19/12/2023
Published in
El Diario Montañés and El Comercio
Gerardo Castillo
School of Education and Psychology of the University of Navarra
When a liar is discovered, he tries to confuse the person who discovered him by claiming, for example, that there were no lies, but rather changes of opinion.
Lying no longer carries the stigma it once did and is now socially validated, especially in the field of politics. But that cannot prevent it from being and remaining a moral anti-value. The root of the current tolerance of lies is the new nihilism of the 21st century, which annuls the distinction between truth and lies. In post-truth or emotive lying, emotions take precedence over objective facts: the appearance of truth is for some more important than the truth itself.
Alfonso López Quintás, Full Professor of Philosophy of the Complutense University of Madrid, affirms that nowadays lying is considered profitable, as it allows one to get out of certain predicaments and to set up effective strategies to win without the need to convince. If you go ahead with the truth, you will not get far; on the other hand, lying is a success resource .
The current 'culture' of lying is favoring mythonomy, which is the addiction of people to lie compulsively. The mythomaniac's main source of his lies is narcissism, which is a cover for his insecurities. The compulsive liar builds his own identity with the training of the lies he tells and repeats.
Some symptoms of the pathological compulsive liar are: the involuntary smile produced by the pleasure produced by a successful lie; he is not able to hold his gaze; he uses too many words in an attempt to be credible; he brags about himself; and he has a permanent need to be admired.
Lies stimulate the mythomaniac and provide him/her with a shield to protect him/her from uncomfortable realities. In spite of this, anxiety is often part of the compulsive liar's life, as he or she is inordinately worried about being discovered. And when this happens, he/she tries to confuse and manipulate the person who discovered him/her, for example, claiming that there were no lies, but changes of opinion. In this case, an attempt is made to replace the lie with the rectification of an error.
Lying is a conscious and liberated act, but it does not have to be intentional, since there is unconscious lying, which is intimately related to self-deception, lying to oneself. It is due to a process of incorrect reasoning, according to which the interpretation of an event is distorted to protect oneself from an unpleasant reality that one does not want to assume.
Conscious lying causes serious harm to both the liar and the deceived. It harms the liar in the sense that it seriously alters his sense of reality, and causes him to gradually lose the ability to differentiate between what is true and what is false, and he ends up believing his own lies. The most direct consequence arising from lying is the emotional damage it does to the deceived person. In addition, he or she is induced to make decisions that he or she would never have made.
Faced with the 'culture' of lies, it is urgent promote the 'culture' of truth. It may be objected that this proposal is unrealistic, because what chance does it have if truth continues to be irrelevant and ignored by some politicians and intellectuals? Or worse: the difficulty of counteracting the relativistic mentality of our time, which affirms that truth is relative and denies the existence of absolute truths. But if this is so, such an affirmation refutes itself.
Michael Lynch, professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, argues that truth does matter, both in life staff and in political life. He explains that the growing cynicism about truth stems in large part from our confusion about what it is. "We need to overcome our confusion and shed our cynicism about the value of truth."
Truth is a value linked to honesty, which implies the attitude of maintaining truthfulness in words and actions at all times. The family and the school should foster the love of truth from an early age, both through teaching and by example. Love of truth makes healthy coexistence possible and is a condition for any other love.