Does lying really matter?

Kevin Mokento | Monday February 14, 2022 14:24

In William Shakespeare’s play entitled Romeo and Juliet, lovers of theatre appreciated that the name of any thing is not any more important than its attributes. Talking about Romeo’s house, Juliet said, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” I am sure you catch the drift. A liar by any other name will always remain a liar.

If you are in the habit of hiding behind the veneer of palter and the patina of equivocation, or accustomed to telling the truth while deliberately hiding important but unpleasant facts, you may deceive yourself into thinking you are not a liar.

However, you may be swamped by lies of omission. Much as you may wish to deny it, at some stage in your life, you too have lied. In courts of law, brimming with confidence, with their right hand up and perhaps their left one firmly clutching the Holy Writ, people of different social and educational statuses have, without batting an eyelid, happily sworn, “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing else but the truth,” only to subsequently somersault and face the wrath of law on account of perjury. In fact, we may be pardoned for believing that lying and human nature have the strongest and most enduring of bonds.

After conducting a study on lying, an author named Dr Sanjida O’Connell concluded, “Women are far better at both lying and detecting lies than men. Men tell simple lies...while women tell more complicated, believable ones.” Detection of lies is not easy though, it is the preserve of 0.25% of the world’s population, a group of supremely elegant lie-detecting crackerjacks, whose ability to detect lies falls a mere 20-percentage points short of a polygraph. Deprived of the sixth sense, mere mortals, like you and I, struggle to detect lies because they are normally dressed like the truth. That is why novice or lazy sleuths inadequately versed in effective interrogation methods are often comfortable with the practice of churlishly and forcefully extracting the truth from suspects by employing abusive and illegal water boarding and other illegitimate physical torture techniques.

Lies might be as old as humanity itself. That is, if you believe what one popular hallowed book, that has been translated into more languages than any other, tells us. From its content, you can infer that the world is in a bad shape largely because of the first lie ever told and you would wish divine intervention had foiled the telling of that lie. Particularly when you reflect on historical and current atrocities.

The following might spring to your mind, the over 100 million people who died during the two world wars, the harrowing massacre of six million Jews in the Nazi-led holocaust in Germany, the Rwandan genocide that claimed lives of a million souls, and the thousands of people who were killed by the South African apartheid regime. Perhaps even more depressing and fresh in the minds of many are the thousands of Iraqis that fell during the Second Persian Gulf War. On the strength of a powerful death-dealing lie, a strong coalition of forces set out to put the kibosh on Saddam Hussein’s dream of ruling Iraq for life. Hussein was accused of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction; a galling lie that was engineered in the corridors of seemingly unaccountable powerful intelligence outfits in the western world.

As to why, a decade after the official end of the war, the culprits have not yet been arraigned before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, remains a mystery to me. Indeed, like the Orwellian notion goes, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Add to this, pandemics that have ravaged the world and many of the grave societal ills such as incest, rape, sexual abuse, murder, blue and white collar crime, corruption, human trafficking, gender-based abuse, sex trafficking, deliberate environmental degradation and many others. Surely, if the hallowed book is as trustworthy as I believe, the first lie has caused mind-boggling carnage, harrowing depression and striking emptiness, and will continue to do that. This view does not obviate the need to hold the feet of all offending parties to the fire!

Is lying fundamentally wrong on all levels? You might say, lies matter to a certain extent. Like a doctor would speak about different levels of weight, starting on the acceptable healthy weight rung, moving up to the mild overweight rung, and thereafter ascending to the burdened levels of obesity and morbid obesity, in the same vein, purely because of your positioning in the liar-ladder, you may be tempted to rationalise on lies and attribute varying degrees of gravity to them.

The so-called white lies, considered harmless, are popular. Parents and children would tell these lies to each other, or married people to their spouses, students to their teachers and employees to their bosses. Such lies could be precipitated by the desire to keep one’s whereabouts a secret, to justify one’s failure to turn up for school or to meet a crucial deadline at work. While on face value, these lies of commission might seem acceptable to many, the truth is, with the unfurling of time, tellers of such lies might taint their moral grain and evolve into hardened compulsive liars.

Remember, you can take a baby elephant into your house, spoil it like you would pamper a favourite pet, but as it grows and becomes much bigger and stronger than you, you will not only fail to control it, you will also fail to find an opening in your house big enough to drive it out. In simple terms, chronic liars are not born such, they develop into psychopathic liars over time.

Once lies have carved out a sizable niche in your physiological structure, they will replicate and thrive in your system, and you may find it hard to remove them. When lies are detected, respect and trust naturally fade, and in family settings, love would wax and wane, and if left unchecked, this could result in bitterness, resentment and animosity.

In employment circles, it is only fair to expect the employer and the employee to discharge their contractual obligations. Employers are often quick to hold errant employees to account for unacceptable conduct and would not shy away from firing them. However, often times, employees, particularly non-unionised ones, are often given the shorter end of the stick. Under pressure from shareholders to achieve specific returns, operational leaders would not think twice about canceling certain benefits that employees are contractually entitled to, such as performance-based remuneration increase and bonuses.

Sometimes this happens in business environments where companies are growing in real terms and all vital business metrics are exponentially spiraling north.

The stimulative potency of cupidity that grips people who are not at the coalface of production would result in the shrinking of emoluments. In their failure to deliver on their promises to the employees, the employers would have simply lied. And some of them would not only fail to see the wrong in that but would also threaten discerning employees who would call them to account for failing to play their part.

In political settings, banking on a history of political gravitas and past accomplishments, it is not uncommon for those seeking office to produce the most convincing of manifestos, attractively packaged and lustrous. But what often happens when they are called upon to deliver? Several factors may work against achieving what they promised.

Shifting priorities based on the immediate needs of the nation, such as measured responsiveness to unforeseeable pandemics and natural disasters, and factors such as the dearth of other crucial resources and the extravagant diversion of funds to unimportant non-budgeted courses, may constrain their ability to deliver in harmony with their promises. They would be accused of peddling lies of influence to clinch the electorate’s votes.

This is what the former Governor of New York, Andrew Mark Cuomo alluded to when he uttered this well-thought-out sentiment, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” However, politicians’ failure to deliver on their promises will always provoke the ire of the electorate. Firmly believing that they have been sold a dummy, they would feel that the powers that be are not only deceptive but also downright disrespectful.

May we all do the right thing, resist lying, even when the urge is extremely strong, and the stakes are disproportionately out of sync with our wishes.