Home Truths With Prince Charles Dickson
Why Do We Lie?
He who tells a lie is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one. Alexander Pope
A man called home to his wife and said. 'Honey I have been asked to go camping up in Obudu and we may be going fishing too with my boss and several of his friends, We 'll be gone for a week.
This is a good opportunity for me to get that promotion I have been wanting, so could you please pack enough Clothes for a week and set out my personals and box, we're leaving from the office and I will swing by the house to pick my things up" "Oh! Please pack my new blue silk pajamas."
The wife thinks this sounds a bit fishy but being the good wife she is, did exactly what her husband asked.
The following weekend he came home a little tired but otherwise looking good. The wife welcomed him home and asked if he caught many fish? He said, "Yes! Lots of Salmon, some Bluegill, and a few Swordfish. But why didn't you pack my new blue silk pajamas like I asked you to do?"
With that short take, this weekend I want to talk to us about lie, lies and falsehood, put succinctly, why do we lie? Just the other I watched as someone in my front at a store in Area 10 in Abuja tell someone on the other end of the phone that she was in Port Harcourt, in my mind I said sure, that must be Area 50 part of Abuja. Bless the man who invented the GSM, which has added a new dimension to it all, from what the Catholics call white lie, to the very big lie.
From the lies we tell our wives, to the ones we tell our kids, to the ones we tell our colleagues, we lie to our bosses, we lie painfully to ourselves, in turn our leaders lie to us invariably a circle of lies.
The age old axiom is that for every lie, we need another to cover the first one, and to this I add that the truth, off course, is that a billion lies told a billion times by a billion people is still a lie. That is why the promises of a better Nigeria remains an illusion because they promises are largely founded upon falsehood.
Our leaders lie to us about electricity, water, infrastructural development, health care and what all these promises remain are ‘lies’. The truth that they do not tell us is that they will steal, loot, corruptly enrich themselves and so therefore what we have at the start of the race is a case of starting a lie and a truth together, like hare and hound: the lie will run fast and smooth, and no man will ever turn it aside; but at the truth most hands will fling a stone, and so hinder it for sport's sake, if they can, and one can only say, what a circle.
When a society is founded on falsehood, what we have despite the variations would not be far from a society full of artifice, calumny, deceit, deception, dishonesty, equivocation, error, fallacy, hypocrisy, pretension, slander, and sophistry. Sadly these we have in abundance, we do not make much of an effort in changing the trend.
I was once told that one who lies, would steal, would kill, it is all about the stakes, it is about what the cover-up is. A lie is one of the first signs of cowardice, small or big when told we pollute the air, we ventilate the atmosphere with falsehood.
Our good morning becomes suspect, because we lie, and it is easily amusing because we equally claim to be very religious people, but then take it away from us and then its like a bone off our neck. Muslims lie when the miss one of their five daily prayers, Christians lie when caught sleeping in the church, and say they are meditating.
Our lies vary, but they are all lies, irrespective of how, when, where and even the magnitude of which they are told. Lies hurt, I have always recommended truth as the antidote, on the extreme where you think a person cannot handle the truth, keep quiet.
As a person, family, people and a nation we have done irreparable damage to ourselves, and our nation as a result of the lies and falsehoods we have perpetuated.
Can I have a N100.00? No, I swear I do not have and indeed we have a N1000 in the pocket, another N5000 in the wallet. We lie because of greed, because of a lack in self confidence, we lie because we are scared, the reasons are plenty but either one it is a lie.
Have I lied before, hmmm, have you lied before, how many times have we lied and then also gone on to be on the defensive? Even in primary sociology of values there have been arguments that one could lie to save a person. On this premise many times we have lied and justified it by saying that we had too.
Like the man in our story, did he lie, did he need to lie, play the script and wonder what that seemingly harmless promotion vacation could do to a family in the long term.
Imagine that the remaining months of the year, you would not tell one single lie, what a ‘lie-less’ and love-filled life you did live, and then contend with the scenario that you pay a N100 for every lie you told, how rich you did be. Each time you lie again, I am watching, and each time I do, a greater Being is watching and HE sees us. Let us make a promise to ourselves that truth will prevail.
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