Live Not By Lies

We honestly cannot handle the truth...about anything...ever

“It’s only your willingness to feel worse that will allow you to feel better.” —Brad Blanton

“I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson 

I have been thinking a lot and wanting to write about the importance of truth in our aggressively post-truth world, and it is a struggle. It seems that I can’t write about truth without writing about lying, and I can’t write about lying (without lying) unless I include the inconvenient truth that I am, as far as I’m aware, the worst liar I know. And I know that you are also almost certainly the worst liar that you know, and that is a little bit reassuring, but only a little bit, because we both lie so much and we have been doing it so long that we can’t trust each other or anybody else, including ourselves, even though we think we can trust ourselves—which is the biggest lie of all.

I don’t want to be completely truthful about truth. I don’t want to spill too much tea at once. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I want to retain control of the situation (or what feels like control, which is good enough) and manage your experience for you. Fundamentally, I don’t trust you to make your own assessment, and I don’t trust myself to accept the consequences of your assessment. What a massive intrusion upon your free will, and a profound limitation of possibility for us both.

Have you ever taken an inventory of how often you lie? If you haven’t, I humbly recommend it. You’re going to be shocked and disgusted. I’m not talking about overt “I did not have sex with that woman” type lies, although those are relevant as well, but they aren’t all that common. I’m much more interested in tallying up all the lies of omission. All of the things we don’t say, or we sort of say but casually spin in our favor. Go ahead, add them up. I promise, it’s cataclysmic.

I have read and been deeply affected by Truth Manifestos before. There are many of them, all very compelling. “Lying,” by Sissela Bok. (Also) “Lying,” by Sam Harris. “Radical Honesty,” by Brad Blanton. Gandhi’s autobiography (aka “The Story of My Experiments with Truth.”) Kantian ethics. The collected works of Emerson and Thoreau and the other transcendentalists. Pretty much every major religious and mystical text ever, across every possible tradition.

I find the essential ethical arguments of these manifestos incontrovertible. It is very clear to me that any attempt I make to manipulate your understanding of reality is 1) an extremely uncool incursion upon your free will and 2) very likely to generate some unintended consequences—unintended consequences that will in turn compel me to continue to intervene with my (implicitly superior) judgment. Those are just the two biggest problems. There are a lot of other problems. But just those two alone are so enormous and destructive that they should be more than sufficient to unleash a crisis of conscience.

Any given white lie seems trivial, but think for a moment about what a massive cascade of error we potentially set into motion with that small untruth, for ourselves and others. The more I consider the implications of this, the more stressed out I get. As an agreeable, I tell white lies constantly. I advise clients to do it all the time. After all, white lies let us off the hook from the uncomfortable confrontations we don’t want to experience—confrontations that just don’t seem necessary. Why suffer needlessly? There’s no real harm done.

But there is harm done. All kinds of harm. One white lie can easily launch us right into a massive ego trap that, left unchallenged and allowed to spawn more lies to sustain it, can cage us for life. It is also very easy—too easy—to casually distort another person into wasting time and resources on a personal or business relationship with you that you yourself don’t even want. Even very small lies add incredible amounts of noise to an already very noisy world, and that noise reverberates far beyond the initial untruth in ways you cannot anticipate or control. (Harris and the others give many more specific examples. “Do I look fat in this dress” is positively fraught with ethical peril.)

A very common question Doug and I get about personality is “how do I identify my real personality, without distortion? Which version of me is the real deal?” It’s a very good question. And wouldn’t the only theoretically reasonable way to find out be to tell the truth, always, without exception? Harris suggests as much in his essay:

“To do this is also to hold a mirror up to one’s life—because a commitment to telling the truth requires that one pay attention to what the truth is in every moment. What sort of person are you? How judgmental, self-interested, or petty have you become?

