A Little Bent
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| Image: en.wikipedia.org |
This week, I’m staying with Jordan Peterson, and this week I reflect on Rule 8 in 12 Rules for Life. Tell the truth or at least, don’t lie.
Today I woke up thinking about a person who had a huge potential for a great and beneficial relationship when I met them. Their talents and abilities were just what I needed to move some mutual projects forward. That was until I discovered that the person just could never tell the truth even on utterly mundane issues. It just seemed to be part of their DNA to tell white, grey, and black lies and you never knew when you could trust their word or never at all. That relationship broke down faster than the dreams for it could crystallize. It is just difficult to trust someone who never tells the truth and the uncertainty of never being able to trust someone’s word took its toll on the relationship.
People will use words to bend and twist the world into delivering what they think is necessary. Whether that is telling a lie to win an argument, to gain status, to impress people, or gain what you want. Some other motivations for ‘spinning words’ include proving one is right, appearing competent, avoiding responsibility, minimizing immediate conflict, or imposing one’s beliefs. All of these are an attempt at manipulating reality with perception.
And why might reality be so difficult to face? In most instances, liars do not know themselves or are hiding something about themselves from others, and in the process, they also suppress who they could be from themselves. They never take the time to discover who they are, what they want to become, and how to go about it. Instead, they buy into an image, make it their own, then set out to do everything in their ‘lying power’ to make others believe they are or have achieved the lie.
It may seem easy to lie about how far you are when you are late for a meeting. It however denies you the chance to explore how best to improve your planning and timekeeping. You also pass up an opportunity to be truthful when there are no major consequences and in the process, you transform yourself into a liar. In other words, you weaken your character. Next time you are confronted with an opportunity to tell the truth, it will be harder to act out who you are not (a truthful person) because you have already trained yourself to be a liar.
When a person lies, they know what they have done in the moment. They may blind themselves to the consequences of their actions or even forget the lie. But at the time, they were aware. A compounding of lies over time adds up to create an inauthentic self and eventually a warped structure of being, a corrupted soul.
To quote Jordan, “It is deceit that makes people miserable beyond what they can bear.” Indeed, those who lie live in hell. The hell of having to keep track of what lies they have told to whom; which lies to add on to the previous ones to keep the deception going; coming up with new tactics to avoid those who have been lied to and the threat of being found out.
If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division when you are misbehaving. I’d call this the nudging of your conscience. And as you continue to live in truth, you will have to face and deal with the conflicts that truth-telling generates. As you deal with each instance, you mature and move closer to your ideal self, a wiser self.
Jordan concludes: “To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into being. Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word. Truth makes the past truly past. It is light in the darkness. If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.
“Taking the easy way out or telling the truth – those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.” ~ Jordan Peterson
Lies weakens one's character! 👊🏽
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