Liar, Liar

I've always been curious about lies. Since we were kids, we've all had hammered into our heads the idea that "honesty is the best policy", and how bad it is to lie. But things are rarely that simple now, are they? I figured that there's got to be more to the story; that some crucial context was missing. So, let's take a sharper look at it.

The Lie.

What is it? Why do we do it? What happens to us? How do we fix it? These are the topics of this article. Whether you're someone currently dealing with a liar or just a curious reader (as I am the curious writer), there'll be something for everyone here. Ready?

First, the what. What is a lie? As far as I know, in essence,

a lie is a willed act of creation–of a false mental mapping of reality–generated from a rearrangement of memories.

Let's clarify.

First, a lie must a willed action to qualify as such. Therefore, based on this definition, there is no such thing as an unconscious lie.¹ Instead it would be more accurate to refer to any unwilled false mental mapping of reality as conceptual errors. In other words, these accidents of ignorance, while they do convey a false reality, are not deliberate falsifications and therefore fail to qualify as a lie.

Secondly, a lie is a false mental mapping of reality; it is of mental origins, since reality (or existents as such) doesn't lie, it simply is. Put another way, existence simply exists, but we, as creatures capable of altering our own mental images, are the ones who are capable of falsifying them, and we do so mentally, first and foremost.

Thirdly, lies are generated from a rearrangement of memories. Basically, the lie must get its contents from somewhere. That somewhere is the liar's memory; whether it is accurate or not doesn't matter. Say I lied and said "I was sick yesterday" to a friend as an excuse for missing an event. To do that, I must know what the words "I", "was", "sick", and "yesterday" refer to. There must therefore be an existing mental image (or memory) of the concrete referents of each word, with which I could then string together (or rearrange) into a narrative that I was sick yesterday. This rearranged sequence of memory may be saved, if, for example, I find myself needing to repeat it to others or to not contradict myself in front of others. Otherwise, it could be swiftly discarded and forgotten.²

Another key feature of a lie is that not only can you lie to others, you can also lie to yourself.

The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offence.

Quote from §55 of The Antichrist³ (1895), by Friedrich Nietzsche

To lie, you need to have 2 things:

1) The memory of what happened and the ability to remember it (Remembrance).

2) The ability to compile and rearrange your memories (Rearrangement).

These are the basic requirements of lying; of producing a lie in any way for whatever purpose. If you do not know the truth and cannot remember it, you cannot lie. This is best explored by a case study of a pathological liar with acute amnesia⁴, where the patient (pre-recovery) lost his ability to lie. Likewise, if you cannot compile or rearrange your memories, you cannot think, let alone lie.

Now we know what lying is and how we do it. We can ask the bigger question; why do people lie? What do they hope to gain or avoid?

When it comes to reasons for lying, there are loads. But, instead of just categorizing the reasons in the most obvious way (to gain something, to avoid something), I'm going to highlight 4 interesting ones. This will mean that my list is not all-encompassing. But honestly, anything I've left out is probably obvious without me saying.

1) To avoid/reject reality, threatened by its perceived danger to one's psychic state.

This is the big one for the lies we tell ourselves. Different people have different levels of tolerance when it comes to the truth, especially the inconvenient truths. Faced with them, people are presented with a choice–to accept or to reject. The weight of these truths can be measured by the amount of responsibility (to yourself and/or others) that is demanded of you in direct response to it. Put another way, every impactful truth carries personal implications–either in what you will do or what others will do to you as a consequence of learning that fact. Not everyone will be ready for that. I mean, why else do people run from responsibility? Because they sense they can't handle it, that it'd be overwhelming, that they'd fall apart. That's what a neurosis is, a split in the psyche⁵ in people that literally could not handle some aspect of reality. To lie to yourself that reality isn't what it is is a fear- and anxiety-based response. Philosophically, it is the choice to live a life endured over a life lived; the choice of a retreat over an advance.

Now, morality-wise, this reason for lying can at times get muddy for the simple reason that retreating is sometimes in your "best" interest, because frankly, you just don't have what it takes at this very moment to face whatever you're facing. I mean to say that for some, facing the truth at that very moment would spell a greater disaster than the consequences of a temporarily sustained self-deception, thereby justifying the lie as the least bad option⁶, at least temporarily. This justification, however, only goes so far–as the moment you have what it takes, it no longer works to justify your continued self-deception. Either way, know that there is a tiny bit of context-dependent ambiguity here. So just be skillful when judging others who do this. Some will need support, others will choose to solidify their delusions. One piece of advice when trying to help people who lie for this reason (and who also want to be helped) is to try to figure out what they're missing (if anything) in order to face the reality that they are avoiding.⁷ Then find out how to fix it so it's no longer missing. Once they actually have what they need, be it knowledge or faith, you are then working with them to fix a habit, rather than an existential threat to their psychic integrity. Trust me, it's a lot easier.

2) To manipulate others, getting high from a sense of social superiority.

