I have always, always tried to hear both sides of a story, or at least leave the possibility and the mind open for that other side. Sometimes, for those closest to me, I don’t do a very good job of that.
What prompted this particular post was when I was caught off guard by a friend of mine. I care about a particular person and because of that, I normally don’t question that person’s integrity, that person’s personality. I take what I can from that person’s stories, right? Unfortunately, the other side of of the story isn’t as pleasant as it was when I had heard the first time around.
What makes us do that? We do we make that person so ideal, so perfect that after a certain point, flaws are no longer accepted? No, I can’t figure out if I had chosen to block out the flaws or if I had chosen not to look for them, but either way, they were not recognized. The other side of the story never had a chance to explain itself when it so rightly deserved the chance.
Just to get to the point here, there is always more than one side to the story and to completely close yourself off to another side is a foolish idea, a foolish action. If one side of the story doesn’t make sense, well then, it deserves some more explanation, it deserves another side, another story. What it does not deserve is another lie.
(Does not exist - for you math nerds)
So I’ve been reading Freakonomics as a class textbook (one of two, don’t worry) for a while and it got me really thinking about the things that people do.
It basically all summed down to the point where people do what they do because of the incentive. People lie because of many reasons, but it’s mostly for some sort of good result (though there are cases that would refute this statement of mine). People lie because they don’t want to hurt anybody, they lie because what they are doing will hurt somebody, they lie because they don’t have the heart to tell the person what is really going on.
I remember as a child, I would try and disobey my father by being sneaky. Well, he was sneaky too because he would always find out, but he would wait for the right time to catch me in the act instead of confront me. I always remembered that although what I was doing was a bad thing (or something that he didn’t want me to do), he was more disappointed at the fact that I had to lie. That was my father, always ashamed that I had to resort to such things.
What I remember most about what I’ve read so far is how far people go for incentives. Teachers have been known to cheat, sumo wrestlers included. Real Estate agents have been known to use their expertise to their advantage, withholding information that might be valuable to a potential buyer or purposely creating manipulative ads.
People do so much to lie, but is it really worth it in the end? Now, I’m not saying that there’s someone out there that doesn’t lie and I have been known to do my fair share of distorting or bending the truth, but there are just some things that a person should not withhold from another, you know? But how can you judge or measure the severity of a lie? Does it depend on how upset it makes you feel? Does it depend on the act that was covered up? Or is it just the lie in general that is awfully damaging?
Either way, I think that although it may hurt the person to tell the truth, it’s better to say it upfront and from you than for the person to find out from another person or through another means. It always hurts more when the person or people you care about are lying to you.
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