[13 min read]
Generally, we lie. Usually, we don’t know everything. And life can tell one that this seems not to be a bad behavior.
The first time when we don’t know something or not for sure, we try to find our very personal way of understanding the world. Over time, we may tweak it further – and because we fear to disgrace ourselves in the eyes of others, it might become very difficult. We pretend something that might not happen, might be untrue, or we simply bet. We start lying – because we think that’s correct what we have in mind, or it might be by purpose or by intention, or whatever this might be for. We rather don’t argue about the issues and perhaps me here as well.
Why not lie ?
Since nobody knows everything, we can safely pretend that at least some lies never come to light: the others even don’t know everything and there might be a good chance that it will not become public that we lied. Others do it also and so we are in a community of liers. This is about our stories that might have happened the way we tell it, or might be only our specific view, even without adding or skipping something. But we figure out very early in our lives that some things pay off: smiling to the parents usually draws a smile onto their faces too. This helps even in situations when there is nothing to smile about: you did something wrong and you earned scolding – if a child then starts smiling, caring parents will also start smiling, no matter what the origin of this shouting was. Lessons learned: you can smile things away, at least, consequences. Our ego could accept that something was wrong – but if you’ve got no real indication this might draw the clue that the overall impact was not that important and it was just ok for the rest. Driving this forward, our overall result is: people love you because you are so successful – even when they know that you cheated. But because the relationship with somebody that is successful makes you successful as well in others eyes, it’s the reason to start lying to yourselves even in this regard. You create your own additional view to the world – at least simply by pretending that it will work and others are simply too dumb to do the same. You start ignoring it and the pattern goes on. As you can see, nobody is fortified from the start not to lie.
A challenge by nature
People just care about themselves first and not all the reasons are so clear – it might be for personal enrichment, maintaining our good feelings by fostering our relationships, or making us happy by helping others, or similar reasons to act in a way nobody else might really understand. But whether we achieve what we intended to achieve or not – we only will find out by doing so. A lot of the motivation for trying it out comes out of our own projections of the future – and a lot of lies to ourselves.
Business masters learn how to steer a company and make the right decisions to become successful. Successful personally or for the company – that might be another dimension. However, as an economist, people care a lot about how the overall economic behavior will change or about market directions. A business administrator instead usually focuses on the internal mechanisms. While the one predicts things out of the blue because the insights into complex market behaviors in the actual timeframe and with all the actual companies and people isn’t really possible, the other one tries to abstract from the complexity also but with a more narrow view and with more direct impact on the company. Both might give their best but with everything stated it’s just not something they can know for sure.
In sales, there is a saying: sellers lie. But what about the engineers and technicians ? They could lie but it would reveal very quickly to be not the truth if somebody else isn’t able to work with the result … but still it even could be ok because things are complex and hard to understand, so mistakes can happen. Errors, bugs, and failed designs are usually called flaws and sometimes named even “features” as a negative tenor of such impacts. Since we cannot say “I don’t know it for sure” – at least, in complex systems – because we wouldn’t earn any money to feed ourselves and protect our children, the consequence is that we usually lie …. and don’t stay away from telling somebody something we don’t know for sure and say really that we don’t know it. It’s always that gray zone we live in and that we learned to live with.
People that need something, ask perhaps for help and it starts to be about buying and selling things. Since nobody on both sides, the buyer and the seller, can be completely sure about the outcome of their actions, it’s always a little bit about lying to each other. The grade of not telling the full story, perhaps because not knowing enough or not willing to tell the full truth as it’s known, is the thing when we start to recognize that the other one might cheat and we start to label it ‘lying’. But people need to interact with each other for economical reasons, and we need to exchange goods or services in order to be able to care about the family or ourselves. There might not always be a proper guidance by the vendors or by the sellers and things get blurry for us – but we need to decide on something to buy and we need to pretend to ourselves that this would be a good decision.
Is science serious ?
