Mark Twain said “If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything”. The validity of those words rings true till this day. The effects of a lie or lies always seem to lead to a path of extreme detriment. Although I have experienced both sides of a lie I often wonder if the reasoning behind lying is always just. Do people lie to protect? Or is a lie an extension of deceit? These are questions that many people can relate and reflect on because we have all been lied to. Whether you were told white lies about the Easter bunny and Santa Claus or someone lied to you about their whereabouts any false statement is quite simply a lie. The effects of a lie are what I have the most experience in and it is those effects which caused me to be a liar in turn. Living a lie or maintaining lies an individual has told over time is a tiresome process and a difficult one to bear. My experience in dealing with a lie began at a young age. I was often enamored with associating with people older than myself and I frequently felt I had to establish that my experiences were equal or greater than theirs.
Growing up in Alabama where the weather changes as quickly as a couch potato's remote and football is the epitome of life lead to an interesting childhood. Scarred knees, dirty clothes, and climbing willow trees were part of my every day life. As I progressed through middle school I began to associate with kids older than myself because we would indulge in playing basketball during recess. Although I was eleven at the time I could hold my own on the basketball court against the fifteen and sixteen year olds. It was during these times at the basketball court they would share their experiences in life amongst us and I often felt left out. Being t...
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...ons and anguish filled my heart as I listened to the pain of love. The effects of this lie broke my heart at the time as well as my trust and it took a long time to overcome the trust issues that were a result of this lie.
The effects of a lie are one of the aspects of lying that tends to be overlooked. People lie for different reasons or people find different ways to justify their reasons for lying. Nevertheless, the main component that remains true is that a lie is a false statement. A false statement can change the course of a person's life or it can be used to hide any number of activities, but maintaining a lie and ultimately having a lie exposed is what causes the most harm. Whether lying about meeting someone or lying about being involved in a particular activity people need to realize the power of words and the effect that they have on any person involved.
In The Ways We Lie, Stephanie Ericsson expresses the inevitability of lying and the way it is casually incorporated into our everyday lives. She personally brings light to all the forms of lying and some that are often not recognized as a lie. Ericsson questions the reasons and validity behind lies by highlighting the effects and consequences.
Author Allison Kornet in her article (1997) “The Truth about Lying: Has Lying Gotten a Bad Rap” states that deception or lying has become a part of everyone’s life. A person lies or deceives as often as he brushes his teeth or combs his hair. Many psychologists have neglected or ignored the concept of deception or lying and its effects on everyone’s life. Kornet explains that in the previous two to three decades, the psychologists started noticing or analyzing the effects of a person’s deception on others or why a person lies so many times in his day-to-day life. The person might learn lying from childhood
When confronted with a problem, why does the human brain default to lying? Dishonesty is never a solution, although it may seem like the best option in the spur of a moment. My grandma always gave the example of her youth: she avoided and deceived her friend’s sister because the little girl riled everyone. Come to find out, the sister passed the following month due to an illness. I could never imagine the guilt she experienced. Nevertheless, everyone has been deceitful before and many characters were in the tragedy, The Crucible, by playwright Arthur Miller. Reasons for lying are understandable, but most people will admit that mendacity has only caused pain. Lying’s outcome is never positive: it may seem like a good option, for falsehood can save a person’s life, benefit someone, and it eases stress, but these are all transitory.
There are always consequences for lying, whether it happens immediate or nebulous, a punishment will occur. Some lies cause other people to hurt that have nothing to do with the situation but still get punished. For example, someone stealing an answer key to an important test in class will make the class suffer by taking a much harder test. Another example is a basketball team having to run for a teammate’s lies. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible is based on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, and it proves this exact point.
We all know that stereotyping has ill effects. It is a known fact. Stephanie Ericsson’s “The Ways We Lie” considers this a most insidious lie and describes it as grouping individuals with certain characteristics as collectively having the same personality/traits/future/etc. because “our need for vast amounts of information in nanoseconds has made the stereotype vital to modern communication” (164). This is true. But it is also true that we have known for years what stereotyping can do to a person. Why do we still do it? Why are we so adamant on upholding our oft-disproven generalizations?
