Dishonesty And Stretching The Truth Sociology Essay

Tad William once said “We tell lies when we are afraid… afraid of what we don’t know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us.  But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.” In relationships and marriages, dishonesty is a love buster. But sometimes honesty is worse, like the article dishonesty it says: “When a wife first learns that her husband has been unfaithful, the pain is often so great that she wishes she had been left ignorant. When a husband discovers his wife’s affair, it’s like a knife in his heart — and he wonders if it would have better not known. In fact, many marriage counselors advise clients to avoid telling spouses about past infidelity, saying that it’s too painful for people to handle. Besides, if it’s over and done with, why dredge up the sewage of the past?” (Harley, 1976) They look at it as just a mistake and want to be forgiven.

People are dishonest because they believe that the others can’t handle the truth, which for most cases its true because the truth most of the time is bitter. But i think that no matter how hard the truth is you should just be straight up and honest. Mark Twain once said “If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.”  Just like Dishonesty article says: “It’s this sort of confusion that leads some of the most well-intentioned husbands and wives to lie to each other, or at least give each other false impressions. They feel that dishonesty will help them protect each other’s feelings. But what kind of a relationship is that? The lie is a wall that comes between the two partners, something hidden, a secret that cannot be mentioned, yet is right under the surface of every conversation.” (Harley, 1976) If you think about it you’re going to have to take a lie and keep adding on to it more and more and you can’t even remember what you said in the beginning so even though telling the truth is difficult it’s the easiest. With a lie you’re always going to get caught up. Just like karma- what goes around comes around. And depending on the lie you can be holding all this unnecessary weight on your shoulders and be stressing about it.

A Russian proverb states “With lies you may get ahead in the world – but you can never go back.” Just like the article Dishonesty states: Dishonesty strangles compatibility. To create and sustain compatibility, you must lay your cards on the table. You must be honest about your thoughts, feelings, habits, likes, dislikes, personal history, daily activities and plans for the future. When misinformation is part of the mix, you have little hope of making successful adjustments to each other. Dishonesty not only makes solutions hard to find, but it often leaves couples ignorant of the problems themselves.” (Harley, 1976) So along with lying not only would you be feeling guilty and stress, you may even regret what you have lied about which makes it even more difficult to confess what you have lied about. A lie can take care of the present and solve what you are going through momentarily, but it does not have a good future. 

Bill Copeland once said: “When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback.”  Once you have become a liar, people cannot believe you no matter how hard you try. They will immediately develop an instinct to question the words that are coming out of your mouth. For instance, we have all heard of the tale “The boy who cried wolf.” The little boy would entertain himself by tricking villagers that a wolf is attacking his flock of sheep. When they came to help him, they found out that it was a false alarm and he just wasted their time. They thought he was just a little boy that was playing around. However, when the boy was actually confronted by the wolf and cried wolf, none of the villagers believed him. In other words, the moral of the story was even when liars tell the truth, they are never believed. 

Some people even lie because they feel desperate, like they steal because they are desperate and in need of money. They do not know where to turn to so they see this as their only way of getting away. Also another example is academic dishonesty. Some students feel really desperate to cheat or plagiarize because they want to pass or earn a decent grade. Other People basically lie sometimes just so they can get straight to what they want, like in the movie sisters keeper, the girl who had Leukemia told her 11 year old sister to lie to her mom saying that she didn’t want to donate her kidney to her, but really it was because the girl with the Leukemia didn’t want everyone to suffer with her. So it was a lie because the daughter didn’t want to hurt her mother.

Kids start learning to lie from their parents, especially when the kid is afraid of the parent. On Feb 10 2008, Po Bronson wrote an article in the New York Magazine it was a study that A doctor in a University made, this is what the article said: “For a study to assess the extent of teenage dissembling, Dr. Nancy Darling, then at Penn State University, recruited a special research team of a dozen undergraduate students, all under the age of 21. Using gift certificates for free CDs as bait, Darling’s Mod Squad persuaded high-school students to spend a few hours with them in the local pizzeria.

