There's life in lies

When we were children we were consistently told to "tell the truth and shame the devil" and consequently tried our level best to be truthful at all times.

Unfortunately in our teenage years we find out that those very paragons of truth, namely parents, teachers and even older siblings, were lying to us all the time.

I remember being told that Santa came all the way from the North Pole with my presents at Christmas. A bigger lie was "You are the most intelligent girl I’ve ever met" or worse still, "Fat, what fat? You are robust."

Well, all along I thought that unlike those that lied to me I would always tell the truth and now a survey carried out by a beverage firm calls me a liar (see page 18).

Only they lie when they don’t call it a lie but a fib. I honestly don’t see the difference.

A little research into the subject and it dawns on me that we are all liars because the survival instinct forces us to be.

The Art of Lying – a book by Japanese authors Kazuo Md Sakai, a practising psychiatrist, and Nakana Ide, an essayist, simply says: "Pleasantries and flattery grease the social wheel and if we were to stop lying, jealousy and resentment would bubble up and relations between people would not be smooth. And if we were unable to tell an occasional lie to ourselves we might fall into deep despair."

Well, the book is interesting. It teaches you how to lie well; lies that work and lies that don’t and the preceding chapters explain why people lie, tell you to practise lying to yourself, enumerate the lies that make a woman beautiful and a man succeed, lies that make the world go around, lies that keep our societies going and how after you transcend a lie you can see the truth.

Well the only real truth I’ve seen so far is that what we call good manners is just a lie, and that complete transparency with your spouse or your boss will be detrimental to your mental and economic health.

Nirmala Janssen
Editor@alnisrmedia.com
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