You seem to have a somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of “lying’ (or I do—might be a cultural thing). My understanding of lying is “saying something you know to be untrue”.
Your definition of lying is exactly my own. The difference is that I take “knowing to be untrue” as enough, without requiring that they also narrate “This is a lie, teehee!” as they do it. People rarely do that when saying things they know to be untrue. Because that behavior is conditioned against for obvious reasons.
Far more often, people will say thing they know to be true without admitting to themselves that they know it to be true. They’ll even narrate to themselves the opposite. Because that way, people will conflate “Hasn’t admitted to themselves, against their own interests, that they know that what they’re saying is untrue” with “Doesn’t know that what they’re saying is untrue”, and run defense for them.
You have to distinguish between beliefs and metabeliefs, lies and meta lies, intent and meta intent, or else you end up running defense for people who intentionally choose to say things they know to be untrue, because they would rather mislead in self serving ways than speak the truth, and they know you won’t hold them accountable.
Physicists eventually figured out that energy is conserved, but in hindsight that’s almost a definition of energy. Why do you think we used the label “kinetic energy” for the quantity “1/2 m v^2″ instead of for “1/2 m v^3”? Any property of a system that doesn’t have such constraints isn’t interesting enough to be noteworthy. The whole reason we track “energy” is because it’s a limited resource which can be used to do things and predict what can be done.
Money is a lot like an “economic energy” in that regardless of whether people are being paid in dollars or pesos or gold, watching flows and quantities of money tells you interesting things about the system. And you can’t just “print more” because that dilutes the economic energy. If you could, people would just print it when needed, and you’d think about it as much as you think about the number of people who have an even number of items in their left pocket.
So maybe this woo energy doesn’t have units of joules, in the same way that “economic energy” doesn’t, but it’s certainly conceivable that there are significantly constrained quantities of other systems which become important due to their constraints. Maybe we’re just at the stage where we’ve noticed that you can put energy into objects by lifting them and get it back out later, but haven’t yet figured out how to define “joule” and the laws that dictate how it flows from gravitational potential to kinetic to thermal and back.