Truth, an alternative to Lying

I just read from a blog about the courage it takes to be honest. I have been having some thoughts about this. About how, a lot of people have taken to lying so much that it just doesn’t seem to make a moment’s difference.

It surprises me when I see how easy it comes to them, how they don’t have a moment’s hesitation or afterwards a moment’s guilt in lying with a straight face. One thing about being honest was that you didn’t need any doubts about your stand; you could be as loud and as firm as you liked. But that didn’t seem to verify your honesty anymore, considering the liars were just as good. Only place you can expect a difference is when liars forget the lies they once said and later contradict their own stand.

Day 1:

“I have always scored 90 for Math”

Day 29:

“I have always scored 100 for Math”

Day 49 – in a drunken moment

“I just want to pass Math for once in my life buddy sniff sniff sob”

The thing is all this lying is not because people are so bad. Its just that they have somehow gotten used to ejecting a series of small lies to get their way, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. So if you are not allowed at a place cause, say, you needed a condition ‘x’ to be eligible, they don’t see it as an obstacle on the way. To their clear single-direction mind, they wanted entry so they get it, it was not their fault ‘x’ was there in the first place so-

What makes me sad more than the lying itself is the ease with which people do it not feeling a tinge of doubt about its virtue, about their assumption that this was the way of life. For them the question of “Oh what do we do now cause we don’t have it” never arises. They look at others to whom it did, with incomprehensible eyes, eyes that said how can anyone be so slow. To them, it is only a solution everyone will have to arrive at sooner or later, and that for some weird reason, some people were taking time. Truth does not come any different to them, they don’t despise it. Its just that, they use it as an alternative to lying. When you can’t use the truth, you use lies – the logic was simple and its unlearning quite hard to force upon. Especially when the ways of truth promise no easy paths to a glorious life, the way they had it before.

But how did lying become so everybody-does-it? Was there not enough stress on how important it was to stick to the truth anymore? Did no one tell kids that telling the truth even when they did something wrong would actually make room for leniency? Why was it that lying, even if it was for a simple insignificant matter ignored and not corrected? Cause that means a lot. I can say because when I was a kid there were times my Mom told me “See how your brother admitted he did it even though he knew he’d be in trouble” and to me it seemed like something really respectable. Next time when I did something wrong, I’d run to my Mom and proudly announce I did it.

“I sat on that new expensive dining table, and broke it, all by myself” (mm yes, that happened. Hey I just wanted to test it, but err, it was glass).

It started as a funny way to speaking the truth, but once you understand the importance you don’t feel like swaying away – a simple lie could kill you with guilt for days ahead, you’d rather stick with the bitter truth. Cause its so much better to be punished for something you did than getting credit for something you didn’t.