Tell Me Lies, Sweet Little Lies
Have you ever noticed that everything revolves around lies?
It doesn’t take much, just watch what people say and do.
Now I’m not just talking about politicians here, they have their own brand of lies. They refer to them is spinning the truth, which in itself is a lie, isn’t it?
I could write a book on just that, but today I’m referring to lies themselves. It is my firm belief that people do not want to know the truth and so we have as a society created a web of lies for our protection and advancement.
Now I’m sure you can think of at least a few (if not everybody) that tells lies for advancement. This can be social advancement, political or economic. Like that guy at work that lies about his qualifications to get that raise or maybe telling his boss lies about how he agrees with the way he’s doing his job. (better known as kissing ass)
Then there is the more excepted brand of lying. When you lie to yourself. This can appear helpful, after all I’m sure you heard of affirmations. Aren’t these just lies that we tell ourselves in the hope that they will come true? The problem with these types of lies is that if you tell yourself a lie enough times you believe that it’s the truth.
We’ve all seen this example many times, in fact there have been demonstrations of this type of lie on many TV shows.
Most notably, American Idol. We laugh at the ones that get up and sing very badly when the performer actually believes that they are talented. This is a lie that they have been telling themselves and probably their friends and family have been telling them, sometimes for years.
I don’t want to insinuate that this is something that has been happening more today than in history. We even have examples of lying to ourselves in fables. Take for instance the fable “sour grapes”.
In this fable there is a wolf that sees some grapes up high on the vine. He would really like to have some of these grapes to eat and he jumps as high as he can but to no avail.
After many attempts he gives up saying to himself, “they were probably sour anyway”. This is a classic case of lying to your self, the wolf really wanted the grapes, but because he couldn’t have them he lied to himself saying that they were probably sour. This is using a lie as a way of dealing with disappointment.
David Hodgson
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