Promises and Lies
Oct. 27th, 2013 04:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydyAs I said to a friend recently, "I'm not that big a fan of promises." Some of that is clearly personal history. My mother promised my father the standard "Till death do us part" thing, and years and years of abuse didn't make her feel that she could be free of that promise. Of course, there were other things going into that decision. (Or more precisely, those decisions. The decision to stay was one that she made over and over and over again for 25 years.) The economic realities of a divorced woman in the Sixties certainly had a lot to do with it. But while it wasn't the only factor, it was certainly a very strong one.
Promises are contracts that we make with the future. We make them because nothing is quite so frightening or unknowable as the future. It looms at us every second of every day, and is utterly untouchable and unknowable. And so we make promises, to ourselves and to our loved ones, as a way of creating a future, as a way of taming the unknowable, a way of creating security where there is none. The problem, of course, is that we are making commitments for people we don't know and have never met: our future selves. We cannot know who we will become. Which, of course, is part of the point of making those promises, especially the marital promises. We don't know what's coming, but we want to be able to rely on each other. We want a cushion against the cruel reality of time. And so we promise. And we mean it.
Sometimes, the promise really is the way forward. Sometimes, keeping faith with our past selves and our present loved ones is the way we find strength and courage to build the future. But sometimes the present is so far beyond anything we could have imagined, sometimes the people we become is so far beyond anything we could have anticipated, that keeping that promise is like making love to a corpse. Sometimes trying to keep faith with your past means breaking faith with your future.
There is no easy way to know when this has happened. We change gradually. Our past, even if we have very good memories, becomes shrouded by our present. But sometimes, it becomes clear that keeping promises is no longer a way forward. It is no longer a hedge against the uncertainty of the future, but rather the building blocks of a present misery. And I believe that there is no shame in understanding this, and choosing another course. Let the dead, as they say, bury their own dead. If promises, instead of ensuring the future, destroy it, then it's time to choose a new future.
Breaking promises is not cheap; it always has a cost. At very least, you are breaking faith with your past self. It is not something to be done lightly. But everything has a cost, including keeping the promise. And doing a cost-benefit analysis is not a bad thing. I know people who feel that it is always immoral to break a promise. Nothing I say here will change their opinion; they see promises as concrete things, like baseballs or roses. I don't think they are. They are a way of thinking about the past and the future, they are neither fictional nor fully real. They are a way to resolve issues. When they stop resolving problems and start becoming a problem, it is time to find a new problem-solving technique.
My feeling about lies is very similar, I suppose. Again, I know people that think that lying is always wrong. I certainly don't think so. I will casually lie to people I don't know well about things that are inconsequential. Some stories "tell" better if told in the first person, even if they didn't happen to you. Some truths are incredibly complex, and a technical lie is as close to the truth as you can get without getting into serious personal detail that is none of your interlocutor's business. But just as breaking promises can cost, so can telling lies.
My problem with lying is not a moral one, but a practical one. Lying deforms the datasphere. We, all of us, collect and collate information on people around us, as well as ourselves. We can't help it. Understanding people, predicting their behavior, interacting with them, pretty much requires that we collect and understand data about them. The more superficial our interactions, the less detail we need, the less data we bother to collect, and the less we care about how it all fits together. However, as Teresa Nielsen Hayden has said, "Story is a force of nature." We cannot help but take all the information we get about a person and try to fit it into a coherent narrative. We both want and need to understand people.
When you lie, you deform that data set. Now, the occasional lie is likely to go undetected, if it's not about something important. And depending on exactly what it's about, it may be completely inconsequential. But the thing is, the way we understand people is actually quite complex and subtle. So if we observe someone who claims to truly love animals, but their behavior doesn't seem to quite bear that out, we note that. Not necessarily as a lie, but as an anomaly. If someone tells you stories about the year they spent in between high school and college, we don't particularly note them as important. But if the number of things a person says they did in that time frame starts to add up to an impossible number of things, a set of circumstances that don't really fit within a twelve-month time frame, we tend to notice. We don't always notice on a conscious level. But as we try to understand the story of someone's life, and if there are too many false notes, we do notice that. Sometimes, of course, we are wrong. Some people have completely true but utterly improbable lives. Some people are very good liars and the stories all have an internal consistency and there's nothing out of place or out of character. But those are outliers.