“You might discover that some of your friendships are not really that— perhaps you habitually lie to avoid making plans, or fail to express your true opinions for fear of conflict. Whom, exactly, are you helping by living this way? “

I would add to that—not only is truthfulness the only way to discover who you really are, it is the only way to discover what you really want. When I hear someone say they don’t know what they want, or they feel “stuck,” that’s a giant red flag telling me some serious deception (including self-deception) is going on.

I think all of us would agree we are living in a craven, opportunistic post-truth social and political hellscape, where everything is very, very bad and will only get worse from here, and it seems increasingly that the people who embrace the biggest lies reap the greatest rewards. The social and political lies are relentless, toxic, and unbelievably brazen. It’s a cultural context that seems to insist that we recalibrate our own truth-telling for survival and expediency. Many of us just nod and smile along with the regime. Those who do take an occasional stand against it congratulate ourselves from our parapets, then turn around and lie to our friends and family and coworkers about how someone’s butt looks in a dress, our happiness in a relationship, or what we are doing next weekend. What kind of ethically coherent framework is that? I am undermining my moral authority on the important questions with my opportunistic self-serving bullshit on the comparatively trivial ones. And perhaps only I am aware of that hypocrisy, but whose judgment of my hypocrisy is more important than my own?

Of course, my hypocrisy runs even deeper and is even more dire because I find all of this incredibly persuasive and essential and probably the only path out of the aforementioned hellscape, but I’m trapped in the same prisoner’s dilemma as everyone else. What kind of sucker would someone have to be to voluntarily assume such massive first-mover disadvantage? You mean tell the truth not just when it’s performative and self-serving and convenient and easy, but all the time? Well. Now you’ve just entered a beauty pageant with no makeup on. Enjoy your smug sense of moral superiority while you come in dead last, dummy.

In order to really embrace Extreme Truth, one must have at least a tiny sliver of faith that Extreme Truth is going to be better at negotiating life than you are. That is, I think, the heart of the whole “God thing” in 12 step. It’s not really about the God thing, per se, it’s about not playing God in your own life—because you are not, in fact, omniscient, and your attempts to steer and manage things “your way” are almost certainly going to make things unpredictably worse than they already are. Your perceptions are hopelessly distorted in ways you can’t even detect, and you’re going to make massive errors if you try to force life to yield to those distortions. Manipulating other people to get what it is you think you want is, at the very least, extremely stressful, and I (truly!) believe that it is inferior to saying what you believe to be true and letting the chips fall where they may. (This is the essence of the Jordan Peterson quote that I often reference.)

The idea that truth might be better at evaluating and navigating my life than the drunken captain of the distorted self who is otherwise in charge is just a mildly crazy deductive hypothesis. No one could be expected to believe such a thing—let alone embrace it—without some cold hard evidence in the form of experience. Therein lies the rub: leap and the net shall (probably?) appear, but then again, maybe it won’t and your life will totally go to shit and you’ll be friendless under a bridge. And if that’s how this goes down, you will have no one to blame but yourself.

I am (understandably) a touch conflicted about the soundness of experimenting with such volatile stuff. But there are (at least) three very compelling reasons to do it anyway.

1. Each time I deliberately withhold, twist, or otherwise distort the truth of any matter, including to protect someone’s feelings or lead them away from the “wrong” decision, I am actively distorting the cost/benefit analysis of the person on the other side of that exchange. I am forcing them to live in accordance with what I believe to be best. That is the antithesis of love and individual freedom, which I purport to champion but apparently cut off at the knees on a regular basis. As Harris and others point out, it does not take a very sophisticated thought experiment to realize how unfair and quietly coercive this is if you imagine yourself on the other side of a lie told “for your own good” or to prevent you from being upset.

