On Lying

By Robert Sheckley

 

A huge topic, which I do not intend to research. This writing is to be my own thoughts on Lying, unsupported by what Oscar Wilde thought about it, or Leo Tolstoy, or anyone else. To present your views on lying as an amalgam of other people's views is a kind of a lie in itself. It is avoiding your own views, your own relationship to lying by substituting your research on the subject: what famous people thought about lying. 

In general, most of us do not have too much trouble with lying, at least not with our own lies. If you're like me, you lie as little as possible. Why does one lie at all? Is it not to present the better case, the one that more truly represents you, rather than the dismal and easily misunderstood truth? 

There's a practical side to this: it's easy to remember the truth, difficult to remember a lie. To lie, and then be caught in your lie, is an uncomfortable position. You are being called upon to explain why you lied. As though it were a terrible sin. The urge to lie about why and how you lied is very strong, even though ordinarily you do not lie. But in this particular instance, you were caught short, without anything to say, so you said what came to your mind: the truth as you would have preferred it, in the light of hindsight.. 

But the very fact that you got caught in your own lie and are ashamed of it argues a basic instinct for truth. There's something in you that not only detests a lie, but also goes out of its way to reveal your lie, so you will be straight again.

A lie, like a truth, sounds like a simple thing. Can I appreciate the difference between the two? But it turns out to be not simple at all. When asked what I was doing at so and so's last night, the unspoken or real question may be, who was I doing something with or to? Someone, my wife, perhaps, is suspicious of me, and wants to hear the truth she dreads confessed to. She wants to hear something that I do not want to say, because it is factually untrue, and, to the extent it is true, misleading, not a true statement of me or where I'm at. 

Where are you at? Isn't this the real issue behind apparently simple questions? If I say I was at the tavern, I had better have more to say, to say or at least imply the innocence of my bar experience. But to say all that is an intrusion. And it does a violence to my spirit to have to confess to this. 

How do you answer when people ask, in effect, where are you at? How do you give a statement of your innocence? Or how do you draw gradations between types and degrees of innocence? 

Lying brings us into the essential area of who and what we are, and the desire or willingness to tell a lie is as often as not an attempt to portray oneself in a certain way. 

Truth and lies are points on a continuum. A truth can be told as a lie, to cover up something else. A lie can be an attempt at a greater truth. 

This is what I'm interested in-the role of lying in the presentation of self. The many other forms and instances of lying-on your income tax, to your boss, etc, are possible outcroppings of the desire to have it easy, to not involve oneself in hateful complication. 

But lying usually results in complication. The truth is usually better as it doesn't involve you in so much tsouris. But in these affairs of the heart, in the need to present yourself to a particular person, the complications of the truth are sometimes too much to bear, and the truth that you say is an entity in itself, which another may not understand, or appreciate. 

And then , there is the lie the fabulist tells. For some of us have the minds of a Baron Munchausen, truth for us is less a statement that a picture, vividly colored, representing as much how we would like to feel as how we do feel. But who in essence lies more, the literal-minded with his few emotionless, succinct words, or the fabulist, with his mix of who he is and who he wants to be