…because you made it impossible for me to speak the truth.
You don’t have the guts to hear it. You are too weak and self-obsessed to to make space for another person. You are too terrified of what it will mean to you personally, how you may have to change the status quo, how you may need to restructure your life. My truth would surely have knocked out the foundations of your worldview and the thought is impossibly uncomfortable for you to deal with.
That’s why I lied. I will always lie to you. You don’t deserve my truth. I don’t trust you with it.
I hate to lie. I hate to be at the mercy of another person’s blindness or stupidity. To lie is to feel robbed of vigor and energy. It feels as if I have poured all my power into the one to whom I am lying. I feel as if I am a lifeless puppet on a string; I must dance when they command. I hate feeling like that. Do you hear me? I HATE IT!
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
~ Ayn Rand
Yet I lied and I am not sorry. It was not an act of self-abdication. I surrendered nothing to you. I faked nothing. I just refused to become a martyr to your narrow-minded stupidity.
You have a tiny, narrow soul. There is no room for anyone but you there. Nothing can coexist with you. Your perceptions crowd out every other possibility of thought and existence from that petty narrow mind of yours. Your beliefs are like a glass cliff face on which no hand hold is possible.
There is no space in you to hold my truth.
When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.
~ Criss Jami
Don’t you dare accuse me of lying! Can’t you see, there was nothing else I could do? The truth is, there was nothing else I wanted to do!
What right have you to demand that I take the trouble? You don’t want anyone to upset your apple-cart of false notions. When you choose to close yourself in that manner, don’t expect the world to bother taking the trouble to show you the faults in your thought process!
Why should I bother breaking your door down? Why should I struggle with you to show you that your house is flooded and the water rising? I will gain nothing by it. More likely than not, I will only get a punch in the face for my efforts. When you insist on being stupid, don’t complain if the world grants you your wish. Stay inside your closed, cowardly world.
I hereby leave you with your stupidity!
But Why Did You Lie?
First 😛
Oh, God! I cringed under the force of the tornado.
You thrashed the seemingly thick skin of the perpetrator before you proceeded to flay him alive, pulled away the sineus and tendons binding the flesh to his bones, and left writhing, his ‘narrow’ soul out in the open for the benefit of the posterities.
How true are those quotes and how stinging your weaving about them! I stand chastened.
That is the irony, isn’t it Umashankar. The ones for whom the chastisement is intended, never get it- deliberately or otherwise. It serves to chasten the already chaste. 🙂
Thank you. I’ve been wanting to write on this issue for long. 🙂
can’t say that I relate to the entire post. but yes, the first part I could understand. the reason to lie, now matter how small the truth may be. sometimes, it is even because we’re scared of the truth itself, which is bigger than who we are lying to. I haven’t thought too deeply into what a lie does to me. when I do, it is because at that moment, the situation demands it perhaps. and yes, sometimes a person is so set in their views and ideas that they can’t handle the truth. maybe they choose not to understand it. who knows?!
Yes, some people are so committed to their own worldview that for them no other reality exists. If the wall looks purple to them from where they stand, they refuse to consider the fact that it might be yellow on the other side. Or that there is even another side. It is impossible to tell such people the truth. They make it so difficult.
Thank you. You came first today again. 😛
Why does a person lie? There could be many reasons. I try my best to avoid making a value judgement about a person who has lied. However, I have found that people who tell the biggest lies are often most judgemental about other people’s small, maybe harmless lies!
It is always easier to find the blemish in someone else’s face than your own. We don’t look too carefully when we look in the mirror.
Good to see you here! 🙂
Mind= Blown. Brilliant read
Thank you darling! <3
This is so bang-on with what I strongly feel about a certain relationship of mine. It was as if you are speaking for me…:D love you.
I love you too Janu. I hope you also love me when I an not speaking for you. 😀 <3
You know the answer. 😀
Of course I do. Lekin fir bhi, poochh lena achha hota hai. 😀
You are absolutely right on! It takes courage, a lot of courage to hear the truth. And your last line is a great one – “When you insist on being stupid, don’t complain if the world grants you your wish. Stay inside your closed, cowardly world.” 🙂 I wonder if the person to whom such a thing is said – hypothetically – can actually handle this truth! O well…but that’s your point, isn’t it? 🙂
Beloo, you have NO idea how I love your comments. There have been times when your comment has given me a deeper insight into my own thought process. There have been times when your words have gently led me a few steps farther- to a wider conclusion- to what I was probably thinking when I wrote the post.
You cause me to learn myself better. What a teacher you are! Hugs! <3
Hmm! Me – I can see A person or A situation in black and white but tend to be wary of seeing an action in black and white. One of my grouses with Ayn Rand is that she seems to see the world divided between black and white, which for me is too simplistic.
