Honestly, I made a mistake

The truth about lying

A popular humorous movie plot is to have the central character, for some contrived reason, forced to tell the truth. We love watching a poor schmuck like Bob Hope or Jim Carey squirm while admitting his boss’s wife is a little overweight or the dress his girlfriend is wearing makes her look like a circus clown.

It is humorous because the characters are breaking a social convention. There are times when, out of politeness, we are supposed to be dishonest. Our social code is full of complicated rules about when and how to lie.

Yet it all seems so unnecessary. Imagine how much more enjoyable dating would be, for example, if both combatants told the truth. We would start by buying our own drinks. There’s nothing honest about buying a woman a drink. We’re doing so with evil intent, as the woman well knows.

Besides, she must have some means of employment. If she can’t afford to purchase a drink, she shouldn’t be there in the first place. With our own drinks in hand, I will casually remark that as awful as I look now, I’m even more slovenly at home.

“I know what you mean,” she’ll candidly reply. “When I’m about the house, I look a fright.”

“The pillow does something to my hair. I wake up looking like Christopher Lloyd.”

“I wear curlers to bed.”

“I’m getting a little thick around the middle.”

“I’ll, no doubt, add a few pounds with age.”

“My hair will thin.”

“I can get a little cross at times.”

“I’ve been known to be forgetful.”

But do we start with honesty? Of course not. We fire out the gate, piling it on thick and heavy. I portray myself as Jupiter, her as Juno. After such a start, the relationship has nowhere to go but downhill.

“So what if you graduated first at Harvard Law School. The president of the bank that charges me 25% interest on my credit card likely went to Harvard. A fine reference that makes. You might as well say you went to Sing Sing.”

It is the same with job interviews. Neither side buys the lies. The employer is just hoping to find someone who will show up to work reasonably sober. For our part, we’ll even work at a dump like this to buy food. They’d naturally prefer someone better than me. But at the money they pay, they can’t expect anything better.

There’s something demeaning about praising someone with lies. It’s as though we can’t think of anything truthfully good to say about them. It’s especially painful listening to parents talk about their children.

Nobody’s child could, or should, be that good. And with time, all this false praise wears even thinner. I know parents who have been bragging about their children’s exploits for decades. If half of what they said were true, their offspring should be starring in Steven Spielberg movies by now or be president of the United States. Instead, they seem to be mucking through life like the rest of us.

And what’s wrong with that? When I meet someone on the street, I don’t care how many Broadway musicals they’ve starred in. I’ll be happy if my wallet’s still in my pocket when they leave. So what if you graduated first at Harvard Law School. The president of the bank that charges me 25% interest on my credit card likely went to Harvard. A fine reference that makes. You might as well say you went to Sing Sing.

If lying is so pointless, why do so many of us keep doing it? To understand, we must identify the two major types of liars. First, there are the bad guys who lie for personal gain. They want to sell you a lemon of a car or get you to vote for them.

Then there are the good guys who lie to avoid being punished for telling the truth. If sins were forgiven, the good guys would gladly fess up. The car broke down on you because I forgot to take it to the service station. The report was full of mistakes because I did sloppy work. What do you expect for the money you pay me?

We hate to admit this. But we are lied to so often because of the shabby way we treat truth tellers. Rather than forgiving minor sins, most of us have the memories of elephants, storing up each transgression and weaponizing it. Then, when someone foolishly admits to a making mistake, every error he or she ever made is pulled out of our quill and fired into the culprit’s heart.

An “oh, I’m sorry. I forgot to take out the trash,” is rarely met with a “that’s all right. I forget things as well.” So to avoid the inevitable litany of abuse, we make up the excuse of being too busy searching for what smells like a gas leak in the basement to take out the trash. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the good guys are being conditioned to lie.

Unfortunately for them, they aren’t as good at lying as the bad guys. It doesn’t come natural to the pure of heart. That is why the girl that expects suitors to smoothly extol her many nonexistent virtues will invariably end up marrying a jerk. Whoever smoothly piles the most manure will get the best jobs and elected to political office.

Yet imagine a world where truth is rewarded and sins forgiven. Suddenly, the good guys are comfortable in their virtue while the bad guys are stumbling over themselves trying to sound legitimately honest. Of course, for this to work, it would have to be a society-wide revolution. One dodo telling the truth would be doomed to a lifetime of loneliness and unemployment.

Yet for all its merits, there is still something seemingly unromantic about the truth. In his 1886 book “Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow,” British humorist Jerome K. Jerome put his finger on the sentiment:

“By jove! fancy a man trying to make love on strictly truthful principles, determining never to utter a word of mere compliment or hyperbole, but to scrupulously confine himself to exact fact! Fancy his gazing rapturously into his mistress’ eyes and whispering softly to her that she wasn’t on the whole, bad looking, as girls went! Fancy his holding up her little hand and assuring her that it was of a drab light colour shot with red; and telling her as he pressed her to his heart that her nose, for a turned-up one, seemed rather pretty; and that her eyes appeared to him, as far as he could judge, to be quite up to the average standard of such things!”

I, though, beg to differ. Some misguided soul, likely heavily inebriated, mistaking an average American girl for a goddess of perfection and beauty, would naturally want to marry such a creature. But imagine a sober man who after accurately assessing your true character—warts, moles and all—deciding that of all the billions of people inhabiting this planet, he honestly and truthfully wants to spend his life with you.

Can a man offer higher praise?

Follow me on Twitter at @DrWayneSheldon1 and on Facebook at the Rural American Gazette.