Seriously ?! That’s a good but offending question to everybody: it implies first of all that you are lying, and it implies – perhaps on the same level – that the other one thinks that one knows it better for sure. The latter usually is not given with regards to all the circumstances and models the assembly of our perception of the things was done with. However, seriously thinking about this question is something we could do for our whole lifetime. Since we cannot know everything and we cannot know even all the things to come, we’ll never be able to even understand whether we have been completely right: there will always be something we cannot judge about.
In science, we say to be very confident about the things respected and that we already know. Since we rarely discover all these things ourselves, we need to back ourselves with others. If there would be an infinite amount of man power and time available to somebody …. – before one dies, so actually it would never happen as far as we know – … this could nearly be the case but asymptotic only: at least, the universe changes at the same time and it would be hard to know it before it happened. The conclusion is that we need to believe in the things we got told by others.
But can we definitely rely on each other ? Since nobody can know everything, even the real accuracy of our findings, because we have only a very limited view to our world and need to abstract and by that leaving perhaps important things out of our judgment, there is no guarantee about the accuracy of other peoples tales: they need to tell a tale since there is no complete evidence.
With smaller amount of time and resources, the tales will be more bold perhaps but might be foundationally obscure: if it’s not really completely rechecked for ages with always the same result, the next wave of scientists will take those as a given and will base their own research on this – even with the result that they could not be certain about it. However, will they give up ? Perhaps, perhaps not: if they are unsuccessful, they perhaps won’t get additional resources to retry or to do other things – those resources that somebody decides about will go to the successful ones because it’s more pretending that they will deliver the “right” results.
So, what ?!
A hard decision is to be made and depending on the initial things about protecting ourselves and our children, this might be not that problematic for us personally: people might start to tweak and with the excuse that something is the result only within the given limitations, we might rather pretend to others to have been successful – in the favor of protecting ourselves and others. Money drives the behavior and since we have no other option than giving up on ourselves, we might apply the lessons learned from the past: be successful no matter how but don’t tell somebody about. And thus the things became strange in our history, already: we cannot survive if we have nothing to eat, and if we die we cannot be successful and help ourselves. So, let’s cheat when it’s not too obvious, if you don’t get killed by that, and there are still enough resources to go on. Sometimes, it might come to light and we might face consequences but these are rare occasions with a real impact, as we learned in the past. Rather, unforeseen things will happen that we cannot control but those might happen anyways. And thus, because of all this cheating and lying around us, it seems to be a viable approach. By the way, the things don’t apply to humans only: this behavior is inherited and is one of the tools that drove us into a certain direction and we became successful with that.
Do we really lie ?
Even, we do lie to ourselves, every day, perhaps: In the morning, we wake up and perhaps had a good intention to take a walk in the sunshine. We figured out quickly that it’s raining. So, no good chances to have a walk in the sun. Because we know that we haven’t got enough food at home but we are hungry, we start thinking about getting some – especially, very soon, because we are hungry. What to do ? Well, the easiest thing would be to go to the supermarket, just around the corner. But we know that it’s raining and we started the day in the mood of having a walk in the sun. Now, it might become a walk through the rain. But because of the circumstances we either pretend to ourselves that it’s not a big deal to have this short walk through the rain – and could add that it’s a good decision then to do so because we even move our body and that’s good -, or just we pretend to be not that hungry and we’d rather stay at home. Both are basically lies to ourselves and tweak our initial mood and our perception of the circumstances.
Going on, the lessons learned might be different until a certain time when this kind of cheating with ourselves is not successful in the meaning of protecting ourselves … and this is the time when we start to change our behavior and adapt to changed conditions. And since even under changed conditions not everything is solved magically, we use the usual tool to do the most convenient thing at this time: by ignoring the blockers and changing our perception of the world and perhaps influencing other’s chances.
Yes, and all these lies were economic in the way those served the purpose, in some way or the other but mainly for our personal success and wellbeing.
I understand !
No, you don’t ! It’s your perception and your model in your own head you pretend to understand or just claim to be able to understand, what your mind produced as the reflection of things you heard and perhaps also heard not completely. All the nuances and the things between the lines and body language, etc. ? I’m still pretty sure: you didn’t !