Truth, You dare?

I don’t know about you but when I was a child, my entourage were very keen to embed within me, the morally correct behaviour of telling the truth.

I was told that lies were bad, to tell a lie was a punishable act. The truth was always promoted so with our manipulable little minds, we take these instructions on board as good little children do. Then comes one night when we are invited to dinner somewhere and off we go.

At dinner time, we all sit down for this wonderful meal that our generous host has prepared for us and then, you know what’s coming don’t you… yes you do and you are right! Said host asks us ‘so how is you dinner’ and we say ‘I hate it’ or we are somewhat more tactical and say ‘it is nice but mummy/daddy/the cat makes it better than you’.

Mummy and daddy, or our guardian, at this point obviously have gone bright red and the child gets ‘that look’ you know the one, don’t tell me you never got it! Yes, THAT look, the one that instantly triggers sirens in our brain warning us that we are going to get some form of telling off when we get home, we have no idea why because we did nothing wrong, nevertheless, we sit in silence for the rest of the night.

However, it is also possible that we actually do not say anything rude at all, we may be very polite and say ‘it is nice, I have not had this before as no one eats fish in our house because daddy can’t stand it and says is smells like wet socks’. The host again immediately goes uncomfortably pale as they realise that they have prepared something no one eats and yes, even this time, despite being honest and polite, we get the look again.

So, now comes truth lesson number 2, the upgraded version, we are taught that whilst we must tell the truth, there is this concept called the White Lie that is sometimes preferable to the truth. This is when we are asked to use common sense, now the thing with humans is that, most of the time we end up in a pickle, due to our inability to apply common sense to our lives but then we do not know that because our brains are wired to tell us that we are always right so of course, we think that our opinion is the only opinion worth the time of day, well that is a topic for another day, but for now, can you see how common sense, white lies and the teaching of always telling the truth now come together to form one confused little human, set up for future failure when they reach full sized human.

Why is it that as a child we are told one thing but when we turn into adults, we practice something else but even then, we actually continue to teach the next generation the same thing that we were taught as children despite knowing that these teachings will never be implemented. Basically, the act of teaching our young to tell the truth, is ironically one of the biggest lies we teach them!

Back to the question, why is it that we are compelled to lie? This is an actual question that I am asking you by the way, it is not rhetorical.

Why do we have to suppress our feelings and even though they might not be rude, it is still preferable to lie? We all start our day with a lie

‘How are you?’

‘Fine thank you and how are you’.

Most of the time no one actually wants to know how you are and the person you are addressing does not want to tell you how they actually are because they know you do not care but they answer and in turn ask the same question because it is polite to do so however, you also say 'fine thanks', regardless of what is going on because you know that they do not care and are being polite.

Are you exhausted reading this? Well if you are, just think for a moment that you actually make your poor brain process this on a daily basis – how do you think your brain feels!

Take a minute and ask yourself why do you think someone might be compelled to lie to you.

I am not sure of what answers you came up with but if I think of a potential reason then, I would draw the conclusion that it was our own doing that others feel compelled to lie to us because we are not very good at hearing the truth and accepting it as constructive criticism.

I will give you some examples:

Someone went to get baguettes from the bakers once and on their return, they asked me ‘are they ok’, I took a look and said ‘yes thank you, but they look a bit burnt today don’t they’. Now I was making an observation but the person who I was speaking to said well next time go get your own and got themselves in a hufflepuff.

I did not say anything negative towards this person, nor the baker, all I made was a general comment on the appearance, which was clearly true. My thinking was, oh maybe they were so busy they forgot the baguettes in the oven today, but again as humans, our first instinct is to think negatively.

I confess that I have done this myself; I was painting for the first time and I asked my dad ‘am I doing a good job?’ Here was me thinking I was the next Leonardo Da Vinci but turns out my strokes were going in all directions so dad told me yes you are for your first go but next time you need to keep your strokes going in the same direction, so left to left, or right to right, (but not left, up, left, down, up and right) so it does not leave those marks as he pointed to my failed masterpiece.

Being a novice, I should have obviously taken that feedback on board and improved my painting but instead, even as a child, the Dunning Kruger effect had taken over me so I sulked and decided that I had had enough painting for the day.

I will try not to make these posts too long but the bottom line is, sometimes we need to hear things that we may not want to hear but we need to take those things in a constructive manner because most of the time, what we are being told are little things that will benefit us later in life and really are for the greater good.

However, we decide that if we do not like what we hear, we will not listen and then we blacklist the person who said it to us.

I am not sure if you agree with me but we all say that ‘I can take the truth’, ‘I am strong enough to hear the truth’, ‘I respect the truth’ so on. All I can say to you, in my best Jack Nicholson voice, is that ‘You can’t handle the truth’.

If you are disagreeing with me right now, I rest my case….