6

Why Liars Are Their Worst Enemies

“A liar cannot improve because their perception is contaminated with their self-serving lies.”

“Why are they so jealous Daddy?”

“Maybe because my milkshake brings all the girls to the yard, and they’re like, it’s better than yours.”

“That’s so petty!”

“I know! Losers would rather ruin mine than work on their own damn milkshakes.”

“But why are they like that?”

“Maybe they’ve been dropped too many times as babies.”

“Daddy!”

“Just a theory, sweetie, who knows why they’re so stupid?”

“Maybe they’re just mean.”

“Same thing.”

“Meanness is stupid?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Well, if you’re too nice, people take advantage of you until you learn to stand up for yourself, and let them know it’s not acceptable. But if you’re mean, no one likes you, you become ostracized.”

“Now you might be OK with being ostracized especially if you don’t like people, but the problem is that even you don’t like you because you don’t like mean people either, so you’re always in conflict with yourself.”

“If you want to be liked by people, it’s simple: Just be the sort of person you admire, it’s your virtues, good character, that make you likable, even lovable, above all else. And even if no one else sees it, at least you see it and so you’re at peace with yourself.”

“But if you become the sort of person you despise, then no amount of short-term gains will matter because you can never be happy. You can never even achieve peace with yourself given how much you despise yourself. If you lose yourself, you lose everything.”

“Some try to hide it, even from themselves, pretending they’re nice, but deception only works so long before everyone finds out because you eventually slip up, become sloppy, and everything comes out in the open and you have to pay the price.”

“Either way it’s stupid because either you’re a liar and therefore untrustworthy and so shunned from any relationship, or you’re an asshole and no one wants anything to do with you because no one likes you. Like I said. Stupid.”

“The worst thing is that even you don’t like yourself because you can’t trust yourself, you don’t know or remember if you made something up, whether you’re seeing something as it is or from some skewed perspective you adopted for selfish reasons. You don’t know what to think.”

“You lie to yourself that you know the truth, that you’re right, but you know deep down that you’re a liar, that you’ve lied before and done it again and again, so you don’t know the extent of your lying, how much you can trust yourself, and the truth is you can’t. At all.”

“The world of a liar is a world of chaos because you don’t know where you stand, because you don’t know if you can stand on anything at all, given your shunning of the truth, given your disregard for what’s real and what’s not.”

“You think you’re getting something over someone by lying, and maybe you are in the short-term, but in the long run, you’re not. You’re the worst victim of your lies because being deceived is not a character flaw, but dishonesty is, one that will wreak havoc in your life.”

“You can overcome betrayal and deception, learn to better discern people’s character if you orient toward truth, if you’re honest, because you can trust yourself to be vigilant against lies, to do your best to see things as they are.”

“You can still be mistaken about things, but at least you get to know yourself and what part you played in the breakup of a relationship, for example, by being honest and seeing things as they are, so you can improve in the future and not make the same mistake again.”

“A liar cannot do this, cannot improve, because they fail to see the truth in the first place, because their perception is contaminated with their self-serving lies. They don’t know where their lies end and the truth begins. You cannot improve without truth.”

“How can you stop yourself from making the same mistake again if you cannot see what mistakes you’ve made because of your lies? Progress is only possible if you see things as they are, if you’re oriented toward truth, and not its opposite.”

“They will reap their karma, suffer in the misery of their own making, not able to improve or escape, as long as they flail about in the darkness of their lies, refusing to see the light, refusing to see the things as they are.”

“People say that philosophy is concerned with ‘first principles’ or things that we can be sure about because we are well aware of the consequences of starting a system of thought based on questionable claims. History of philosophy is littered with examples of such disasters.”

“So much so that an Enlightenment philosopher, Descartes, proposed to doubt everything that’s doubtable, including our senses, in order not to go wrong and accidentally include a falsehood in our metaphysics. Even dreaming up an evil, deceptive demon for the cause.”

“So in the Meditations and Discourse, he argues that the one thing he can be certain of is that he exists as a thinking substance because even to doubt this requires the existence of a thinking substance. Kinda clever, eh?”

“Whatever you think of Descartes’ argument, I want you to see the stark contrast between someone so concerned with the truth that they’re willing to go to such lengths and someone so unconcerned with the truth that they repeatedly lie casually if it serves them, maybe their ideology.”

“If it’s dangerous to include questionable claims in our philosophy, can you imagine how much more dangerous it would be to include a bunch of lies, things you know are false? Yet this is what you’re doing when you lie.”

“You might say that you lie but don’t necessarily believe in your lies, so you’re only lying to others, not yourself, therefore it’s OK. This might be true in a specific instance or two, but in general, if you don’t believe in your lies, many can tell and your lies go nowhere.”

“You can try to be very meticulous and consistent in your lies so you don’t trip up, but that’s very stressful, having to remember both the truth and the complicated set of lies you’ve invented and inventing to deal with new situations, like living in 2 different worlds.”

“Not only lying verbally, but having to fake your emotional reactions so that your behavior is consistent with your lies, that’s a tall order even for the greatest of actors, and having to perform, be this inauthentic, at every social interaction, well, that’s a nightmare!”

“You’re in bondage, spiritual bondage, having to present a face you don’t feel, having to say things you don’t mean, having to think about things you don’t want to think about, all the while filled with guilt and shame, because you know what a fucking liar you are.”

“And if you think this is temporary, that we’ll all forget in time, think again! If the lie is of any significance, if it deeply wounded someone, betrayed someone, it’s the kind of thing one never forgets, you’ll have to keep up the charade for the rest of your life.”

“Jesus said that truth will set you free, and it’s true, it’s the only thing that will set you free. As long as you keep lying you’ll be in spiritual bondage for the rest of your life. It’s a harsh but fitting punishment for lying even though it’s just a natural consequence.”

“And if you’re the type to derive pleasure from lying to others, rather than guilt and shame, you’re like the murderer who must keep their true nature hidden at all costs lest they burn you at the stake because everyone despises you.”

a monologue about social, political, and moral philosophy cleverly disguised as a dialogue between me and my imaginary daughter Annie: first, next.