Each student was handed a deck of 36 cards, and each card in this deck listed a topic teens sometimes lie about to their parents. Over a slice and a Coke, the teen and two researchers worked through the deck, learning what things the kid was lying to his parents about, and why.

“They began the interviews saying that parents give you everything and yes, you should tell them everything,” Darling observes. By the end of the interview, the kids saw for the first time how much they were lying and how many of the family’s rules they had broken. Darling says 98 percent of the teens reported lying to their parents.

Out of the 36 topics, the average teen was lying to his parents about twelve of them. The teens lied about what they spent their allowances on, and whether they’d started dating, and what clothes they put on away from the house. They lied about what movie they went to, and whom they went with. They lied about alcohol and drug use, and they lied about whether they were hanging out with friends their parents disapproved of. They lied about how they spent their afternoons while their parents were at work. They lied about whether chaperones were in attendance at a party or whether they rode in cars driven by drunken teens.

Most parents hear their child lie and assume he’s too young to understand what lies are or that lying’s wrong. They presume their child will stop when he gets older and learns those distinctions. Talwar has found the opposite to be true-kids who grasp early the nuances between lies and truth use this knowledge to their advantage, making them more prone to lie when given the chance.

Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.” (Bronson, 2008) Basically kids learn how to lie from fear.

One lie that we will never stop having is, lying to ourselves. Lying to yourself maybe to build some confidence, or even maybe to understand something. The article The Human Thing to Do: Lying to Yourself by Vanessa Gilbert says: As humans, we perform a lot of acts we wish we had never done, and we spend a lot of our time on earth regretting what has already been done, something we can’t change. Whether it was that bad breakup, or smoking for twenty years, or even wishing we would have gone out and exercised on those Sunday mornings, we all worry about them and we all lie to ourselves to pretend that it wasn’t our fault, and that we couldn’t have prevented it anymore than what we did. In fact, it seems we lie to ourselves so much we can’t piece the truth apart from the false things we have told ourselves for months on end. If there is one fact I have learned in my thirteen years of life, it is that everything in this world is corrupt in one way or another. That certain aspect, religion, club, organization, or mindset didn’t even start out pure because it was most likely made by humans, who are dirty, selfish, and continually seeking the solace they find in having a solution for everything. I guess you could say that lying to yourself has always been something we have done. You can’t blame this one on popular culture, teenagers, or the failing economy. Humans have lived this way for thousands and thousands of years, and we’ve made it this far thinking the same exact way. Is it okay to be delusional and far from the truth? Is it worth knowing the truth just because it is the truth? Furthermore, would we be better off if we were up front with each other and ourselves?

 It may hurt to face the truth in the beginning, but in the long run, you are guaranteed to be happy. You will be happy with yourself, with the people you love, and with the cold, hard truth, and nothing else. In the process of opening your eyes, you see a lot more than just what’s around you. You see what you missed, what is real, and what is to look forward to. Not everything that is true is harsh. If we do not come to realize what is real, we will continue to be let down, and we will always make the same mistakes. All our energy will all be put into something that is not helping us any. We will neither advance nor go backward. Instead of staying stagnate, why not move forward?” (Gilbert, 2009)

In conclusion, dishonesty isn’t the best thing, and also sometimes it isn’t the worse thing. Society is filled with liars and dishonest people. But there are also people that had only told a few lies. Baltasar Gracian once said “A single lie destroys a whole reputation for integrity”. A single lie might just ruin one’s whole life. So one must watch out and think before talking or doing, so no one can get into lies.

Resources:

Harley, Dr. “Dishonesty.” Marriage Builders ® – Successful Marriage Advice. 1 Jan. 1976. Web. 30 July 2010. .

Bronson, Po. “Are Kids Copying Their Parents When They Lie? — New York Magazine.” New York Magazine — NYC Guide to Restaurants, Fashion, Nightlife, Shopping, Politics, Movies. 10 Feb. 2008. Web. 31 July 2010. .

Gilbert, Vanessa. “The Human Thing to Do: Lying to Yourself – DivineCaroline.” DivineCaroline: Relationships, Health, Home, Style, Parenting, and Community for Women – DivineCaroline. 07 June 2009. Web. 30 July 2010. .