I understand sometimes people lie to avoid hurting someone, but a lot of the time it seems unnecessary. When something really important happens and honesty matters, people still choose to lie instead of just telling the truth.
I said to a psychologist one time “it seems to me people tacitly accept other peoples lies because it validates their own”, although that doesnt explain why people lie in the first place. The psych agreed.
Back in the day, I had an aquaintance with a guy who was a thief. One day I asked him why and he declared “because Im smarter than they are!”. He was refering to the store clerks. It wasnt even about sticking to the man, it was a simple real-time mania of ego, outwit the clerks. High narcissism. He ended up in the business of custom theivery but I dont think that worked out very well.
So I have had this obsession with truth my whole life. Ultimately big truth but down to truth in general. I feel truth and falsehood are antithecal in more than just the obvious way. Its kinda like kastanzas line from seinfeld about it not being a lie if you believe it. You see it with trump. In order to lie you have to in some ways believe it yourself. The more you lie. The better you lie. The more you have to convince yourself its really true in some way. I personally believe this in all things. If you kill, regardless of reason, you are going to be a killer. Maybe not as much of a killer as someone who premediates on a complete innocent but repetition is going to pile on. Same with stealing and such. Im digressing here a bit but essentially for some people lying becomes so much a part of who they are that they do it for the smallest of reasons some of which only makes sense in their head. Its kinda funny because honest people (like ones obssessed with truth) will get a lotta flak for not just telling a white lie.
Lieing is easy. Telling the truth is hard. People in general suck.
In my perhaps unorthodox view it is a projected fear-based-tauma potentially from past lives, that seeps into the present when we are not aware of the returning fear, that can speak on behalf of us or have temporary access to our vehicle. We have more than one body in which illness can attach more subtly if allowed.
We all start life here afflicted, one way or another. It is consistent focus on conscientiousness that bestows conscious awareness of the bundle of afflictions in their complexity that allows a stoic harmony, in body and soul to be as we are now and forever more no matter what.
TL; DR
Attacks of fear can have a person abandon themselves, which feeds the fear to be intelligent enough to see a next opportunity another time.
There’s lots of reasons. Avoiding conflict, avoiding accountability, fear of retribution, self-delusion, acts of retribution or sociopathically WANTING to hurt people, apathy, social acceptance, the fact that people don’t care what the truth is as long as they don’t have to do anything they’re happy. Greed, gluttony, lust, indifference, envy, pride, wrath… trying to pin down precise motivations is complicated.
Very often it’s conflict avoidance
Like if your parent / teacher / boss goes ballistic because you fucked up, you’re not likely to tell them you fucked up again. If this pattern starts when you’re younger especially it tends to ripple out through the rest of your life
This can be frustrating because it appears irrational. Then again, so is life
Totally agree with the conflict-avoidance answer. A small reframing: making mistakes is perfectly normal. A lie is usually an attempt to skip owning one.
What makes you a mature person is:
- Acknowledge it to yourself: nobody is perfect.
- Plan the recovery: there’s a fix for everything but death. An honest apology is often most of it.
- Own the fix: you dropped the bricks, so you pick them up. Don’t wait for someone else to do it.
- Learn from it: making a mistake is fine, repeating it isn’t.
A lie turns one mistake into two, and the second one is harder to undo.
Because it can give you an advantage.
yeah i don’t get what’s so hard to comprehend for OP. people lie because they think it will lead to more desirable outcomes for them, that’s it
especially when it’s an immediate outcome vs a long term outcome.
even if long term it bites them in the ass, short term is more pressing for most people most of the time.
Or because they’re lazy, or scared, or…
If you’re lazy and lie to get out of doing something or if you’re scared and lie to get out of the scary situation … that’s an advantage!
Ha ha fair enough!
Story time:
I once messed with the sim lock thing and accidentally lock it ( mean y’all know the sim pin lock and pul lock thing?), and my mom didnt notice it yet, and I felt scared, but at the same time was thinking “maybe if I just come clean and apologize, everything would be fine!”, you know, how tv portrays western parents.
Oh well big mistake, I forgot I was Asian. So I told my mom and she instantly
transformed into a tiger and devoured me (figuratively)yelled at me and said a bunch of thing like 無鬼用 (useless) 搞破壞 (troublemaker?) and the 食嘢唔做嘢做嘢打爛嘢 (all you do is eat and contribute nothing and when you do try to do something you break everything). Oh keep in mind I was like no older than 11 at the time. 😭I actually cried like a baby. So yeah, I thinkg that’s pretty much the turning point where I learned a thing about the adult world.
I should’ve just never mentioned a thing and just blamed it on “technical issues” when she eventually tries to make a call.
This would not have been a big deal with western parents. Could even have been a bonding moment with a good dad to figure out how to fix it.
But yes, parents fuck us up. I also have memories of similar things, like when I was unplugging the xmas tree of a neighbor as a prank, and my dad got super angry and hit me in the back of the head so I fell down a ditch.
Some parents are just horrible parents.
You’re lucky to have experienced a positive subset of Western parents.
A very childish reaction from her
some people are really creative~ and are born story tellers. gotta make use of that skill~
I’d go as far as to claim that lying is virtually always unnecessary. People are quick to come up with examples where they think it’s the right thing to do, yet when you ask these people when they themselves would rather hear lies than the truth I usually get nothing.
Lying to “not hurt someone” implies that you consider yourself a better judge of this person’s ability to manage their emotions. That’s not how you treat an adult, especially one you pretend to respect and care about.
However, not lying isn’t synonymous with radical honesty either. No need to tell everything that’s on your mind - just don’t say something you know to not be true. If grandma’s cooking isn’t to your liking you probably don’t need to insult her for it if she asks. I’m sure you can come up with something more diplomatic. If rudeness and insults are the “truth” then than perhaps reflects more on you than on them.
So many great answers, and they are all different yet accurate!
Another contradiction I’ve found (and is reflected in a lot of the answers) is that everyone SAYS that they want people to tell them the truth, but when we actually do tell them the truth, they turn into a tiger and devour us, or a similar negative reaction. We request the truth, but at the same time, we psychologically train everyone around us to lie to us.
the problem is we want other people to tell us the lies we tell ourselves. and when we don’t get that, we get very upset because it hurts our self-worth or self-image.
also the lies we tell are much more simple than the truth. a lie is ‘you always look pretty’. the truth is much more complex, and we generally dislike complexity.
also a lot of value judgements are entirely relative/subjective and human beings are terrible at being objective and generally find objective measurements emotionally unappealing compared to the subjective approve or rejection of our peers.
like objective I know where I stand economically, but subjectively, to other people, I can either very wealthy, or very poor, because those value judgements are primarily formed from their frame of personal reference, not national statistics.
Honestly, most of the time the people who are lying beleive there is a slim chance they can safely navigate the situation with minimal harm to themselves and/or others even without divulging the truth. Which is actually accurate a lot of the time, in theory at least.
That said, most people do not actually have the intelligence to finesse a situation effectively when in the constraints of their lies. Most lies are sloppy or imperfect and most liers are not intelligent enough to handle the strategic part of lying.
Because I didn’t want to work today on (U.S.) Veteran’s Day.
Ah, November Flu. Common among those who have sick days that don’t roll over or get paid out.
In some cases, some might have a hard time accepting the truth, so they manufacture a lie because they want to believe the lie.
I miss her, but not her lies.
See: dictators, other abusive figures, and people who in general are very rigid in convictions
Human psychology.
