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I Cannot Tell A
Truth
by Mad Dog
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In a recent poll, 52 percent of the respondents said lying
was never justified. On the other hand, almost two-thirds of them said
it was okay to lie in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. In
other words, 16.66 precent of those polled lied when they said lying is
never justified. |
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We’re supposed to tell
the truth. From the first time we told our parents “I don’t know”
when asked how the chocolate ice cream we said we hadn’t eaten wound
up smeared all over our face, it’s been drilled into our heads that we
should always tell the truth. We’re told honesty is the best policy,
the truth shall set you free, and George Washington could not tell a lie
about cutting down the cherry tree when in fact the story was made up by
Mason Locke Weems doing his best Jayson Blair imitation in his biography
of Washington. That’s right, this apocryphal story about truthfulness
is a lie. Is it any wonder we don’t know who or what to believe?
Whether
we like to admit it or not, we all lie. Not necessarily big blatant lies
like “I never had sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky”, “We know
they have weapons of mass destruction”, and “We’ll never get rid
of Dan Rather,” but small everyday ones. We say we’re sorry we
missed a phone call when we actually checked the caller ID and said
aloud that there was no way in hell we wanted to talk to them. We tell
our kids they can’t have any ice cream because we ran out of it yet
some magically appears in our bowl 20 minutes after they go to bed.
Covered in some of the chocolate syrup we’re also out of. And we say
we can’t go to work because we’re sick when it’s the first
beautiful day of Spring and we pray we don’t run into everyone else
from the office at the beach. But most of all, we lie about lying.
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A white lie, on the other hand, is one you can rationalize.
It’s not enough to convince yourself — that’s easy — you need to
convince others that it was only kinda sorta a lie. If you can convince
2 out of 3 people then you can safely call it a white lie without lying.
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In a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, 52 percent of the
respondents said lying was never justified. On the other hand, almost
two-thirds of them said it was okay to lie in order to avoid hurting
someone's feelings. In other words, 16.66 percent of those polled lied
when they said lying is never justified. In another part of the poll,
four in 10 people said they'd never had to lie or cheat, yet on the very
next question one in 10 of those people said they might, in fact, have
told a lie during the past week. Uh, how about the past two minutes?
The
problem may be in differentiating between, and how we feel about, types
of lies. Mark Twain — or maybe it was Benjamin Disraeli, no one’s
sure who’s telling the truth about having come up with this one —
said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and
statistics.” While that might have been true in the 1800’s, we live
in a more complex world today, one that demands more refined categories.
There are actually five kinds of lies: lies, white lies, fibs, spin, and
advertising. Okay, just kidding about the advertising because it
actually encompasses all the other categories. Remember that when you
see the words “bigger”, “better”, “faster”, “quicker”,
“whiter”, “cleaner”, “new” or “improved.” It won’t
stop you from tossing two of the giant economy size packages in your
cart, but at least you’ll feel good knowing you were lied to by the
best.
Basically,
a lie is getting caught not telling the truth. If no one knows the
difference and doesn’t challenge you, you can keep convincing yourself
you stretched the truth just a tad, but the second you’re snagged it
becomes a lie. While always telling the truth would avoid this, most of
us are gamblers and are willing to give it a shot. Hey, if you’ll buy
a lottery ticket with a 1 in 17 million chance of winning, why not take
the better odds and try to get away with telling someone that you would
have come over to help paint the garage had you not been abducted by
aliens?
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After
all, God didn’t spend valuable time chiseling “Thou Shalt Not Lie”
in stone so Moses could blame the broken tablets on the kid down the
block. |
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A white lie, on the other hand, is one you can rationalize.
It’s not enough to convince yourself — that’s easy — you need to
convince others that it was only kinda sorta a lie. If you can convince
2 out of 3 people then you can safely call it a white lie without lying.
A fib, meanwhile, is a trivial or childish lie. The worst part about
fibbing is having to explain why you bothered saying it in the first
place since childish behavior in an adult isn’t usually considered a
desirable character trait. Just ask Pee Wee Herman.
And spin? Simply put, it’s
political. Even when it’s not about politics it’s political. You
don’t even need to waste time considering whether it’s true or not
because you’ll never know. To paraphrase an old joke: How can you tell
if a politician is putting spin on something? He moves his mouth. Spin
is a close cousin to truthiness, the word Stephen Colbert created that
the American Dialect Society (motto: “T’ain’t no thang”) named
the 2005 Word of the Year. Truthiness is when someone “purports to
know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to
evidence.” In other words, spin is on purpose, truthiness is
self-delusion.
This doesn’t mean we should accept
people not telling the truth. After all, God didn’t spend valuable
time chiseling “Thou Shalt Not Lie” in stone so Moses could blame
the broken tablets on the kid down the block. So tell the truth. And if
you don’t tell the truth and you’re caught, own up to it. Just be
sure to put a good spin on your excuse and you’ll be okay. That’s no
lie.
©2006 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Tell the
truth about whether you read them.
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