LAUSR

1. Imagine that you have been lied to by your partner or closest friend. It’s a hurtful lie and you feel let down and disappointed. Lying is a violation of trust and it destroys relationships.2 A lie has social and political consequences. A single lie can bring down a political party or a government.3 Hitler coined the expression the ‘big lie’ in Mein Kampf (1925) to describe a lie so ‘colossal’ everybody would believe it because no one would believe that the truth could be distorted so infamously.4 2. Have you ever tried to hold a conversation with someone who lives in a fantasy world and you suspect everything said is just wild exaggeration? You might be dealing with a pathological liar.5 Typically, a pathological liar is also narcissistic, selfish, and delusional: lying becomes compulsive and habitual. Pathological liars suffer false memory syndrome; many believe they have accomplished superhuman feats. This kind of compulsive lying is regarded as a psychiatric disorder. 3. We all lie on occasion, most of us might tell a ‘white lie’ to save someone’s feelings but most of the time we tell the truth.6 We are bought up in our culture with a deep respect for telling the truth. Some would argue that in our culture we are compelled to tell the truth about ourselves and our feelings, even when the consequences might be painful. Sharing our private lives and confiding in others creates intimacy and relationships. 4. In the age of social media, there is a fascination with the lives of ordinary people. We have become the confessional society. Reality TV rules! Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth not only in the social media but also in the court room, in the newsroom, and in the classroom.7 Truth is central to all our institutions.8 5. Human communication is only possible against a background of truth and truth-telling. Can you imagine a society based on systematic lying where no speech is reliable? You couldn’t believe a stranger giving street directions, or trust a newspaper report, or a friend who confides in you.9 6. Truth is a deep cultural practice in the West, yet we take it for granted and only question it when we are exposed to the consequences or effects of a lie. But truth takes different historical forms and changed its shape over time.10 7. The Ancient Greeks had a concept called Aletheia meaning ‘unconcealed’ or ‘openness’. Truth was seen a form of ontological disclosure. In Greek mythology, Aletheia (Veritas in the Roman world) is the daughter of Zeus and the goddess of truth (vs gods of trickery, deception, and lies).11 The ancient poet, Homer12, uses the word in the Iliad and the Odyssey to mean truth where truth has to do with the reliability of what is said by one person to another. Its opposite is a lie or deception. ‘Then verily, child, I will tell you the truth’ is a ritual sentence that occurs five times in the Odyssey. The word often occurs in the phrase ‘the whole truth’. To tell the whole truth in this sense is not just to utter some sentence which is true, it is to give a whole account, to tell the whole story.13 In the Iliad (23.361), Achilles asks Phoenix to act as umpire in a chariot-race and to report back the truth.14 8. The traditional oath required of a witness in court proceedings—to ‘tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’—dates from this ancient source over 3,000 years ago.15 In this ancient tradition, Aletheia is a matter of being truthful and open in one person’s dealings with another, so that what is said can be taken by hearers as reliable and trustworthy. It seems all classical cultures have a notion like truth.16