To Lie or Not to Lie
In the first episode of the sci-fi series Dune: Prophecy, a character teaching a class about the human mind explains that humanity’s greatest weapon is the lie. “Human beings rely on lies to survive,” she lectures. As the show continues, a central theme emerges: because humans are willing to deceive, they are unreliable and therefore unpredictable. This unpredictability creates the opportunity to take advantage of others, to catch them off guard, unprepared.
Nothing new here, you might say. The human proclivity for deceit in the service of power over others echoes down through history.
From a biblical point of view, human nature is certainly given to deceit, is perverse and is hard to fathom. One of the Hebrew prophets said as much: “The human mind is more deceitful than anything else. It is incurably bad. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9, New English Translation). A few centuries later nothing had changed; one of the Gospels records Jesus’ teaching that deceit is one of the traits that defiles us (Mark 7:21–23).
Perhaps that defiling deepens because lying has a progressive aspect. One lie leads to another, eventually becoming entrenched behavior. And worse, when a persistent liar tells the truth, he may not be believed. Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and the main author of its Declaration of Independence, wisely wrote: “He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.”
Was Jefferson speaking only of politics? Likely not, though it seems that in political life especially, the lie is common currency. To get into power, many promises are made that are never intended to be kept; they are falsehoods from the get-go.
“When you tell the truth, justice is done, but lies lead to injustice.”
People lie out of pride; to gain power, status, prestige, wealth; to avoid insecurity; to gain what is not theirs; to cover their deceits. With all of these possibilities, can any human relationship flourish for long when lying becomes common practice?
Another well-known prophet lamented the condition of his society when he wrote about the fate of truth and the troubling consequences. He said, “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off; for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. So truth fails, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey” (Isaiah 59:14–15). When honesty in human dealings is eroded and eventually no one can trust anyone, then justice cannot be achieved, right ways of acting are a distant dream, and fairness is shut out. Society is close to collapsing.
A 2013 model describes how global industrial civilization can fail in five descending stages. Russian American engineer Dmitry Orlov lists them as financial, commercial, political, social and cultural. At the fifth and final stage, “faith in the goodness of humanity is lost.” People, Orlov writes, lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.” In other words, deceit prevails, and so much that depends on trust, truth and honesty collapses along with the whole social structure.
According to the teacher in the sci-fi series we referenced earlier, humanity’s greatest weapon is the lie. But it would be more accurate to say it’s one of humanity’s greatest existential threats. What can we do to avoid the collapse Orlov envisions? Ancient wisdom tells us that spiritual renewal reverses the perversity of human nature. Yet another Hebrew prophet, Zechariah, put it this way: “These are the things you shall do: speak each man the truth to his neighbor; give judgment in your gates for truth, justice, and peace; let none of you think evil in your heart against your neighbor; and do not love a false oath” (Zechariah 8:16–17).
What a different world it would be.