It’s operative to be deceptive and it’s human to lie but it should only be done astutely with strategy. As a trained and professional deceiver, this is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned from the trade:
It doesn’t matter why you need to lie, as long as you do NEED to. So when you do lie, make sure it’s necessary. Make sure the truth won’t be as advantageous as the lie, because if it is, the lie is unnecessary.
It’s not about morality, it’s about efficiency and effectiveness in your communicational skillset.
A single lie has immense potential. It’s potential power can die as soon as it’s been fabricated or it can grow, expand and multiply into a an unstable and uncontrollable force of nature.
Lies have a tendency to not be able to survive on its own, it needs to be supported by more lies for the initial lie to [seemingly] seem viable. And those lies that support the initial lie may need their own supporting lies to keep up viability, and so on.
This is the cascading effect of sloppy deception.
The truth, even if recollection is hazy and distorted, is comfortable, stable and self contained as a sort of single unit of information. It can survive on its own, not needing a “house of cards” of supporting information to stand on to be viable.
Lies require imagination and imagination is relatively hard.
Conscious lying also makes our body language and facial ticks betray us, not to mention emotional responses.
Truth requires recollection and recollection is easier than easy, it just is.
Recalling actual memory is fluid, natural and keeps body systems neutral.
So if you do need to lie, first make sure the truth won’t be as beneficial for whatever purpose you require.
And if a lie does seem necessary, try to make it about something you already know like a subject or interest that you’re already familiar with.
Try not to be too creative and expansive, as these two things create the potential for the lie be more difficult to keep up.
It doesn’t matter if it’s for something big or small, each and every lie we tell will position itself into the person or persons memory that we tell it to – ready to backfire on you the moment somethings off.
When this happens, the person you lied to often remembers your lie better than you because it originally registered in the mind as fact. They didn’t have to use imagination to fabricate a story like you did.
Something that actually happened (fact) naturally integrates into our memory. Whereas the details of a creative invention of something false tends to dissipate from our memory like a fading dream.
For a lie to work and withstand scrutiny, it has to be in a sense, “real”.
Every lie we tell has to become true, in one way or another.
First by convincing the person in the first place, then later on with another lie(s) to support it. At worst you may need to change both intangible and tangible elements of the physical world to further make that lie to be “true”.
The art of deception is powerful but it’s a double edged sword and it’s very sharp.
Lying is easy, supporting it is not. Only lie as a necessity.
[The featured photo was taken in Panjshir, Afghanistan.]
