We get used to lying - Cinema

I don’t know how to define what the truth is. Is the truth the same for everyone? I guess it is not. For if it was then we would all have the same beliefs, even the same foundations to the way we think and interpret things. But because there is no one truth, and no one sense of what is right for all, I don’t know how to interpret truth and compare it with falsity. If there is no one truth, then how do we know when someone is lying? How do we brand something as this big fat lie that someone just said? Surprisingly, when we interact socially we always find that truth stands out as this beacon of light for everyone to follow. Everyone claims and stands by the ‘spirit’ of things and so the binary of truth and falsity sprouts and bears fruit.

Now let me try and analyze both truths and lies in the perspective of complete objectivity. The absence of subjective evolution and individual perception should perhaps make truth and lies possible, and even applicable to more than one individual at one time. Firstly, do we need universal truths, do we need these benchmarks of evaluation to be able to survive in this world. What is this need to continue to want to be told that you are in the right and when there is the right on one side, there will have to be a corresponding wrong. That wrong, that lie makes it possible for the truth sayers to take pride and tell themselves that they are just that, right. So in essence does truth stem from a need to satisfy your ego? Doesn’t it feel like we need truths for ourselves to be able to live and tell ourselves that we are on the right side of the spectrum? But did the first falsity come from the truth, did we make it up to side step something. I ask this, because I always attribute human emotion to the distinction between falsity and truth. When someone feels strongly about something, when there is a passion that drives a feeling that for majority of us is a dominant sign of truth, or at least claimed truth. And then the problem of truth being claimed by a few in opposition to others. If one set of people don’t disagree with other on a certain aspect of what is truth and what is not, there would be no debate and everyone would be in agreement. At the complete risk of going onto another tangent, I sometimes even attribute truth or any sense thereof to the human need to disagree or make everyone agree to what one thinks. There is an essential need that is served when people agree with us, there is a boost to the ego, self esteem of who we identify as people when someone or just people in general tend to be in agreement with us. We find that we feel good about ourselves by being made to feel that what we think is acceptable to many others outside the scope of just our thinking.

Now we move to the contradictory emotion to truth. Why is it that we feel that falsity is the easy way out, do we not give people enough credit even if that means they will disagree with us? Do we not judge wrongly if we think that people may disagree, yet understand our point of view? More so given that truth is such a figment of an individual’s imagination, we would be ok to have that challenged by the figment of someone else’s imagination, which is just not what we hold, yet rooted in similar emotions and justifications. So every lie finds similarity with truth in more ways than we can imagine.

When I hear someone say that people lie all the time, I want to say people don’t tell lies at all, there is very little distinction between lies and truths that it is close to impossible to distinguish between the two and we are stuck with not being able to distinguish and stay with what we feel comfortable in. We never usually worry about consequences of either the lie or the truth and thus stick with what we think. Once we stop distinguishing between the two, there is little possibility of being able to find truth, say the truth and Not get used to lying.