Every philosopher is on a quest to write something that changes the way the person who reads it thinks, a search for some compelling argument. Not truth as we might contend, persuasion would be a better term. What is verifiable through testing is scientific fact, those are not arguable in the same way as the value of a proposition that we are unable to see the benefit of without proceeding with it. Nothing important to human existence hangs on facts that everyone agrees with.

We are going to revisit lies, mostly because I have been inspired by my good friend, and sometime mentor, David J Watts. His analysis has given me more to think about. Like all good critics he pointed out the spaces in between my points and suggest where I may have missed something. Here’s what he had to say…

Really like your writing style, I don’t remember what I said about lying, I know I contributed something..

The main tenor of the argument , if I have understood it, I think we are kind of forced into lying and it’s very often a power thing. It’s just not possible, particularly in the workplace, to really be forensically honest . You just can’t because it would just wreck your career. So I think, I mean it’s not just the workplace, we’re forced really, to lie. I would go a lot further actually, and I’ll come on to that later, but I think  it’s much more deeply ingrained in the fabric of human civilization. In many respects I think lying is actually a necessity.

Where I might add a bit to yours, I think it might be useful to define what lying actually is, what it might be, it would be a useful way to start. Everyone has got a common sense view of what lying is, but is that what it actually is, I’m not sure? We might say ‘oh, telling a falsehood, that’s a lie’ , well yes but that’s not all that revealing. I mean what about not revealing a truth, is that a lie, is the concealment of something you know to be true lying, or is that something different?  Is it better or worse, it’s all deception? It would be good to attempt to define something that could be agreed on to start the piece.

It strikes me that the subject opens up a can of worms. If there is such a thing as a lie, then there has to be such a thing as a truth. The lie has to be judged against something, and that something has to be a truth, so is there a truth? Does truth exist? Then you are into the realms of, if there is a truth, if something is true or not true, those truths may be confined to just verifiable facts rather than the more complex and quite possibly more important grey areas on which human relationships are built. You know, the battle of Hastings was 1066, we say ‘that’s a truth’, it wasn’t 1067 that would be a lie. It was Hastings, it wasn’t Eastbourn or Brighton, those would be lies. But so what, the battle of Hastings was 1066,it’s not really saying a lot. The more complex grey areas of was the battle of Hastings a defining moment, did the Norman conquest transform the nature of the feudal system in Great Britain, England maybe more so? Those are sort of grey areas, they may be more important than the plain verifiable facts, we don’t know but it is something to think about.

I’d go even further. I’d say that being less than, let’s say, robotically honest is a human trait, I think we all do it and it’s just part of the complex tapestry of human communication. It’s mostly for the benefit of the liar and the receiver, and it’s probably good for society as a whole. I don’t think we could handle too much truth. I remember writing in The Plum Tree, you know the Smedley thing, where our main character is confronted with just too much truth and he concludes that, this is not verbatim but… ‘Truth is a vicious cold-hearted assassin that bludgeons its victims with no remorse, feels no pain no pity no fear, and it  will not stop until you are in pieces on the floor begging for dishonesty.

I think a lot of lies are really necessary, you might call them white lies, or maybe they’re not quite as white, you know, sort of grey lies, a bit mucky..  Let’s say you’re in a coffee house looking around and you see all these fat people eating, and they eat in a disgusting way and they’re made ugly by being fat and eating as if they are in desperation for the food. You’re fat and you’re ugly, that’s what you are thinking, those are your genuine thoughts on these people. Are you going to reveal that, are you going to go over and tell them ‘by the way, you know, I think you’re fat and you’re ugly’. No, obviously not. What if they said ‘do you think I’m fat and ugly?’ you’re not going to say ‘yes’, you’re going to say no. Or you might say ‘well you’re not the most beautiful, but I don’t think you’re ugly or fat’. But yes you do. You might keep telling lies, they say ‘are you sure’ and you say ‘yes, I’m sure, I think you’re fine’. I think we do it all the time, and if we didn’t life would be unbearable, but I think you’re talking about the bullshitter (in my piece). That’s different, I think we all know one of these guys. It gets to the point where it’s just an insult to your intelligence and it’s hard to take, and it causes you to avoid them, which is sad really for them.

David J Watts

I’m a huge fan of Dave, to me he is man who understands words and meanings, and offers that understanding in the way he speaks. It has a confidence to it, yet humility runs alongside so as to not make the listener think they are being schooled, and I think that’s hard to achieve. These may be the traits of an experienced teacher. which he is.

For another analysis, and just to show I take the negative as being of as much value as the positive, I will state what another of my readers thought and told me…. Rambling, too long easing out points already made, stick to essay style… and that was my dad, whose judgement I also value.

Paul S Wilson