Most people have a story which makes a reasonable amount of sense, within the limits of memory, and we tend to automatically make allowances for the types of errors that the flesh is heir to. However, if someone's story doesn't add up, people tend to feel distrust. Each lie we tell has an unknown effect on the datasphere which is other people's understanding of who we are. Over time, we reveal both in what we say and what we do very complex models of who we are. Each lie has the potential to highlight a conflict. As I've said, telling the truth isn't a guarantee that this conflict will not arise. People's lives are complex, and we always see them through the lens of our own experience. So it's completely possible to misunderstand what someone has said about themselves, or to put various pieces together wrong. But at the point that we feel, either consciously or unconsciously, that someone's story doesn't quite add up, we start distrusting not just the stories but the person. We are less likely reach out to them, either to accept or offer help. Less likely to engage emotionally. It can become insurmountable. We all know someone who has told us so many lies we just don't believe anything they say anymore. This is as much because we can't seem to fit it into a matrix that makes sense as the genuine sense of betrayal.
I don't believe that lying is evil, or a sin. But I do think it does damage to our ability to communicate, often in complex ways we cannot predict. And I think it interferes with our ability to create authentic relationships with each other. I also think that sometimes it is absolutely necessary. So, I try to lie seldom, and only about things which are either utterly trivial, or completely vital. People lie. Mostly people tell the truth. All of this is complicated. But keeping the datasphere as clean as possible seems like the best way to create the bridge between me and you.
Promises and lies are both tools. They are powerful, complex, and dangerous tools that we should try to understand and use within the contexts of our real lives rather than our idealized lives. The fact that we can never truly touch reality, that we must always deal with an approximation of reality, makes all this even more difficult. But, you know, no one ever said being human was a cake walk.
Promises are contracts that we make with the future. We make them because nothing is quite so frightening or unknowable as the future. It looms at us every second of every day, and is utterly untouchable and unknowable. And so we make promises, to ourselves and to our loved ones, as a way of creating a future, as a way of taming the unknowable, a way of creating security where there is none. The problem, of course, is that we are making commitments for people we don't know and have never met: our future selves. We cannot know who we will become. Which, of course, is part of the point of making those promises, especially the marital promises. We don't know what's coming, but we want to be able to rely on each other. We want a cushion against the cruel reality of time. And so we promise. And we mean it.
Sometimes, the promise really is the way forward. Sometimes, keeping faith with our past selves and our present loved ones is the way we find strength and courage to build the future. But sometimes the present is so far beyond anything we could have imagined, sometimes the people we become is so far beyond anything we could have anticipated, that keeping that promise is like making love to a corpse. Sometimes trying to keep faith with your past means breaking faith with your future.
There is no easy way to know when this has happened. We change gradually. Our past, even if we have very good memories, becomes shrouded by our present. But sometimes, it becomes clear that keeping promises is no longer a way forward. It is no longer a hedge against the uncertainty of the future, but rather the building blocks of a present misery. And I believe that there is no shame in understanding this, and choosing another course. Let the dead, as they say, bury their own dead. If promises, instead of ensuring the future, destroy it, then it's time to choose a new future.
Breaking promises is not cheap; it always has a cost. At very least, you are breaking faith with your past self. It is not something to be done lightly. But everything has a cost, including keeping the promise. And doing a cost-benefit analysis is not a bad thing. I know people who feel that it is always immoral to break a promise. Nothing I say here will change their opinion; they see promises as concrete things, like baseballs or roses. I don't think they are. They are a way of thinking about the past and the future, they are neither fictional nor fully real. They are a way to resolve issues. When they stop resolving problems and start becoming a problem, it is time to find a new problem-solving technique.
