Telling the Truth

Some people are of the opinion that we should always tell the truth; or, they at least think we should not lie (which means, of course, to sometimes avoid telling the truth instead of lying - a form of manipulation, however).

Would that be right? Should we always tell the truth?

There are reasons for acting so, and reasons against. Let's take a look at it.

A saying goes: "The truth always comes out sooner or later." Not telling something we know to be true and of great importance to another person (who trusts us), usually results in a big mess when, finally, it comes out.

Possible motives for not telling the truth are:

1) We did something wrong, either by mistake or because at the time it seemed the right thing to do, and we don't want the other person to know about this; we fear it would destroy our image of being honest, or even destroy our relationship. The other one might not understand our acting and might not trust us anymore. In this case, it is clear that our image does not match our acting: admitting our mistake would be the honest thing to do, not hiding it. Besides, this way trust could be built instead of destroyed. Any person who does not want or is not able to understand our (mistakenly) wrong doing might not be the right person for us to socialize with. Mistakes are normal; they are what helps us learning not only in technical matters, but with relationships as well. -- But if the mistake we made was so big as to end our relationship, we should face that; by lying or avoiding the truth, we will only make it worse. To tell our friend, or partner about our acting as soon as we realize it as having been wrong might be the only chance to save our relationship. (I leave parents out of this generalization, because they are a more difficult matter; the relation between parents and children is often messed up in a way that makes the subject of telling the truth a matter of who has power over whom.)

2) We came to know something that would hurt the other person deeply, and we don't want to tell it because we want to spare him/her the hurting. Why do we want this? It is clear that we don't want to hurt another one, at least I don't think anybody could want something like this, unless it is out of revenge, or out of some need to hurt back (which might nevertheless not be the right thing to do). But in this case the hurt would be caused not by us, but by a third person. Sparing our friend/partner/parent (whoever it is) to get hurt means certainly, we don't consider him/her able to deal with it.

Let's look at an example. Say, one of our old parents died. The other one isn't able to live on his/her own, and we have to sort things out - what can be kept, what has to be thrown away. Of course we come across personal things, too. That is where we find some letters from a love affair our dead parent had had some twenty years ago. We are sure, the other one doesn't know about this; and our parents, as far as we know, always had a kind and loving relationship. Are we going to tell about this? It wouldn't even be possible to say, the dead one was another person than we thought s/he was. There was just one part of his/her life that we didn't know of, and we might be hurt ourselves; but, would it alter his/her attitude towards us? Would it change the kind of respect we got? And if we weren't respected - has this anything to do with our remaining parent? What would s/he want? Would s/he want to know? Especially under the condition that the cheating person can't be confronted? -- These are all questions to be considered, and there may be a lot more.

Let's take another example: A good friend of mine lives in a partnership with a man. One day I see this man (who isn't aware of me being present) with another woman, holding hands and kissing. Am I going to tell my friend, although she will be hurt very badly? Well, I don't really know any context, although the woman certainly couldn't have been the man's sister. I could though say to myself: it is none of my business. Maybe it is not a long time he is together with a new woman and he just waits for a "good" time to tell his partner he wanted to leave her. He may not be looking forward to hurting her, either; and sometimes, it takes time. Who am I to interfere? I could make it worse. But then - he could be doing this some time already and not having any intentions for deciding between the women. Wouldn't my friend have the right to know this, then? But, if the man can "handle" this without being neglectful to one of them, would my telling probably do more harm than if I didn't tell? -- A basic question to all of this seems to me: what do I think about my friend? Do I consider her able to handle her life, which includes being hurt? And, would I be really able to go on with our friendship as if I really hadn't seen anything? What if she confides in me about some problems she has with her man? Should I wait until something like this happens, to tell her about his cheating? But then - if she finds out, finally, and also finds out that I happened to know all the time, the hurt I tried to spare her would be doubled because of me. Our relationship would be messed up and maybe over. Am I willing to take the risk? There is, of course, another way to handle this: I could confront the man. Should he indeed be cheating on my friend, I could give him the choice to tell my friend himself (he may, of course, lie to me).

There is one question we really have to ask ourselves: do we trust the other one to be able to deal with their hurting? Why would we spare them the reality of their own life? We may think children to be an exception: They may sometimes be too young for handling reality. But then again: Do we really think our child cannot deal with the fact, say, that a beloved aunt is in the hospital because of a serious illness she might die from? If the child is still too small to understand the concept of dying; so be it. But not telling him/her or acting as if nothing serious was the case although the atmosphere is filled with fear and hurt can't be a good idea; the child gets mixed feelings and doesn't know why, and we could only try to steal our way out of their questions. How are children supposed to learn to deal with hurt if not from real situations and circumstances?

