Liar, Liar

What would you do if you discovered that a person very close to you was a liar; that they, on a very regular basis, led you to believe things that were either slanted or utterly false. This person has been lying to you for many years about a variety of different things. In fact, I can identify this deceiver in your midst . . . its you. No one lies to us more than we do ourselves. We routinely invite fraud into our souls. Many times it becomes such a part of us that we can’t even recognize it anymore. In fact, we actively and sometimes aggressively defend our fabrications because we are afraid of the truth.

In his book on humanity’s ability to adopt self-deception, Robert Trivers identified three areas where we indulge ourselves by clutching to fantasy.* First, we actively work to both create and suppress memories. Time and time again we re-interpret the past to protect ourselves from pain and elevate our self-image. The Good Ole Days  weren’t as good as we remember. We make heroes out of villains, and villains out of heroes to fit our  own desired storyline. Painful memories can be buried deeply so that we don’t have to deal with their place and effect in our lives.

Second, we allow ourselves to believe lies to rationalize immoral behavior. “Few variables are as important in our lives as our perceived moral status. Even more than attractiveness and competence, degree of morality is a variable of considerable importance in determining our value to others—thus it is easily subject to deceit and self-deception.”* In short, we turn a deaf ear to truth to make ourselves feel as if we have acted rightly. We routinely can condemn actions in others which we ignore or justify in ourselves. When someone cuts me off in traffic they are a jerk. When I do it, I am just driving aggressively. Whole systems of moral code are adopted that tend to excuse our own transgressions while condemning others. We degenerate morality into a set of rules (law) when Jesus said that the one rule (law) that defines morality is love. Even now as you read, you can see this moral justification in others, but are you willing to recognize it  it in your own life. (I speaking to myself here too.)

Third, we deceive ourselves in order to boost our own self image. We tend to reinterpret the facts to make us feel better about ourselves. I have told everyone for many years that I am 5’7” (170cm) tall. This may not seem to you like something to boast about, but for me I claim it. The truth is I am a little under 5’6 1/2” (169cm). My mathematical brain knows that I should round down to 5’6”, but many years ago I reinvented the truth to make me claim 5’7”. And I have been believing that lie ever since. The truth is that we all deceive ourselves in much more insidious and destructive ways because we don’t want to believe the truth about who we really are and what we have really done.

The harm of all of this self-deception is that we use it to avoid the real problems in our lives. I do not have to deal with my own pain and struggle if I am able to cover them up with with a blanket of pretense. But if we fail to cope with the real brokeness within each of us, we never heal and we never become who we could be. Don’t be afraid of the truth you have been denying.

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. - Jesus


*Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life.  All quotes in this blog entry are from that book. This work is an interpretation of decades of studies about how humans interact with deception.