Everyday Canvas

Lying and Its Other Version

Imagine listening to someone while you know for sure what he or she is saying is a lie. Doesn’t that make you furious inside, even if for one reason or another, you don’t make him or her face the lie? And isn’t it true that the vehicle for lies is mostly language?

Our subconscious lives on truth and knows very well that language is power; therefore language should be used for good and no good comes out of lies, even if it is the white lies we tell to save face or spare the moment. It is common practice to only say the parts of the truth that may be acceptable or to say what we think people want to hear, leaving the full truth hidden away. This draws a very different picture of reality, doesn’t it?

By that I don’t mean to say one should offer the truth haphazardly if the truth puts another person's life in danger. Case in point, a psychiatric patient may not handle a heavy truth, and his therapist may choose to make the patient face that truth when more therapy gets him ready for that. Otherwise, the patient may do away with himself. On the other hand, most healthy people do better when facing the truth and prefer it to the white lies that almost all of us tell once in a while.

Then, there is another type of lying that doesn’t use language. It is silence, for silence can become the vehicle for the suppression of any idea or action.

Up to about a century ago, women could not vote. Why? Was it because they were being mollycoddled or because they were considered not to have enough brains as men? During their mere struggle for survival, most women even bought into the idea of being lesser than men, while others drove the idea inward to fester like a tumor, until the time arrived for surgical intervention. To those who missed seeing that intervention, let me tell you, even the later phases of it weren’t pretty.

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence,” said Robert Louis Stevenson. If you saw a neighbor abusing a child, wouldn’t you have wanted to do something about it, before the reporting it became acceptable and even a law? Yet, decades ago, such abuse and others like it met with the silence of those who witnessed the abuse. Isn’t that kind of a silence a bigger lie than the lies put in words?

When truth is replaced by silence, that silence is a lie. When I am doing something wrong, I expect a true friend to tell me about it. When I finally face the truth about me and find out that my friend kept silent, I am more bound to think that she doesn’t care about me and is only pretending we have a friendship; as a result, I would feel isolated and rejected.

About four decades ago, someone I was going to sign a contract with omitted to tell me an important background problem regarding the issue, probably thinking—if I knew the truth—I wouldn’t do business with him. He said later, chances were I would never find out the truth as it didn’t have anything to do with the present issue. That was some rationalization on his part. Should he have not kept silent about it, I would probably still sign the contract. The truth behind his silence would possibly keep some people away, yes, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me. Unfortunately, his silence did matter, and luckily I found out just before notarization, and never did business with him again. Why would I have anything to do with a liar?

Truth doesn’t have many versions to it, but lies do. This is what we should always keep in mind.

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Prompt: “Lying is done with words, and also with silence,” says Adrienne Rich. What does this quote say to you? If you so wish, you may offer your experiences on the subject.