But: Sometimes telling the truth is not a good idea, especially when it comes to administrational matters. There are unfair laws; and even if a law makes it possible to act in a good way, the administrator in charge can act otherwise. He or she may just be in a bad mood today, or have a resentment against people like you, or whatever. Unfair may not be any law as such, but the combination and/or the amount of laws or regulations we are supposed to know about. We are bound to be trapped someday because of that; does being punished for not having known something give us more knowledge and/or make us a better person? I doubt that. Instead, it could give us a feeling of resentment and gradually alienate us from our law system. I do not want to say we should disrespect laws we do not agree to; my point is, we need a balance there, because in the main thing we need to be able to stand for our law system as a whole. So it may be right to lie; though it shouldn't be out of not wanting to take any responsibility at all for what we've done. There is, after all, a risk we take: being caught means punishment. (It one time happened to me that I neglected a deadline I didn't know of, and because I came too late the administrator suggested I should change the date on the paper for not having to pay fine. We have a really weird edge of our administrational system here, because seemingly this administrator thought the rule he had to exercise on the people to be unfair. But why is there no usual way of feedback for him to the people who make those rules? I guess it was his own way of keeping the balance to make people lie about a stupid, although in this case not totally useless deadline.)

Why is this all so difficult? Wouldn't it be much easier to just decide to always tell the truth, no matter what? -- Two points to this: 1) What we do, what we say, whom we talk to: our actions always have consequences. Even telling the truth, although it may seem a good thing to do, can bear very bad results. (The classical example of telling the murderer where to find their potential victim is only the most obvious one.) We might nevertheless decide to act upon this principle, but there is no way out of our being responsible for the consequences of what we do, at least not by argument. (Small children and disabled persons evidently are sometimes not to be held responsible for the results of their actions.) 2) The problems arise because we take other people in consideration. We usually (let's hope: almost everybody) don't throw slippery things on the pavement because we are aware of the possiblity that if we do, someone might fall and get hurt. Now, this is an easy example. The above mentioned examples are difficult because we don't have hard facts we can rely on, but must guess: Is it by telling or not telling that I worsen the situation for my parent, or my friend? To not throw away a banana peeling is staying on the safe side; but usually there is no such side. We must live with the results of whatever we decide, and if we don't know the right thing to do where other people are involved, we need to carefully consider all the implications we can think of. Life isn't an easy task; but then, most people are sensible and will only get mad when we try to explain why they shouldn't hold us responsible for what we've done. We may not have known better, at the time we made our choice; but we are always responsible. Whatever we decide, we need to be able to stand for it (and maybe that was the reason why the above mentioned administrator wanted me to lie about the date: he couldn't stand making me pay for what he didn't think to be right).

A last example: My friend introduces me to a friend of her's she's very fond of; but, at first sight, I do not like this woman. Should I tell her about my dislike, or should I keep it to myself with the intention of not hurting her feelings? This is the kind of truth that is bound to come out, because if I don't tell her, she might think just the opposite. When she arranges for the three of us to spend time together, matters get complicated: I have to act as if I liked the person, and sooner or later need to stall my way out of this. So I invent excuses for not having to meet her; but my friend starts to think that I withdraw from her as well. Bad idea from the beginning! Here's the question: Why did I really do this? Did I really want to spare my friend's feelings? Or was there another reason: Did I fear she couldn't take my dislike of one of her friends? Or, do I think I always have to like the friends of my friend? Do I feel myself to be a bad person if I am or behave not like I am (seemingly) supposed to be?

If, when, under what circumstances, to whom, we tell the truth (or not) is, after all, a matter of relationship: What kind of relationship to another person (or even to our law system, our political system) do I want to have? Do I want the other person to know me? Do I want them to know only part of me? But then: do I really know myself? -- We live, after all, in a society where lots of people, including ourselves, live in denial about at least some of their traits; sometimes it may be a good thing to be hurt by any truth, because that's exactly what can make us sincere and stop our self-denial. But it always remains our decision if we want to confront another person with what we think to be their own blind spot or weakness.

At least: The most important thing is to be sincere with ourselves. What we do, we should do with utmost awareness of what our motives are; so that we take the consequences that result from our action, and not try to avoid just that. There is no recipe for our actions; but all of them have consequences for other people we should think about before acting. Rules and laws tell us what we can expect will be done to us if we act in a way we're not supposed to act; but obeying them won't keep responsibility from us. It may even sometimes be more responsible to not follow a certain law.

There is no principle to act upon, there are only guidelines - it depends on how things are, it depends on the context, it depends on what we want and how we want to relate to other people. We have to make our decisions and then live with the consequences without trying to cheat our way out. We learn a lot about ourselves in the process. This is what growing up is all about, and what makes us an autonomous person.