It's much easier to tell the truth

It really is. Once you start lying, you have to keep on lying. Sooner or later you will forget which particular lie you told to whom and you will suffer. Don't get it twisted, you WILL forget. Telling the truth is easy. There's only one way to tell it and it never changes.

To be a good liar you really have to work hard at it. You have to be a low-life sack of shit with no morals and enjoy swindling people just for the hell of it. I tried to be a good liar but it didn't work out for me. I'm not a quitter mind you, I just realized that I can't lie like rugs or most sales folk, that low-life sack of shit thing just wasn't me and I don't like mental or physical pain. The truth doesn't hurt as much as lying does and it saves so much time and effort.

If you are committed to telling the truth, go all the way baby! An omission is a LIE! There is no such thing as a good lie or a half-truth. A lie is a lie is a gosh darned lie!

If somebody asks you whether it was you who broke something, yeah, tell the truth regardless. That's one thing, but the "white lie" principle does indeed apply in other situations.

There are times when telling the unvarnished truth is senseless and destructive. For example, when new parents ask you if their baby is beautiful, yes, their baby is beautiful, however ugly it may be. Ugly babies are godawful rare in my experience, but it's been known to happen. When it does: You don't tell new parents that their baby is ugly.

This principle applies in lesser degree to almost all social situations. "Good manners" are mostly a matter of lubricating the interface between people with harmless bullshit. Your neighbors don't always need to know exactly what you think about them. It's much easier to get along well with most people if they and you don't know too much about each other. Where I work, every single one of the sales reps is in my opinion a hopeless gibbering idiot. Do they need to know that? No. I treat them with reasonable respect and consideration because they are co-workers, and that is how adults behave. They treat me the same way. What would be accomplished by my telling these people that I despise them? Nothing, absolutely nothing. We have enough real problems to deal with already. We don't need to invent new ones. Idiocy doesn't prevent sales reps from doing their jobs well; in fact, it seems to be an advantage. There is no problem there and I refuse to create one out of a misguided belief in radical honesty.

Radical honesty works only in cultures where people have so much spare time that they can afford to waste their entire lives sitting around "processing issues" and "getting in touch with their feelings" all day, every day. To me, that sounds like the very coldest circle of Hell. Fuck feelings, I've got work to do.

One of the messages spread by those commercials broadcast during G.I. Joe, brought to you by the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints. Pretty funny now that I look back on them. One of them featured a group of kids playing baseball when one of them hit a ball through a window. An older gentleman comes out of the house, looks down at the glass, and starts singing... opera style....

MAN: "Who broke my window?!"
BOY: "Telling the truth isn't gonna be easy!"
MAN: "Glass, everywhere you look!"
BOY: "Why does stomach feel nervous and queasy?"

Eventually, the boy fesses up, and the man tells him he has to pay for the window, but says "I'm proud of you, child." for telling the truth, which is the stuff from which heroes are made. Then, the kid shouts out "I TOLD THE TRUTH!", and the chorus follows with "HE TOLD THE TRUTH!".

Then there's another one where two kids are walking home, and the first kid says, "Yeah, I'll just tell my mom I'm studying with a friend and come right over." The two split up, and the kid opens the front door, but instead of being in his house, he finds himself in a dark alleyway surrounded by a bunch of dancers with flashlights who begin to sing...

"When you tell one lie, it leads to another
Then you tell two lies to cover each other
Then you tell three lies. Oh brother!
You're in trouble up to your ears."

With each line, they get closer and closer to the kid, until finally he bolts back out the door and runs smack into his mother. He hugs her tights and cries "I wasn't really studying I was going to Jimmy's house to play baseball I'll never lie again I promise!"

Apparently, these commercials were designed in some way to teach us not to lie. Instead, my friends and I just made fun of it.