Lying Read Free Page A

reassuring your friend about her appearance, you are not helping her to do what you think she shoulddo to get what she wants out of life.

    There are many circumstances in life in which false encouragement can be very costly to another person. Imagine that you have a friend who has spent years striving unsuccessfully to build a career as an actor. Many fine actors struggle in this way, of course, but in your friend’s case the reason seems self-evident: He is a terrible actor. In fact, you happen to know that his other friends—and even his parents—share this opinion but cannot bring themselves to express it.  What do you say the next time he complains about his stalled career? Do you encourage him to “just keep at it”? False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.

    This is not to say that we are always correct in our judgments of other people. And honesty demands that we communicate any uncertainty we may feel about the relevance of our own opinions. But if we are convinced that a friend has taken a wrong turn in life, it is no sign of friendship to simply smile and wave him onward.

    If the truth itself is painful to tell, there are often background truths that are not—and these can be communicated as well, deepening the friendship. In the two examples above, the more basic truth is that you love your friends and want them to be happy, and both of them could make changes in their lives that might lead to greater fulfillment. In lying to them, you are not only declining to help them—you are denying them useful information and setting them up for future disappointment. Yet the temptation to lie in these circumstances can be overwhelming.

    When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world. This is an extraordinary stance to adopt toward other human beings, and it requires justification. Unless someone is suicidal or otherwise on the brink, deciding how much he can know about himself seems the quintessence of arrogance. What attitude could be more disrespectful of those we care about?

    While preparing to write this book, I asked friends and readers for examples of lies that had affected them. Some of their stories appear below. I have changed all names to protect the innocent and the guilty alike.

    Many people shared stories of family members who deceived one another about medical diagnoses. Here is one:

My mother was diagnosed with MS when she was in her late 30s. Her doctor thought it was best to lie and tell her that she didn’t have MS. He told my father the truth. My father decided to keep the truth to himself because he didn’t want to upset my mother or any of their 3 children.

Meanwhile, my mother went to the library, read up on her symptoms, and diagnosed herself with MS. She decided not to tell my father or their children because she didn’t want to upset anyone.

One year later, when she went to the doctor for her annual checkup, the doctor told her she had MS. She confessed that she knew but hadn’t told anyone. My dad confessed that he knew but hadn’t told anyone. So they each spent a year with a secret and without each other’s support.

My brother found out accidentally about a year later, when my mother had breast cancer surgery. The surgeon walked into the room and essentially said, “This won’t affect the MS.” My brother said, “What MS?” I think it was a couple more years before anyone told me or my sister about Mom’s MS….Rather than feeling grateful and protected, I felt sadness that we hadn’t come together as a family to face her illness and support each other.

My mother never told her mother about the MS, which meant that none of us could tell friends and family, for fear that her mother would find out. She didn’t