Weekend Engagement - Lies and Truth

Ever thought of losing the ability to lie or having to believe in everything you've heard? And if we are able to choose what will your choice?

This is one interesting topic filled with dilemma. There are just so many quotes out there about truth and lies.

Losing The Ability to Lie
By losing this ability, we gained honesty which is an amazing virtue to have and well accepted by the masses. The good that it brings comes in stronger relationships due to improved trust and easier open communication. People will know that the can come to you for truth.

However this is not so simple, losing the ability to lie can lead to issues in the following areas:

1. Awkward and uncomfortable instances where delivering the truth with regards to something sensitive or personal
2. Hurtful truths that may sound lacking in empathy or compassion
3. Business negotiation becomes difficult as certain information needs to be withheld for competitive advantage
4. Invasion of personal space when certain private things about you that you do not wish for people to dive into

Believing In Everything I am Told
This is the other end of the spectrum. If everything told to me are truths, it will be good as I will know about things as they are, but again, some truths do hurt like I mentioned above.

Believing in everything also have its own implications such as:

1. Being fed false or misinformation, this will lead to bad consequences such as poor decision making, bad judgement or even lead to misunderstanding.
2. When we consistently believe in what we are told, we will slowly lose the ability to discern, since everything is deem are truth.
3. Ease of manipulation sets in, because we believe in everything, people will seed bad ideas, false truth and other malicious intent into us, helping them to achieve their goals through us.
4. Next will be the lack of question or evaluation. When everything is already deem true, we will forgo questioning or even evaluate if things are really the way it is supposed to be, it also robs us of our inquisitiveness to discover new knowledge. E.g Isaac Newton will probably just assumed the apple is destined to hit him without further questioning why it hit him and we will never discover the laws of gravity.
5. We become robots. If everything is believed to be true, we are merely a bunch of robots being given commands to do things. There is no self in this when we just believe what we are told.

Closing - What Should We Do?
To me, we should not go to either extreme as they each bring about consequences which I've discussed above. Striking a balance between honesty and discernment is crucial in interactions amongst people, and that's why we develop critical thinking skills to assess the validity of the information they encounter, how to handle it and how much to reveal/share.

I am no expert but I would like to share some simple tips based on my preference of handling the matter of lies and truth.

1. Tell yourself nothing but the truth
   This is the starting point, if we want things to work, we tell ourselves nothing but the truth. But beware of denial setting in whenever we do not want to face setbacks or trauma.

2. Tell you loved ones as much truth as you can
   These are the people that are closest to you. You need their trust and they need yours. If we keep lying to these people, they will just distant themselves from us. Lying is actually giving up the chance to be genuinely known, understood, and loved as who we are.

3. For acquaintance, tell them enough to maintain the connection
   These people are those whom you come across in your walk of life, can be colleagues, classmates, your hairdresser etc. These might not be the people that you want diving into your private life, so sufficiently sharing with them will help maintain a comfortable distance. An approach can be telling a bit at a time instead of vomiting everything out, so that you have a chance to evaluate if you should share more.

4. Evaluate the situation/sensitivity/need before sharing
   If it is going to be sensitive or personal or even hurting, need to put in more thoughts on how to deliver the truth or if it is not pressing to share the truth, can just keep the comments to ourselves.

5. Verify and check the sources of information
   This is something that some people don't do and things start spreading like wildfire because they are bought in with what they are told and share with the world what they have been told.

6. Be open minded
   Keep the scepticism but do not shut other comments at the doorway, give chance to evaluate and digest. It could something that we ourselves need to change

7. Stay informed and seek diverse perspectives
   Keep ourselves up to date with information and also validate information with various people to gain a variety of viewpoint to issues so that we will not believe wrongly when misinformation is shared to us.

The truth will set us free but some truths need to be handled with care to prevent "truth hurts" situation.

Thank you for dropping by and I wish all of you a blessed weekend!