If you're bored... read this: http://smg.media.mit.edu/library/DePauloEtAl.LyingEverydayLife.pdf
About 50% of conversations have some sort of deliberate lie in them. Almost all of these are done to prevent embarrassment, inconvenience, discomfort or other social problems. Also, most of us don't really feel guilty about this at all. When asked afterwards, most people say they would tell the same lie again. Only a small number of lies are told to deliberately harm someone. This is especially true when a person likes us more than we like them - not just the boyfriend/girlfriend like... any kind of like.
Basically, we want to create a complicit and affirming world, but we don't feel complicit or affirming as much as we wish we did.
This, to me, is the key point. We think of ourselves as this person walking around. A single entity. A being with purpose, ideas, feelings, goals, etc.
Yet. In this case there is our "true" self that says "God, I hate that guy, he's SOOOO annoying" and then the "deceitful" self that says "Hi! How are you? Yes, it's nice to see you to!"
Now why isn't it the internal voice that is the deceptive one? Why is the outer one that is covering the inner one the "lie." Couldn't it be that our inside negative feeling is the actual lie, and the cover up is the truth?
What's going on here?
Also, it seems like we have a kind of two-world system. There's the world in our minds. This world is full of inappropriate thoughts, gestures, actions, feelings and so on. Then there's the world we create. This is the world of social graces, self-restraint, and "manners." But both were created by "us;" these unified beings with centralized control. Or were they?
It seems to me the "social" world is one of normalized hospitality. In our inside mind we are self-serving and decisive; but that has survival drawbacks. If you always act on your internal mind, you aren't very open to working with others. In order to manipulate others for your survival benefit you have to become "socialized." This means learning which things in your inside self are comforting and which are disturbing. Of course, the other beings you interact with are doing the same thing. The end result is a kind of normalized social world of implicit rules. In order to enforce them, violators are removed from the socialized world by other members. This creates a strong incentive to comply; and through death vs. reproduction that incentive is passed on over generations.
So now we have this normalized social world with all of it's internal daemons inhabiting our minds... begging to be released.
So are these evolutionary suppressions of internal desires that prevent us from succeeding with others "lies" any more than the evolutionary origin of those internal desires are "truth." In fact, isn't what is "true" and what is a "lie" something of a construction. I understand that there are "facts" and "non-facts" such as the world is round or not round. But what I'm talking about is the thing that you say that you know inside you don't REALLY believe.
We do it many, many times a day and will continue to do it many more. And it will work to our advantage, and we want others to do it to us. The whole social world, in fact, requires that we suppress our inside voices and color them with our socially acceptable outside voices. So is our world a lie? Or is our inside something to be tamed?
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