worth it?
