I find it vastly easier, personally, to lie with falsehoods rather than bullshit.
That’s really interesting. I’m the exact opposite. Growing up, I really hated the idea of lying, so much that I resolved to never do it. What happened? I became great at deceptive half-truths and selective exaggerations and omissions. I don’t still hold that pledge to never lie (I think I told my first at around age 12), but to this day I’m a crummy, crummy liar. I think basically anyone could catch me in a lie, so I almost never do it. My guess is that’s because I had ~no experience practicing my lying in childhood when the consequences were mild.
I’m not sure if this made me better at keeping a story straight through a bunch of deceptive, selective half-truths than I would otherwise be. Fortunately these days staying honest is almost always the best policy.
As I allude to in the footnote, I find this easier in significant part because it is easier to put someone in the category “does not deserve the truth” (sometimes merely temporarily) than to concoct a mixture of half-truths I can believe enough to say them.
An example I sometimes relate, is an essay I was supposed to write for my high school vice-principal. He had instituted a weekly charitable service requirement, and we had to write five hundred words, weekly, about our experiences. I mostly did Habitat, because at least I could be sure I did something useful for someone, which was not common among my classmates, and the writing was harder than the labor, because… it wasn’t making me a better person. I tried to find some lesson that I could plausibly pretend mattered, and that was enormously difficult.
And then for the last one, I wrote about a thousand words on my reflection of the whole program, and whether it was achieving its goals, and precisely why I thought it had completely failed, both for me and all my classmates. Politely, but honestly.
He flipped his shit. Called me into his office, called my parents, I forget the rest.
So that night I wrote another essay, telling him exactly what he wanted to hear. My dad asked why I didn’t write that the first time. I replied that there wasn’t a single word in it I believed. And that was because, in that day, my vice principal had left the category of ‘people to be reasoned with’ and entered the category ‘idiot to be routed around.’ I was not dealing with this man like an equal[1], but an inferior.
This remains a much easier mental motion than bullshitting. This says good things about my honesty and, I expect, bad things about the rest of my moral character.
Let alone superior. I’m not sure I’ve ever related to anyone like a superior in my life, and it sure wasn’t in high school if I did. That got me into considerably more trouble than this bit did.
That’s really interesting. I’m the exact opposite. Growing up, I really hated the idea of lying, so much that I resolved to never do it. What happened? I became great at deceptive half-truths and selective exaggerations and omissions. I don’t still hold that pledge to never lie (I think I told my first at around age 12), but to this day I’m a crummy, crummy liar. I think basically anyone could catch me in a lie, so I almost never do it. My guess is that’s because I had ~no experience practicing my lying in childhood when the consequences were mild.
I’m not sure if this made me better at keeping a story straight through a bunch of deceptive, selective half-truths than I would otherwise be. Fortunately these days staying honest is almost always the best policy.
As I allude to in the footnote, I find this easier in significant part because it is easier to put someone in the category “does not deserve the truth” (sometimes merely temporarily) than to concoct a mixture of half-truths I can believe enough to say them.
An example I sometimes relate, is an essay I was supposed to write for my high school vice-principal. He had instituted a weekly charitable service requirement, and we had to write five hundred words, weekly, about our experiences. I mostly did Habitat, because at least I could be sure I did something useful for someone, which was not common among my classmates, and the writing was harder than the labor, because… it wasn’t making me a better person. I tried to find some lesson that I could plausibly pretend mattered, and that was enormously difficult.
And then for the last one, I wrote about a thousand words on my reflection of the whole program, and whether it was achieving its goals, and precisely why I thought it had completely failed, both for me and all my classmates. Politely, but honestly.
He flipped his shit. Called me into his office, called my parents, I forget the rest.
So that night I wrote another essay, telling him exactly what he wanted to hear. My dad asked why I didn’t write that the first time. I replied that there wasn’t a single word in it I believed. And that was because, in that day, my vice principal had left the category of ‘people to be reasoned with’ and entered the category ‘idiot to be routed around.’ I was not dealing with this man like an equal[1], but an inferior.
This remains a much easier mental motion than bullshitting. This says good things about my honesty and, I expect, bad things about the rest of my moral character.
Let alone superior. I’m not sure I’ve ever related to anyone like a superior in my life, and it sure wasn’t in high school if I did. That got me into considerably more trouble than this bit did.