When at the end of the day someone asks you how your day was, you don’t know what your answer must precisely be. But after remembering how your boss had told you off because you were late, and how a colleague had upset his cup at your table and wet your pant with coffee, you tell them that your day was bad. But that unintentionally becomes a lie because you didn’t take into consideration how good the weather had been and how beautiful the new idea you conceived had been.
Likewise, even though it has been raining the whole week, you tell your little sister—who is worried lest the picnic scheduled for tomorrow be rained off—that tomorrow will be a fine day. Essentially, you are lying (for even you don’t harbour any hope of the weather changing) in order to quell her for one more day.
The next day, however, turns out to be a fine day, with the rain, that had seemed unabated, stopped. So in a way you told the truth. And yet you lied.
A lie, etymologically, is professed to be a statement that is not true or that the speaker knows is not true. But many a time while lying, even you don’t know if the lie is untrue at all. It is like time, unremitting and vital, veering between truth and falsity and at the same time, exactly being none. You told your sister a lie that was untrue but it kind of transformed into the truth the next day—you were telling the truth and still lying; so do we call that a “true lie”?
A lie doesn’t need necessarily to go hand-in-hand with a false statement either; falsehood is not compulsorily a lie. When I would be stating an untruth, I can yet not be lying. Suppose I say to you that the sun rises from the west and sets in the east. This statement is false, but I am not lying when I say this, for I know that it is not true and I know you know it is not true. I am only telling that in order to make my point: it is possible to declare something false and yet not be lying.
To most of us, the concept of lying is not a concept even. But not unlike truth and falsehood, a lie can entail—and so, invoke—as many ideas and subjects and issues.
A lie markedly lies somewhere between the very pillars that buttress the human civilization, truth and fabrication. It is like an alternative column that supports the roof when both the other pillars are not sturdy enough to hold onto. It is like the only way through when the other two figurative throughways are figuratively destroyed and mangled and thus, impassable.
Lies customarily are related to—and at other times are all about—beliefs and intentions. When you say something that you believe is false (be it false or not) with the intention of inducing the listener to believe it is true, you are lying. But this has a converse too: when you say something you believe is true but with the intention of making others think otherwise. Such are also lies but such lies are a little subtler than the former ones. Such lies are commonly meant to be ludicrous or humorous, but for the liar they are truths nonetheless. When Spiderman tells that he had been saving the world when someone asks his human avatar what he had been doing that day, it is a lie, because he knows he is deceiving (considering he seeks anonymity) and the person asking doesn’t know he really was saving the world and so, drops the whole thing with a snort or chuckle or a shrug.
In case the lies of the second type are revealed, the liar has a practised reply. He will say he wasn’t lying—which actually was the case—but was, in fact, telling the truth all the time while the listener was not concentrating and believing in what he said. In such events the lie becomes truth. In general, that argument becomes a valid one. But it draws ethics and morality and philosophy which would see it as another verbal misinterpretation and thus, consider it to be yet another stab at manipulating the once-manipulated person. It is akin to what governments, political parties and various organizations do once in a while. With almost the selfsame artifice, they lie and deceive. When someone says Nepal will be turned into Switzerland or Singapore or any other country, they are lying through their teeth because that is simply not possible: the countries in question are different in every which way. Such lies, which usually are made by political leaders before (for) getting the political power are considered to be worse and more contemptible than the lies of the first type because they embroil giving hope—doing which is in itself a risky thing—and then ditch people when they have fulfilled their personal causes.
To Kant, to whom it is against moral law to lie, truth is a “categorical imperative” but there are others who believe that in the case a lie doesn’t have much effect—and on the contrary does better than what the truth shall—the lie is acceptable and allowed. There are others who consider lying as a perversion of the natural faculty of speech. They deem that lying is a way of using humans the way someone would, a tool. The naysayers raise questions regarding the context of lies and the rationale and the consequences: Is it ever right to lie? And with controversial questions like such, there comes another crop of vehement lashing and questioning.
What complicates the whole matter of lying more is the phenomenon of self-deception. In a way, it raises the issues tantamount to suicide. It puts a big question mark over the individuality of the person in question and the culpability of the lie, of falling into a mire created for ourselves. Consider how Nietzsche puts self-deception:
‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually, memory yields.
Nietzsche seems to say how the cognizance of one’s own notion can be disconcerting and destructive to one’s self-image and sense of well-being and thus, people usually refuse to believe a bitter truth. This awareness is not the one most favored since people usually have a great sense of self however self-effacing they might be. That stokes the contradiction of self-deception; it goes as far as to question existence, just like suicide usually does. And reasoning blatantly fails explaining existence.
In the end, what most of us do is lie when we cannot tell the truth. In instances like such, lies tumble down the mouth just as the rain falls from pregnant clouds. There might be absolutists, but there are too people who will try maintaining truth, but in duress, won’t be much able to. And then there are some others, who will pretend and who will assume a charade so as to forestall lying.
