Lies
Lying affects every relationship around us. Even the smallest lies have the propensity to decimate our human potential.
When someone lies it has a real impact on the world around us. We too eagerly discount the impact without understanding how bad it actually is. The false narratives built by lies must be maintained using continuous human effort and energy. This effort must be applied before our social and cultural integrity, before our humanitarian pursuits and before our peace, kindness and care for others. Objectives that would require less effort and be more meaningful to humanity such as alleviating human suffering, ending poverty and supporting the vulnerable in overcoming hardship are sidelined as we toil with vigorous effort, endlessly applying ourselves to hide our deception and the narratives that would crumble without constant and consistent energetic reinforcement.
Lying affects every relationship around us. Even the smallest lies have the propensity to decimate our human potential. As soon as I share a lie with you, I've irreversibly affected your capacity to do good in the world. Any lie no matter how small, even a simple exaggeration, can impact the information ecology of our personal networks and may destabilize the fabric of our civilization leading to an infinite number of world changing positive actions not being taken, negative social conventions being normalized, and more devastating outcomes like suicide of an individual or genocide of a population due to false propaganda and misinformation campaigns.
We have the foresight to teach our children about the dangers of lying and even so, model despicable behavior that prioritizes deceptive personal benefit over the serene simplicity and authenticity or truth telling. To lie is to rob yourself of the authentic stability you deserve. You are forever thrust into a chaotic future of maintenance and meaninglessness with a critical need to produce further deception to stop the exposure of your artificial reality.
If someone discovers your lie you may need to destroy or discredit that person to protect yourself regardless of their virtues, authenticity, good intentions and good character. Instead of owning up to your lie and repairing the damage you have caused you may find yourself disconnecting from your own virtues, transitioning from a naive, self-serving liar to a reprehensible sociopath known as a narcissist. As a narcissist you will see yourself as infallible and virtuous regardless of the harm you are causing to everybody around you. You will not hesitate to harm others to protect yourself and your falsehood. You may find yourself engaging in the following:
Slandering someone's name.
Discrediting a person or seeking to damage a person's reputation.
Sharing information that would be harmful to the person.
Spying, Hacking, Stalking and disrupting a person's life in order to gain dirt or to harm them.
Gas-lighting people into believing this person is insane, a liar, or themselves a sociopath.
Insisting you are the victim of a person using false frames of reference.
Causing a person to commit suicide or to otherwise become mentally unstable or incapacitated.
If you are seeing these behaviours around you, or you know someone who is affected by them, it's likely a sign that your personal network is distorted by liars and these behaviours have stemmed directly from someone's need to maintain a false narrative or to preserve the false-integrity of an individual engaged in a form of deception.
I'm sure I won't be able to convince those maintaining lies to stop, but it is my genuine belief that we can live in a world where radical truth telling is normalised and the benefit of such a world is a civilization that meets the expectations of it aspirational vision. I am certain that deception is the root of every problem humanity faces. From toxic codependent family groups to international weapons trade and economic decisions that drive genocide and humanitarian crisis. One by one we can individually commit to radical truth telling and promise those around us that we are standing up against lies, narcissism and flaccid humanitarian policy. By taking the bold and unconventional step of committing to the truth “no matter what”, we create the future our children genuinely deserve.