Being truthful is not always easy, especially when there are so many tempting reasons to be untruthful. Before I turned eleven, I told a lot of lies. I told them because I liked a good story and enjoyed seeing my friends react to my tall tales. Later, I occasionally lied to protect myself or others from certain punishment for a broken rule. I lied to enhance my image in front of peers I wanted to impress. I lied to protect someone else’s feelings. But the biggest lie I ever told cured me from lying as a “go to” strategy to get what I wanted.
When I was in the seventh grade, 12 years old, a group of my friends were plagued by a girl in our group who wouldn’t keep our secrets and who constantly talked negatively behind our backs. Her malicious gossiping was out of control and I decided to teach her a lesson by creating a very convincing lie that an unknown girl was going to beat her up after school for talking about that person behind her back. In absolute terror, my gossiping friend went to the office and reported the threat. Because I was the messenger of doom, the Vice Principle summoned me to the office. In the presence of my anxious friend, I confessed to the Vice Principle that I had fabricated the threat as an intervention to try to end my friend’s malicious gossiping. I got off with a stern warning and a phone call to my mother, but I also lost my friend in the process. That situation made a truth teller out of me. I learned that while lying may be the easy route, it is often a cowardly and unethical route to a desired end. And worse, lies can have devastating unintended consequences for oneself and others.
In reality, telling the truth when the stakes seem high can be difficult. For me personally, self-preservation and empathy remained my biggest obstacles to telling the truth for most of my adult life. I didn’t want others to think ill of me and I still don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. As I’ve grown older, I care less about what others think about me and so truth-telling about myself has become much easier. But when it comes to the feelings of others, I admit that I’ve developed some work arounds. For example, when a singer asks me how he did, and I felt the performance was sub-par, I’ll say something like, “I really liked your energy or that was a great song.” Admittedly, I do feel a bit of guilt about that kind of obfuscation. I still have a ways to go when it comes to providing truthful, but hurtful feedback. Another challenge was convincing my children to be truthful. One child was naturally very honest and another was the polar opposite.
My youngest daughter was a lot like me. She enjoyed making up stories, however, her lies were bigger and more prolific than mine ever were. When she was five, she made up this story about me accidentally running over my father with the car. Her teacher was so unsettled by the tale that she called to see if my father was okay. She said she even looked for the story in the local newspaper for details before calling me. I explained that my daughter liked to make things up. To try to dissuade her from lying, I repeatedly shared the story of the boy who cried wolf, but it didn’t work. The lying became a constant issue in our relationship and trust was damaged as a result. Too many lies, half-truths, omissions, and exaggerations erode the trust in personal relationships and corrupts communication and interactions. Her imagination was so taken in that to this day she sometimes has to ask me if a childhood memory is actually true. Which brings me to another, more important point about being truthful. We have to know the truth in order to be truthful.
With each passing day it becomes more difficult to know the truth. We now live in a society where the knowing the truth in order to speak the truth is itself a challenge. Greedy doctors pushing quick fix weight loss diets and quack medicine are all over the internet. On two separate occasions, I was photo-shopped into group pictures because I couldn’t make the actual shoots. This should be worrying because it means that others can be photo-shopped to appear to be somewhere they are not and with dire consequences. We now look at magazine photos where the model has been made to appear to have slimmer hips, thicker lips, or airbrushed perfected skin. We know that these images create feelings of inferiority among young women. Even more worrisome, the technology now exists to replicate a person’s voice, image, and mannerisms so well as to make that person appear to say or do anything. We also have the ability at our fingertips to remove people and objects from our photos, creating an alternate if not impossible reality.
Couple new technology with how our society has become accustomed to being lied to by greedy corporations, ambitious politicians, and unprincipled media outlets, and I’m afraid the public trust will only be further eroded. Conspiracy theories are already thriving because the public trust has been destroyed by too many lies, omissions, silence, and cover ups. People are willing to believe whatever suits them because they don’t know who to believe or how to find the truth. As a result, COVID-19 has killed more than 750,000 people. Some people believe even that is a lie. And worse, people are still refusing to get vaccinated based on a plethora of lies that feed into their worse fears. I’ve heard of conspiracies that link the vaccine to mass murder for population control to sterilization to mind control to tracking implants. A few greedy anti-vaccine doctors are even pushing their own quack remedies for the disease.
It is a sad reality that people with varying motives are happy to make stuff up for fame, money, or power. They willingly take advantage of the least educated, the most gullible, and the fearful among us. It was actually bizarre to hear about the hundreds of QAnon members who flocked to Dallas, Texas this past week believing the lie that dead Kennedys were going to appear and reinstate Trump as president. How disappointed they must be that it didn’t happen. Others believe Trump is still the president and is running the government while flying around on Air Force One.
But perhaps the most dangerous lie to our country’s future is the one that is having an adverse effect on election laws in Republican states. Based on Trump lies about voter fraud and a stolen election and fears of a violent Republican base who support him, cowardly Republicans are working to suppress the vote of minorities, urban dwellers, and younger voters while at the same time giving themselves the authority to overturn election results. Every American should be vehemently countering this lie and demanding voter protection laws from Congress right now.
The reality is that what comes out of our mouths has consequences. The people buying into the big 2020 election lie now actually believe they are telling the truth and they have shown that they are willing to use threats and violence to push a false agenda based on it. They have literally traded a factual truth for a debunked, but more desirable lie. The problem is that too many people in authority are speaking lies with impunity. However, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani were sued for billions for defamation by Dominion over election fraud claims involving Dominion’s voting machines. Powell’s defense was that her lies were too outrageous for any reasonable person to take seriously. But they did.
The time has come for laws to be enacted that make it a crime for public officials to knowingly lie about issues of public welfare. It is good that Rudy Giuliani’s license to practice law was suspended for his lies about the election. Doctors should also lose their license to practice medicine for spreading false claims; surprisingly they aren’t right now. It should become law that media and photos that are doctored have a disclaimer that they have been doctored and do not fully represent reality.
The fact is that it is becoming too difficult to distinguish between truth and lies and without a swift intervention, the truth will be completely elusive and bad decisions with life and death consequences will ultimately destroy our society and the world. We see the slow walking of climate change mitigation because of people who claim it is a hoax. This is why better humans must first be truth seekers and then truth tellers.
Final note: Sources for the truth matter and education combined with critical thinking are a must.