2. The distortion in the other person’s CB that I have created redounds doubly back to me. Because I have thrown that person into muddy water, their behavior toward me in turn creates additional distortion in my own CB. This is a big reason why I cannot be at all certain that I know what I want. Such certainty would only be possible with perfect information, and I have guaranteed imperfect information with my own lies, and therefore have condemned both of us to unknown compounding error. I am extremely interested in reducing distortion in my own understanding of the world and my knowledge of myself. This is impossible if my job, friendships, and other relationships are just reflecting back to me a coerced, offer-they-can’t-refuse version of what my lies have demanded of them.

3. If there are in fact any such things as “enduring and eternal ethical principles” to guide us through this life, such a set of principles would necessarily take impeccable truthfulness very seriously, if not center it as the core value. And, indeed, every serious attempt to encode such a set of principles does so.¹ This is not by chance. And it seems to me that there is great value in identifying such principles and attempting to live by them—not because one has any real hope that doing so will change the world, but because to just…surrender despairingly to the Hobbesian alternative is simply too morally impoverished and terrible to contemplate.

Most essays like this end with some kind of rah-rah call to action: AND THUS FROM THIS MOMENT FORWARD NO LIE SHALL PASS MY LIPS. And I really want to say something like that, because that’s the biggest status grab I could make. (And the ultimate prizewinning lie—the best possible most evolutionarily-favored whopper of them all—would be to deceive everyone else that you will only forevermore tell the truth and couldn’t possibly do otherwise even if you wanted to. And then, of course, keep lying like hell. Suckers.)

But I don’t have any evidence that I can keep such a promise because I’ve barely begun to try. The best I can do is say: I believe this is a very worthy experiment. If there is a way to subjectively determine if there is something more sublime and important about the human experience beyond “enjoy yourself and have fun,” my mystic chip demands that I investigate that.

I’m pretty sure I can mostly avoid overt lies of commission. Most studies suggest that we only tell a few of those a day, and they are easy to catch if you’re paying attention. I don’t think I’m guilty of too many of those. What I’m hopelessly guilty of is avoidance. Sugarcoating, deflection, spin. Cheerful resentment. Smiling irritation.

I think this kind of thing doesn’t count for much unless it’s the kind of truth telling that feels very ill-advised and practically impossible, and therefore produces an exhilarating wave of relief when it’s done. I experienced those kinds of truths when I half-assed my way through my fifth and ninth steps in AA, and that experience is my lodestar here, my tiny sliver of faith that this ridiculous insanity might be worth it as something that can meaningfully improve my life.

It also is my tiny stand against a value-neutral world, where every individual’s personal embrace of vainglorious bullshit has collided into a death-spiral yawning abyss of totalitarian nihilism. It’s my declaration of spiritual independence from the rotten husk of ascendant globalist transhumanism that appears to be our collective destiny at this moment in time. I am just not prepared to accept a meaningless existence, or to only find meaning in material or interpersonal reward that is, more often than not, to one degree or another, ill-gotten.

In full disclosure: I don’t want to hit publish because 1) I’m perpetually ego trapped and would prefer to continue editing this for approximately the next fourteen years 2) I know some of you (I’m looking at you, Doug) are going to think I’m a mystic crank who has lost the plot 3) this is definitely going to make it a lot harder for me to get out of holiday party invitations.

Oh well. I am in fact, a mystic crank, and those really just aren’t very good reasons anyway.

“Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself—in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity—is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.” —Nietzsche

“But there is no loophole left for anyone who seeks to be honest: Not even for a day, not even in the safest technical occupations can he avoid even a single one of the listed choices—to be made in favor of either truth or lies, in favor of spiritual independence or spiritual servility. And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.” —Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn (in his “Live Not by Lies” essay, 1974)

1. An exception to this would be utilitarianism, but utilitarianism deployed from an (unavoidably) distorted individual perspective will make its own errors and generate unintended consequences. There are no eternal and enduring principles that guide the trolley problem because different values (values in turn influenced by differing degrees of truthiness) reach different conclusions about the “greater good” at stake. (“Sure, more people die in scenario #1, but are they unvaccinated?”)