Lying on a bed of nails

WTF I hate lying.

People always say that you should tell the truth. It's not exactly in the ten commandments, although there is something about not giving false testimony about your neighbour. But what happens when not lying is bad? What happens when to tell the truth is to contradict other moral values?

It's so easy to say that we should tell the truth, and admire those who are courageous enough to tell the truth and face the consequences. But it's not always that simple. I wish I had the strength of conviction to stand up for myself and my causes and beliefs and tell the truth. But when you threaten me with causing others unnecessary worry or (as cliche and unfashionable as this sounds) disobeying the people you love, and who are supposed to know what's best, I feel like to tell the truth is a bigger sin than to lie (I know it seems insinuating that I'd lie to shield others, but really, I'm not trying to say that. I freely admit I lie for my own gain more than anything else. It's the moral sense of being caught between Scylla and Charybdis I'm trying to emphasize).

But then again, you can't just tell one lie and have done with it. You need to lie again to be self-consistent. And again, and again, and again. You need to create a system in which everything coheres. Your lies need to be consistent with what apparent reality. It's like Ockham's razor, except that instead of the simplest explanation being the truth, the simplest explanation that can best fit certain witnessed points in history.

The easiest on your conscience is to avoid having to tell the truth and let the other person assume an explanation on his own. Usually all you have to do is present the situation in a certain light, such that the points witnessed would tend to fit a certain explanation.

However, it often isn't so simple. In order to present your case in this way, you need to tweak reality a little. Take the case where you've sneaked off to eat ice-cream when you were not supposed to. You might get away with saying that you are going around the vicinity of the ice-cream parlour without actually mentioning you are going for ice-cream. If, for instance, it happens to be near a bookshop, the person you have lied to might assume you've gone to browse books. Once he attempts to confirm it with you, you need to act like you haven't heard him and make your escape ASAP, or you could change the subject. Either way, you need to tweak the reality that you've heard what he said, and be evasive.

It gets worse. You might think that after the one lie, you are home free. As I mentioned, this most certainly isn't the case. The amount you have to lie in order to cover up increases exponentially with the seriousness of the lie. Going back to the ice-cream incident, you might find that the person you lied to (A) might have gone and chatted with B, who was at the bookshop. You would then have to find an explanation for the fact that B didn't see you there. In other words, instead of directing dear old Ockham's razor to cut it's way to the truth, you will have to redirect it to bypass the truth, in favour of a more palatable lie.

Most of the time, you can get away with lies that just graze past the truth, like saying 'we must have missed each other' and being non-specific. Often we have mental caveats that we use to defend the lie as being at least partially true (for instance, you would definitely have missed B if you were never at the bookshop). But there are really only so many silent caveats that we can add to our lies, particularly when people ask questions that are all to close to the mark. In order to keep your lying consistent there will be times when you have to say something that directly contradicts historical events, and those are the worst kind. For instance, suppose C, someone working at the ice-cream parlour, ran into A, and told A about seeing you there. You would have to tell A that C saw the wrong person, or that you were walking across the ice-cream parlour to the toilet.

I confess, I eat too much forbidden fruit. Wait, I mean ice-cream.