To lie for this reason is indicative of an underlying power-based worldview. See, like it or not, the ability to manipulate others can be seen as a competence (just think of the marketing industry). Not everyone will be able to do this. It often takes a level of charm, intelligence, cognitive empathy, and wit to fool others. For people who lie for this reason, the more outrageous the manipulation, the greater their sense of social superiority. You can think about it like the satisfaction of pulling off a great heist. In its own way, it's rebellious. Rebellious against what? Against reality. Ah-ha. Now you know this reason is actually a pathological subset of the first one. See, in actual real-life mature human relationships, it isn't all about power⁸; in fact, power (or force) most often works against the health of these relationships by being the corrupting factor. By reducing the complexity of human relationships to the one-dimensional reductionistic diagnosis of "power", these people achieve 2 things–

1) They save mental energy since, believing themselves to have the answer for everything, the desire to think disappears.⁹

2) They can now use it to justify their own actions that were motivated by power.

How convenient. But as American philosopher Ayn Rand famously wrote about humans,

He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every "is" implies an "ought."¹⁰ Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction.

Quote from §44 of The Objectivist Ethics (1961), by Ayn Rand

Running from reality and its real demands on consciousness, in any long-range timescale, is a deadend. The "highs" these liars feel are not only short-lived, but also an unspoken symptom of their foolish dependence on the worst in man (their naïveté and blindness) and a declaration of war against the best (their intelligence). Know that people possessed by the spirit of power are dangerous. They're not in it primarily for material values, like most criminals who lie. These guys are doing it for kicks. It's like the difference between a thief that steals your money to buy something nice and a thief that steals your money to feel good about their own ability to steal. These people are sociopaths and narcissists. Avoid them wherever possible. If you have a loved one like this, that's rough. Know that it won't be easy to convince them to change themselves as the root of their problem is metaphysical. The good news is that the amount of individuals who are purely possessed by power is very low. Way more common are the ones who suffer from the internal conflicts between their power complex and their reality-based developmental instincts. To attempt help, you must be on the side of the good in them, and only the good. To do that, you must simultaneously be on the side of the good in yourself.¹¹

3) To gain social status, out of a craving for the approval of others.

These people are known as "second-handers". Why? Because their values, rather than something personally determined to be so through a conscious rational process, are instead entirely dependent on what others value. They derive their self-respect from what others think of them, even if they know it to be a lie. These are people who relinquished their own mind to the minds and authority of others. Afraid to think, he has only his unidentified feelings to hold onto, ruled by the ideas of others. It should not be surprising to learn that they guard this last emotional remnant of selfhood with a vicious protectiveness¹², valuing it above reason and thereby reality.

To deal with someone who lies for this reason is almost an impossible task.¹³ They are closed to reason. If they appear to apply it, it is only because they believe others would want to see them apply it; it is a facade, hiding an emptiness that petrifies them with dread–an emptiness that they refuse to meet in fear of total breakdown. As you may have noticed, this reason explains the first 2 reasons. If you truly want to help these people, be prepared for the high percentage likelihood of failure. If they appear to change, it could very well be because they believe people would want to see them change. To strike at the root is to confront the chilling emptiness, which would require the combined advice for reasons 1 and 2. Find out what they're missing and work to fix it, all the while being on the side of the good in them. That's all you can realistically do. The rest is up to them.

4) To protect what truly matters, driven by a selective compassion for the good.

This is the only truly moral reason for lying–to defend our rational human values against those who would use our own honesty against us. This means lying to the Nazi SS about the Jewish family in your secret annex, to the Japanese prosecutors that you've renounced your Christian faith as a Spanish missionary, and to your communist informer neighbours about the small bag of edible grains you've collected from the already-harvested field. Understand that the virtue of honesty, is only absolute as a personal mental recognition. That is to say, reject the unreal and open your eyes to reality, but if others seek to harm you or the good things you value by relying on your honesty, do not let them. Where there is a choice, you are under no obligation to commit spiritual or physical suicide to change the deluded consciousness of lunatics.

Another point, from a logical perspective, is that people who manipulate honesty for their own destructive purposes values neither honesty nor its necessity to life. Language to them is only something to be manipulated–as an entirely socially-constructed tool in an all-encompassing power game (back to reason 2). By lying to these degenerates, you are only feeding their own insane worldview back to them. Protect your values, and let these people drown themselves in the consequences of their own delusions.¹⁴

And so there we have it–what a lie is, how they work, and why people lie. Remember, lying, like any other thing we do, is a type of skill. The more you evade reality, the "better" you'll get at it. Do it enough and you may even lose your ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Not to mention the immense cognitive burden of having a huge backlog of lies.¹⁵ I really wouldn't recommend it.

While lots more can be said on the societal consequences of lying, I'll leave it at the individual level for now. After all, society is ever only a collection of individuals; it'll change when individuals change.

I hope you learnt something from this article of curiosity. I mean, I sure wish I knew some of this stuff when I was younger; it would've saved me a lot of pain, seriously. I hope it'll help whatever you're going through.

