I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in society of people behaving as if lying makes them smarter than those who tell the truth. If you’ve had the misfortune of running across such a person, you know they like to thumb their nose at you while “winning” a situation temporarily all because they fabricated a falsehood.
I’m not talking about someone explaining how they perceive a situation, principle, etc. when it doesn’t square with your viewpoint. What I’m targeting is when people know something isn’t true, but they lie about it to avoid an unpleasant outcome or gain a perceived advantage.
This attitude falls more into the latter. Like I brought up in my recent post, For What Shall It Profit a Man?, some will trade their integrity for riches, fame, or other desires without thinking about what they’re giving up.
Even if you don’t believe in God, lying comes with severe consequences. If you tell enough lies, you eventually start to lose your grip on reality as you begin believing what you’ve told others and tell yourself so your story stays straight. Thus, lying often involves the deception of oneself, not just blinding the intended victims.
What that means is you can no longer trust your own perception of reality. It’s usually only when someone encounters a true crisis in their life that this becomes significant. Instead of being able to navigate the treacherous terrain reliably, the liar will be scrambling to find their way as their compass, one might even say their moral compass, is broken and can no longer point the direction to safety.
However, people around the habitual liar will notice the disparity from what that individual says versus what is true. Lies are acid on relationships, destroying the bonds of the particularly more intimate ones, so once such a habit is uncovered, there might be no recovery.
Jordan Peterson plainly explains what happens when you lie.
Many times, those who make a habit of lying will ultimately alienate themselves from virtually all meaningful relationships. Bitter, lonely, and confused about why they feel thus, because their perception of reality is broken, they will often lash out at others, blame them for their situation, and take a victim stance rather than face the fruit of their labors.
Even though liars sometimes will prosper in the short term, ultimately the habit will catch up to them. They fight against the very reality they seek to bend, a conquest which can only have one outcome. You will never win such a conflict.
This is why I often marvel at the shortsightedness of people who seem to believe their willingness to lie and “get ahead” of others by taking advantage of those victims means that they, the liars, are so much more intelligent. It’s not smart to lie, especially when you make it a habit, because reality will extract a heavy price for that.
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Steven Symes 