7am and 83F. More hotness, and not the sexy kind….
Woke up this morning thinking about lies. Funny that SteveF’s last comment yesterday was about lies. I’ve told my kids to keep trying to lie to me to. My wife was horrified. They NEED to be able to lie, well and convincingly, and to know WHEN and to whom they should attempt lying.
Lying and our relationship to lies is one of the things that separates kids from adults. Our entire world is built on lies, polite fictions, “aspirational statements”, and myth.
Cognitive dissonance is the result of lying to ourselves. Insanity is the result when we are forced to behave as if we believed obvious lies. Propaganda in the USSR, and the “PC” culture in the USA both force one to act on beliefs that are verifiably false, as though they are true.
Advertising is pervasive and almost always a lie. The myths of our culture are lies told to shape and support who we want to be as a people. The masks we wear while interacting with others are almost certainly lies of omission, if not fact.
And yet, we expect and respect honesty. We DEMAND it from leaders while we KNOW they can’t tell us everything for good and practical reasons. We lie to our kids, and teach them that the bedrock foundation of their lives is untrustworthy.
In order for our ‘high trust’ society to work, we have to accept the lies and act as if they were honesty, both in ourselves and others. When the willingness to do so breaks down, and we assume the lies are based in ill will rather than in shared common goals, our society breaks down. Our relationships break down, and our civilization breaks down.
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