Do you know who you are? Imagine if you were able to speak up for yourself in any given situation; would you? Behavior can be altered by you and can change depending on who you are around and the type of environment you are in. Being someone who just fits in instead of standing out, is that really who are you, do you even know who I am?
Lying is being deceitful. It is construed in more cases than not, as the opposite of being truthful. Yet, there’s more to it than that. A person can lie without actually saying anything false. There’s such a thing as ‘lying by omission’ and little ‘white lies’ to keep people baffled as to what dishonesty is. In reality, mendaciousness is a sickness that haunts its nurturers without letting go. Then, after a while, a person can get so good at this ‘skill’ that they even begin to lie to themselves.
“No matter how you hope, no matter how you try, you can’t make truth out of a lie” (Berenstain 1). Various children programs or books, like The Berenstain Bears, try to discourage children from lying. They attempt to do this by informing them of the consequences lying brings. Every day, countless people find themselves being deceived, whether by their coworkers, friends, or family. While some lies may appear harmless, most do more harm than good. Lying takes on several different modes for which it infests itself into the daily grind. A few of these configurations are white lies, facades, delusion or doublespeak. More than half of the population have become desensitized to deceit, because today lying is prevalent, and doublespeak is predominant
We all lie in one way or another. Whether it is a simple white lie about how someone really looks or blaming someone else for something we really did, we all have lied. In Stephanie Ericsson’s essay, “The Ways We Lie”, she explains the ways people lie in order to get what they want, to stay out of trouble, or just to hide from the cold hard truth. Ericsson explains how is it nearly impossible to go without telling a lie and how lies affect others. After evaluating Ericsson’s essay on the many ways we lie, I can say I am most guilty of the telling whites and lying by omission.
Lying is bad but the fear that can come from it is worse. Fear can rule a person which drives them to extreme and irrational acts that can shape society in a negative way. We as people are so accustomed to how we should act that during times of fear and crisis our vision is blurred and sometimes our decision making abilities are impaired. We often look past at how much fear can affect us and our society. Starting from Salem 1692 and going to the McCarthy era fear ruled the people and even now in present time America we are constantly living in fear.
Are everyday rituals, such as, facades reflected as to being a lie? Simply preparing for a meeting or interview does not come off as lying, although another type of façade such as when someone asks, “Are you okay,” after a death of someone close to you, in reality it is a form of a lie, because you are not being honest. In Stephanie Erricsson’s article “The Ways We Lie,” she discusses many different types of lying, that most wouldn’t even consider. Ericsson claimed, “But façades can be destructive because they are used to seduce others into an illusion” (409). Depending how a façade is used, the outcome can be beneficial or damaging. There are facades that are used to cover up one’s true feelings, in order to protect an individual and then there is a type in which one puts on a mask to cover up how awful of a person they are. Charity, a former friend, deceived me with the qualities of everything she was not, my mom is a great example of when it comes to hiding when she is saddened. In this article “The Ways We Lie,” Stephanie Ericsson has a great point of view on the destructiveness of facades, although, it can very well be used in a good way just as much as in a bad way, in fact, like my protective mother, using facades for mine and my sisters own good and then a conniving friend using facades in
Although it is considered wrong to tell lies, it seems that literature has offered us situations where telling lies isn’t necessarily bad. Of course, lying often has a tragic outcome, but not always for the person or people who told the lie or lies. Oftentimes, these unfortunate outcomes are directed at the person about whom the lie was told. Furthermore, these stories have explained that dishonesty can result in success for both the liar and the target. Maybe we have been teaching the wrong values to our children.
Lying is when you purposely tell someone something you believe or know is false. If you told someone something you thought was true, but then it ended up being a lie, you simply have just given false information. Lying is obviously not an ideal thing to do, but sometimes it may be necessary. Here are the four types of lies.
Lying always makes the situation worse even if it is for your good, it will always come back to hurt you.According to Immanuel Kant , “a lie ,even if it does no wrong to any particular individual,always harms mankind individually”. This proves that lying always harms someone even
Growing up, we are always told to never lie because it is the worst thing you could ever do. “Lying will only lead to a horrible situation with less than mediocre results. While lying is not always good, it is not always bad either. Samuel Butler once said “Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.