Now get out there and put out some burning pants.

1. So-called "spontaneous lying" is still a willed mental act; it just happens really fast (and uses up more energy doing so). Also, the will that is willing the mental act may originate from a complex, or multiple complexes, which the ego-personality may reject or ignore, making it appear unwilled. On the topic of something appearing unwilled, in Freudian free-association, the patient is encouraged to temporarily lower the strength of their ego-personality (the censor) to allow these "below-the-surface" wills to express themselves. Here too, it appears unwilled, but that falsely assumes that the only will in town is that of the ego-personality.

2. Lies, as memory, do not necessarily need to go into long-term storage. The lie needs to pass a certain threshold of salience to be remembered. While people don't often tell pointless lies, when they do, it is usually quickly forgotten. Certain pathological liars will lie and quickly forget about it, which can be revealing of their underlying desire to hide who they are; from others and from themselves.

8. The post-modernists would disagree, but honestly, who cares about them? Their obsession with their power-based worldview is in direct contradiction to their distrust of grand narratives. That's when you realize that they actually first decided on the power-based worldview as an item of faith, and only afterward tried to justify it through theory–the very opposite of the scientific method. To think that it holds the majority position in academia is a solemn thought indeed, and a sign of our times.

6. It's the least bad option. That's not the same thing as being a good option. If a good option is a positive integer, this is a negative integer. Its justification lies in being a smaller negative number than one of its alternatives.

4. Quite the interesting case that highlights both the aggressive and defensive aspects of the lie.

Rothman, Y., & Biran, I. (2024). What happens to a pathological liar with acute amnesia?. Neuropsychoanalysis, 26(2), 203-213.

3. §55 of The Antichrist (1895) https://monadnock.net/nietzsche/antichrist-55.html

Listen to this article instead

5. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung described a neurosis as the state of being at war with oneself, as a splitting of personality caused by failures of adaptation.

From Volume 11 (Psychology and Religion: West and East; 1970) ¶522 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung

9. This is why research has shown that the less verbally fluent you are (lower IQ), the more you lean towards authoritarian beliefs. Why? Because they're very black and white beliefs, easy to apply and easy to repeat. This is the source of all your problems, this is the miracle cure, etc. It's very quick to get. They're on battery-saving mode, at least until the consequences of their irrational beliefs bite them in the rear.

Andary-Brophy, C. A. (2015). Political correctness: Social-fiscal liberalism and left-wing authoritarianism. University of Toronto (Canada).

10. Every "is" implies an "ought". I associate this with the idea that all relevant knowledge is narratively-structured. It's in story-format. To map out what you're going to do, you need an imaginable sequence of events; that's a story. Even trivia is technically not cognitively trivial, because the person learning it is probably using it for something–to impress their friends or win trivia-night events, whatever. The ought is what you're going to do with that piece of knowledge.

7. What they're missing might be a skill and the confidence that comes with it, an understanding of how things are, faith in the real, or all of these things together. For some, this is going to be very challenging to figure out and may require you to seek professional help.

11. Basically, you must lead by example. To becoming a shining testament to the superiority of consciousness over unconsciousness. To do this properly, you must first fully settle the debate within yourself. If you're not sure yourself, don't expect others to buy it.

12. This is precisely why they're so easily triggered and tilt heavily to the use of force to punish those who they perceived to have done them this injustice. Force (or pull), after all, is their hypothesized law of the world. Hence all the censorship, cheap tactics, arrests, reputation savaging, and etc. It's not a coincidence; it's by design.

15. Since, not only do you have to remember what reality is, you also have to remember how you skewed it, as well as all the different ways you skewed it for different people. On top of that, trying to keep it all consistent? Yeah, that's a lot of work, and it'll only get harder the more you add to it. That's why in the story of Pinocchio, his nose grows longer when he lies. The more he lies, the fact that he's lying becomes harder and harder to hide.

14. If this seems harsh, that's because it is. Know that every compromise of the good in its long-range timeframe is a victory for evil; it marks your silent surrender and acceptance of the irrational doctrine that unconsciousness is superior to consciousness. Remember, your moral lie is not the cause of their pain. Their own choice of the irrational and immoral is. Physically, you cannot think for others, just as others cannot think for you. Allow them to own the consequences of their own beliefs and actions. Reality is the best teacher.

13. A point of clarity: here I am specifically referring to second-handers who adopt lying as their habitual strategy. You can think about there being "normal" second-handers, and then LYING second-handers. Both are difficult to treat, but the lying ones are especially difficult. If you find yourself matching the description of the normal second-hander, understand that it will be difficult to change your ways. After all, you've had years, maybe even decades, of practice being that way. A little cognitive intervention isn't going to do it. It's going to take a clear plan, effort to implement it, diligence in sticking to it, faith in and understanding of the good to justify it, and ideally, an environment of upward-striving individuals to encourage it. It's going to take TIME. Rome wasn't built in a day.