I can well understand the sort of situation that you are talking of and, with those people, those words are warranted. But I do not agree that all lying partakes of this particular situation.
For example, all parents lie to their children when they are young. “Lovely drawing” – but the child is no Picasso. We lie to build their confidence so that they can possibly grow into Picassos. I do not see that the parent feels demeaned or a ‘slave’ to the child.
We are talking only of adult interactions? Well – all the people I have met need those ‘white lies’ to build their confidence in some facet of their life. In THAT they ARE children in the reactions and if the liar also lies with the mind-set of the parent, I cannot really put either liar or the one being lied to in the slots assigned in this piece of yours.
I suppose I am also the sort of person who can only see ‘purple walls’ 🙂 I am the person who believes that seeing things in ‘black and white’ is not completely mature behavior AND that most of what we feel about life is ‘all in the mind’ 🙂
Yes, I am aware of your grouse with Ayn Rand. You share that grouse with many people who find her work unrealistic. I cannot dispute that at times, she does go over the top. But I have learned to deal with it, so it doesn’t bother me.
Her quote was for situations in which there is an attempt to deliberate mislead- when there doesn’t need to be. Her warning is to those who lie in order to avoid confrontation and take the supposedly easy way out of a sticky situation by attempting to pull wool over another person’s eyes.
As for being a ‘purple wall’ kind of person instead of being a ‘black and white’ person, I can’t but agree. Although, if I talk about the context in which the analogy was meant, I don’t think you are a ‘purple wall ONLY’ kind of a person. 😀
HAHA! I sure hope not 🙂
By the way, my reaction was to that ‘there are no white lies’ part, which is a sweeping statement that does not apply only to the context. She does have this habit of veering off into rhetoric, which puts me off 🙂 You see, that sort of statement is precisely what you are talking against – seeing the walls as ONLY purple 🙂
She does, occasionally, veer off into rhetoric. But you see, she wasn’t only writing for people like you who are sensitive enough to pick up her point even from an obscure analogy. She was also writing for people like me who must have things underlined boldly. What better way to do it than to fling a few paged of rhetoric at readers like us to make us get it? 😀
People may lie, when they do so, they die a little, as to be authentic is to be authentic!
Satya, You say much when you say little. 🙂
Thanks a great deal, you take the trouble to write and share with us such nice stuff.
Sometimes you just have to die a little inside in order to be reborn again and rise again as a stronger and wiser version of you, I read this somewhere.
All of us lie for different reasons not really intending to fake or be bad. I have never judged a person lying to me unless it was meant to deceive. You are right. Sometimes it is just impossible to be truthful to some. I wonder who brought forth this tsunami of emotions?
Rachna, this was not triggered by anything that happened to me. This was just something I’ve felt for long. It too the shape of a post because of Thoreau’s quote. This is one of the times when the quote came before a post. 😀
I get what you are saying.
but, I’m uncomfortable with lies. I try my best not to lie.. but sometimes, I guess one has to .. whenever I lie, I’m never happy about it.
I hate to lie too. And I hate it when someone lies to me. Before I censure them though, I do ask myself if they had to lie to me because I didn’t give them enough space to tell me the truth. 🙂
I think we discussed this once no? 🙂
I hate being lied to too.. also hate lies being told abt me unnecessarily.
I remember we discussed it. 🙂
Great piece.
Thank you Subhorup! 🙂
When did I lie to you? I promise I did not. 🙁
On a serious note, I hate people who lie. But I simply don’t react because I do not want to spoil my mood because of liars. Plain liars are still tolerable, but people who say something in front of you and something else behind your back are the ones that I can’t stand. Power-packed post this is Dagny!
I hate it when people deliberately try to deceive me. Lie with malicious intent… so to speak. They usually presume that they wont be found out. That’s like adding insult to injury. 🙂
Glad you liked Rekha! <3
ooh!! That was a sound thrashing!! I’m glad I wasn’t at the receiving end!!
Your comment has made me grin Roshni! 😀 Thanks for the visit…
My My….A powerful post! It brings back memories of some of the conversations we’ve had around the same topic. The ability to hear the truth is not something, I suppose a lot of people have, Especially in the fickle world of bloggers and writers, as I’ve often come to discover. Loved the post, Dagny (Though I’m still kind of reeling from the power of those words)
The world of bloggers is just a micro version of the macro world, as you already know. It contains every vice and every virtue of the macro version. It’s just that, sometimes you don’t expect supposedly educated people to be shallow and insincere. They at least, you think, ought to know better.
Glad you found the post ‘powerful’. 🙂