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"It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar", Jerome K. Jerome said in 1892. The fact is: we are all hardcore liars and we are all pretty good at it. We do it out of necessity. We tell about 20 to 30 lies a day in order to augment the dreary reality. It is our way of surviving, and survival surpasses morality. Everyone lies and those who seem never to lie are just better at concealing it than others. In fact the more you lie, the better you become. There is a lot more to lying than just distorting the truth. The people you most respect and would never suspect, are the biggest liars, because they are specialized in the full-size lies and are very careful not to lie about modest things that can be checked easily.
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You are a liar too. Test yourself.
- Do you cheat on your Income Tax Return?
- Do you compliment people when you really don’t mean it?
- Do you tell your spouse to tell callers you are not at home when you there?
- Do you tell "little white lies" if it will keep you out of trouble?
- Do you tell creditors that "the check is in the mail" when you have not yet mailed it?
- Did you ever promise to call back the day after with no intention to do so?
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There are those who argue against lying, certainly in business. You have to be an honest businessman. I am afraid those days –if they ever existed- are long gone. I cannot help thinking that the proponents of this school of thought have probably never set up a business. Do they really think that when you start something new that people are waiting for it ? Humanity is a herd. A herd survives because it keeps doing the same things over and over again. The herd does not experiment. The herd attacks everything that is alien to its habits.
Just suppose somebody comes into your office and after a good conversation when you are ready to buy the service or the product the guy says:
“You will be my first customer.”
Brrr…I bet you shiver.
And just suppose he goes on to tell you the truth like an honest business man would.
“I do not really know how I am going to deliver the service but I will learn.”
“ I have no team yet but I will hire them.. I have no equipment but I am sure somebody out there will lease this to me.
When the bank gives me a credit line, - which I hope they will.
“None of your competitors wanted to work with me because they didn’t think I would last more than two moths. But you sir, you are a visionary. “
“It will be you and me against the rest of the world. I will never forget what you did for me. Thank you for your confidence.” Please sign here on the bottom left.”
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Where do babies come from?
Hunter-gatherer society : the birds and the bees
Agricultural society : they grow in fields (in cauliflowers)
Industrial society : we buy babies in a shop
Digital society : we download babies from the internet
What happens when we die?
Hunter-gatherer : we go to the eternal hunting fields in the sky (God is in the sky)
Agricultural : we come from the earth, we go back in the earth (God is in the ground)
Industrial society : we are shipped to heaven (God is retired like us in heaven)
Digital society : we are being uninstalled (God is in the machine)
What do we die from?
Hunter-gatherer : a wound
Agricultural : decay
Industrial society : deficiency (worn out)
Digital society : upgrade fever
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| That is how businesses are set up. They are created out of nothing, based on a dream, three incomplete spreadsheets and a strategy at the back of a beer chart. Everyone suspects this, but no-one wants to hear it, they prefer the lies.
When someone gives a PowerPoint presentation ask him to give you the slides afterwards. Seventy percent will tell you that they will mail them you, but they never will. Because there are lies in them. That is why.
Luckily in America there is now an antidote, a sort of liar’s vaccine, invented by lawyers. It is called a ‘disclaimer’. Many private placement memorandums (PPMs) now start out with twenty pages of disclaimers saying all sort of frightful things about the company you are about to invest in and the outrageous guy who is running it. After these pages, the rest is all lies. First scare the hell out of people with big lies and then do little ones. First disclose that you are a liar and then lie.
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THREE BIGGEST LIES IN THE WORLD
- Love you too
- Being rich does not make happy
- I am thinking about nothing in particular
- We are from the government and we have come to help you
- The cheque is in the mail
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But the question remains. Why do we lie? Why is it existentially imperative for us to purposely distort the truth? Jack Nicholson shouted it in A Few Good Man and got the Oscar for it: “We can’t handle the truth.” The truth is that nothing ever happens in our lives. We live a life of mediocrity far from our childhood fantasies. We still feel a bit lost after our parents past away. Other people seem to be having the big adventures and the pleasant lives and we are stuck with money worries and small town nuisances. We could have been so much more than we are today and now it is too late. We have come to accept that we are finite beings in an infinite universe, just intelligent enough to reflect on our own mortality, which is always closing in on us. All our lives we pursue a party that seems to be going on somewhere else. And once we’re gone, there will be nothing left, no-one present to evoke us, because we did not sufficiently change the world in order to be recorded in annals of history. But when we were eighteen, we said we would.
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SOME CHURCH FATHERS THINK LYING IS OK.
St Augustine distinguishes between three lies
• Injurious (bad, harmful)
• Officious (not bad, white lie, harmless)
• Jocose (not bad, joke)
- Aristotle (Ethics): never allowed to tell a lie
- Plato (Republic) allows doctors and politicians to lie
- Modern philosophers deny that there is such a thing as absolute truth
- Lies are measured by the effect on society
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