Don't know why, but I've often thought about lying.
Not a specific act, but the concept itself. In particular, one question has percolated in my head over the years; What is the most effective kind of lie.
I've come up with many answers, lies that contain a hint of truth, lies that are mostly true, lies that are 100% true, but imply falsehood... (you may notice a pattern, lol)
All good answers, but there's one particular genre of lie that beats them all:
The lie you tell yourself.
Think about it folks, who can lie to you more effectively, more enticingly, who knows what you want to hear to believe something better than you yourself?
Obviously self deception is dangerous in and of itself, but once you've convinced yourself of a falsehood, it becomes easier to convince others, because the sincerity of your words compels others to believe what you say is true.
Something to chew on.
You will never be a real woman.
You have no womb, you have no ovaries, you have no eggs. You are a homosexual man twisted by drugs and surgery into a crude mockery of nature’s perfection.
All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your parents are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “friends” laugh at your ghoulish appearance behind closed doors.
Men are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed men to sniff out frauds with incredible efficiency. Even trannies who “pass” look uncanny and unnatural to a man. Your bone structure is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk guy home with you, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your diseased, infected axe wound.
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.
Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll buy a rope, tie a noose, put it around your neck, and plunge into the cold abyss. Your parents will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll bury you with a headstone marked with your birth name, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a man is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton that is unmistakably male.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.
fascinating.
...but what does any of that have to do with the price of tea in china? lol
it's out of place, but it's an old copypasta about the transgender craze.
Differentiating here for clarity, but I'm not crapping on people with gender dismorphia or intersex conditions, in fact I'm close to somebody who falls in the latter camp, but let's be honest, there's a lot of transtrenders and marxist cultists who push these things for their own benefit as well...
The would be lier.
If you recently got a girlfriend that would explain why you're thinking about lying. They lie a lot and you got to be a step ahead
"Can't bullshit a bullshitter."
nah, lmao.
This goes back to the early to thousands for me.
...plus over the last 8 years, i've started paying attention to politics, so that might play a role.😁
Politics will definitely increase that jaded feeling
Not exactly what I mean, but when you absorb a lot of political content, the concept of lies and deception is definitely on your mind, and I guess my brain just started to get curious about it.
aside from the morality of it, the concept is definitely fascinating to scrutinize.
Jerry, just remember. It's not a lie... if you believe it.
It's called root beer
It's so bubbly and coy
Just like the Federation.
No one is better at deceiving you than you, especially when you want to be deceived. Lots of people who are unhappy grasp for simple explanations and solutions as to why they're unhappy that confirm their suspicions, allay their fears, support their fantasies, or help them throw rocks at their perceived enemies. It's not my fault I'm miserable and failing at life, it's white supermacy's fault! Or it's patriarchy's fault! Or it's transphobia's fault! Or it's capitalism's fault! Or it's Donald Trump's fault! Or it's OP's fault!
We get manipulated because we get swept up in the stories we tell ourselves. Our minds naturally recognize patterns and fill in the blanks with our own experiences and biases, creating our own narrative that is extremely seductive. Confirmation bias kicks in, and pretty soon we can't tell the difference between the constructed narrative and reality. Or perhaps, we do not want to. Even if that lie is horrible, like "Neo-Nazis are everywhere and want to kill me". The more one becomes invested in this narrative, the more difficult it is to realize that it isn't real.
Combine this with an echo chamber that will give you a social reward for believing this lie--and a social punishment for speaking against it, and you've got one hell of a drug. Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you’re mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won’t be able to forget that you’re just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty? Join us and we will pretend it’s true for you if you will pretend it’s true for us.
You can’t be doing well if it seems like an improvement to base your life and your sense of self on an insane fantasy that you know is only a fantasy. But they keep doing it, because when the fantasy gets challenged, it threatens to send them back to whatever their lives were like before they latched onto this desperate alternative.
Thank you for confirming my bias on this issue, lol.
Jokes aside, I appreciate you expanding on what I said and hopefully making it more approachable to people less autistic than me. 😁
no arguments on the morality.
it's good to understand the mechanics, though, even if you avoid falsehood yourself, others do not.
Lies by omission. It's the media's bread and butter. The best deception aren't the lies they tell. It's the truths they don't.
That's a good argument. I'll have to chew on that one, thank you!
The first time I really chewed over this phenomenon is when I heard it said of Tony Blair, from politicians who knew him, that he was somebody who could convince himself of anything. When you combine this with a manipulative personality who selectively - even if unconsciously - picks the truths he wants to believe and pass on to others, you get a master manipulator.
This would still to some extent need to resonate with the other lies already told, take the flat earth conspiracy and theory, sure you could wholeheartedly believe in it, but in order to convince other they need to start with not having any idea, or a very poor theory of their own idea, or the classic cult tactic of having their theory not being reinforced in their own surroundings.
Which is why I would argue the best lies are not the individual ones, but the ones you get an entire group to agree, since once that has been entrenched the computation to change is very low, and too costly to be done.
Or am just answering the wrong queries, haha
Lying is just about the dumbest thing a person can do, in a general sense. The real world has an infinite depth, so as long as one remains earnest and honest there is no limit to how far they can take things. Start lying, however, and you'll end up 'locked' in place, incapable of moving on to anything else because you're too busy maintaining your lies.
I'm strongly suspicious that human society encourages lying so strongly specifically because it needs people to remain stationary in order to continue it's functions, as things currently are. Take the entertainment industry for example, where the most charismatic of our entire population are lavished with fame, fortune and every luxury money can buy... in exchange for lying constantly to maintain a false image of who they are.
well, societies are built on a foundation of stability, so that's possible. Dunno if it's true though.
Our current social model demands that people take on roles which are antagonistic to reality, placing people in a pyramid shaped order with no guarantee that those who hold any particular position are actually suited for the role, yet they still must maintain their position or society would collapse. Such is how nepotism corrupts and degrades social order.
hey, no arguments there.
Never lie to yourself. You can't figure out any problem without the truth, it's why so many of our enemies sew confusion and projection. You can't solve a problem if you don't even know what the problem is.
very true.
sidenote: it's also true that often the truth hurts worse than a lie.
If you're truly convinced of it you're not lying. You're "just" spreading false information. But yes if you truly believe what you're saying it is indeed easier to convince others of your beliefs.
But if we take for example transgenders most of them don't truly believe what they're saying. They know something is seriously wrong. They try to convince themselves but are failing at it. That is why they're so extremely defensive and fanatical about it. That's why they demand constant validation from their surroundings.
I hope I don't come off like a dick here, but that seems like more of a semantic argument than a useful one. either way, you're still deceiving yourself, whether or not your deception is successful.
To deceive yourself you need to be at least subconsciously aware of the deception. A child that has been told by its parent that Santa is real, is it deceiving itself? No. It just doesn't know any better. Is an individual who was taught to believe in God and truly does so deceiving themselves? Again, no. Otherwise any belief or even feeling/instinct you have that you can't 100% verify would be a self-deception.
It is a pretty important distinction. Deception and lies are deliberate efforts. Not necessarily entirely consciously deliberate but at least subconsciously. If you don't know any better you can't deceive yourself.
If you know or feel that something is wrong, if you blame others for things you yourself are to blame because you're scared of the consequences or it simply hurts too much to take responsibility then you are deceiving yourself. For example individuals who blame the opposite gender for their own poor choices. I don't constantly choose a terrible partner, no it's just that all men/women are terrible.
interesting approach.
oh, I wasn't being critical. I'd never thought about it that way is all.
it's something to ponder is what I'm saying.