The 3 Types of Lying – Lying to yourself is the worst lie

Meet the 3 types of truth (and the 3 types of lies) and find out why lying to yourself is always the worst lie.

Hello friends!

Several readers of the site asked me to write about lying. Especially about people who lie all the time or like to lie or believe their lies. Although it is proven that all people lie – even if they are those light lies that do not harm anyone – why can lying reach such a complicated level as mythomania, the mania for lying?

About the lie and the truth

Roughly speaking, in philosophy, we find three main ways of conceiving the truth. After all, if we are going to talk about lies, we have to define what a lie is and, if a lie is a non-truth, what is a truth?

1) Truth as adequacy

The first type of truth is truth as adequacy between the word and the thing. If I say, now is the day because the sun is visible, I will be saying a truth that fits reality. If I say the same sentence after 7 pm, I will be telling a lie, as the sun will not be visible and it will be night.

Most of the lies that we see in everyday life correspond to the lie that is the opposite of truth as adequacy. If the student says he has done his homework and the teacher checks his notebook and notices that the task of answering some questions is not done, the student will be telling a lie. His sentence: “I did my homework” does not fit, it does not correspond to the notebook that should be filled in and is blank.

2) Truth as logic

Do you know when someone says a sentence that doesn’t make sense and we say: “But that doesn’t make sense!”?

Logic is a branch of philosophy that studies propositions and the validity of propositions, in short, logic is concerned with thinking in general. There are several logics in the history of philosophy. During my degree in psychology, I had the opportunity to study formal logic. A classic example is the following:

– All men are mortal

– Socrates is a man

– Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

It is curious how, necessarily, truth as logic will also depend on truth as adequacy. Because, if we hadn’t observed reality and seen that men are mortal, we wouldn’t even have the first premise, that “all men are mortal”, right?

But, in order not to dwell too long on epistemological issues, we can say that the opposite of truth as logic is a lie based on what is illogical. If I say: 2+2=5, I am telling a lie, an untruth.

In everyday life it is uncommon to find this type of lie. It will be more frequent if you work with knowledge, or participate in classes and courses, since the truth as logic or lies as the absence of logic will be linked with knowledge.

3) Truth as unveiling

ἀλήθεια, Aletheia is the Greek word for truth. Heidegger, one of the most important philosophers of all time, preferred the word Aletheia to be translated as unveiling. According to him, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit”, The Essence of Truth:

“If we translate the word alétheia by unveiling, instead of truth, this translation is not only more literal, but it also includes the indication of rethinking more originally the current notion of truth as conformity of enunciation, in the sense, still not understood, of the character of being unveiling and of the unveiling of beings”.

Literally, Aletheia can be divided into A-Letheia, meaning non-veiling, non-concealment, uncovering. In this sense of truth as unveiling, the lie is what covers up the truth, what does not reveal but veils (although revealing can be thought of as veiling again).

Anyway, the lie as veiling makes sense if we think about transcendent issues, especially philosophy and religion. Heidegger’s objective in bringing the sense of truth as ἀλήθεια was to seek the Being (Sein) and the relationship and difference with the entity (Dasein).

In short, a lie at this level would be the falsity of a philosophical, metaphysical, transcendent or spiritual revelation.

Lying to yourself is always the worst lie

In addition to the three types of truth and lies that we saw above, we can also think of truth as having two dimensions: internal truth and external truth. That is, regardless of whether the truth is a truth as adequacy, as logic or as unveiling, we can divide the truth into what it is outside and inside each one.

And that, in turn, indicates that a truth is individual, but more importantly, it indicates that there are certain truths that are intimate. For example, if we had to answer the question of two alternatives:

– Are you feeling happy right now?

(The truth

(B) lie

We could replace happiness with joy, contentment, anger or any other feeling, and we would see that this truth would be subjective, that is, it is only up to the subject to answer what he is feeling inside himself. People outside could have clues such as body posture, breathing, tone of voice, eye contact, etc. But the final word whether the sentence is true or false would be up to each one.

“Lying to yourself is always the worst lie” is a phrase from a song by Legião Urbana entitled Almost without Wanting. And I really like this phrase because it states an important truth. Someone can fool half the world. And although it is difficult to deceive everyone else, it will be impossible to deceive everyone, because the person will know, deep down, that it is a lie. With the exception of cases of madness, in which delusions are present, the person who lies knows he is lying. So this is the worst lie, the lie that aims to deceive yourself.

Conclusion

The lie and the truth have several facets and different purposes. Like the child who receives the order from his mother to reply to a visitor that his mother is not home and says: “my mother said to say that she is not at home right now”. The child tells the truth, but will soon learn that there are inconvenient truths and that in many moments it is necessary to lie. A little white lie won’t hurt anyone.

Thus, many people learn that lying has its benefits and, although it can be functional, as when we lie that we have no money so as not to have to go to a party, this social training of the advantages of lying can become something very harmful for the character. It is similar to the Brazilian way, which is creative and manages to escape from trouble and problems, but most of the time it ends up being dishonesty.

In this way, for some people, the little lies become a snowball. If there is a tendency to psychosis, one ends up confusing reality with fantasy and the light and harmless lie becomes pathological lying.

However, in the vast majority of cases, the problem with lying is moral. In isolation, it is the same thing to lie about being sick and lie in a trial, although the second lie can have disastrous consequences, while the first does not. The problem is that the behavior is identical (saying something that does not correspond to reality) and if lying becomes a pattern of behavior we will have one more dishonest person and, on a large scale, a dishonest society.

Many curse politicians for being corrupt, but as is known: “each people has the government it deserves”. Anyway, the path is always individual. If everyone does their part and tries to create more honesty (for themselves and in their relationships), their part will have been done. And it will be good to start.

Read too:

The Psychology of Lying: Why Does Everyone Lie?

9 ways to tell if someone is lying

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