My feeling about lies is very similar, I suppose. Again, I know people that think that lying is always wrong. I certainly don't think so. I will casually lie to people I don't know well about things that are inconsequential. Some stories "tell" better if told in the first person, even if they didn't happen to you. Some truths are incredibly complex, and a technical lie is as close to the truth as you can get without getting into serious personal detail that is none of your interlocutor's business. But just as breaking promises can cost, so can telling lies.
My problem with lying is not a moral one, but a practical one. Lying deforms the datasphere. We, all of us, collect and collate information on people around us, as well as ourselves. We can't help it. Understanding people, predicting their behavior, interacting with them, pretty much requires that we collect and understand data about them. The more superficial our interactions, the less detail we need, the less data we bother to collect, and the less we care about how it all fits together. However, as Teresa Nielsen Hayden has said, "Story is a force of nature." We cannot help but take all the information we get about a person and try to fit it into a coherent narrative. We both want and need to understand people.
When you lie, you deform that data set. Now, the occasional lie is likely to go undetected, if it's not about something important. And depending on exactly what it's about, it may be completely inconsequential. But the thing is, the way we understand people is actually quite complex and subtle. So if we observe someone who claims to truly love animals, but their behavior doesn't seem to quite bear that out, we note that. Not necessarily as a lie, but as an anomaly. If someone tells you stories about the year they spent in between high school and college, we don't particularly note them as important. But if the number of things a person says they did in that time frame starts to add up to an impossible number of things, a set of circumstances that don't really fit within a twelve-month time frame, we tend to notice. We don't always notice on a conscious level. But as we try to understand the story of someone's life, and if there are too many false notes, we do notice that. Sometimes, of course, we are wrong. Some people have completely true but utterly improbable lives. Some people are very good liars and the stories all have an internal consistency and there's nothing out of place or out of character. But those are outliers.
Most people have a story which makes a reasonable amount of sense, within the limits of memory, and we tend to automatically make allowances for the types of errors that the flesh is heir to. However, if someone's story doesn't add up, people tend to feel distrust. Each lie we tell has an unknown effect on the datasphere which is other people's understanding of who we are. Over time, we reveal both in what we say and what we do very complex models of who we are. Each lie has the potential to highlight a conflict. As I've said, telling the truth isn't a guarantee that this conflict will not arise. People's lives are complex, and we always see them through the lens of our own experience. So it's completely possible to misunderstand what someone has said about themselves, or to put various pieces together wrong. But at the point that we feel, either consciously or unconsciously, that someone's story doesn't quite add up, we start distrusting not just the stories but the person. We are less likely reach out to them, either to accept or offer help. Less likely to engage emotionally. It can become insurmountable. We all know someone who has told us so many lies we just don't believe anything they say anymore. This is as much because we can't seem to fit it into a matrix that makes sense as the genuine sense of betrayal.
I don't believe that lying is evil, or a sin. But I do think it does damage to our ability to communicate, often in complex ways we cannot predict. And I think it interferes with our ability to create authentic relationships with each other. I also think that sometimes it is absolutely necessary. So, I try to lie seldom, and only about things which are either utterly trivial, or completely vital. People lie. Mostly people tell the truth. All of this is complicated. But keeping the datasphere as clean as possible seems like the best way to create the bridge between me and you.
Promises and lies are both tools. They are powerful, complex, and dangerous tools that we should try to understand and use within the contexts of our real lives rather than our idealized lives. The fact that we can never truly touch reality, that we must always deal with an approximation of reality, makes all this even more difficult. But, you know, no one ever said being human was a cake walk.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-10-28 04:43 pm (UTC)My own parents were amicable enough when they got divorced. It was a case of their having grown apart. I was in college by then, and my youngest sibling in grade school and my mother earning a decent living on her own, so it wasn't a hardship on the kids. It was weird, emotionally, knowing that the two sources of my own DNA couldn't get along indefinitely.