Whether it’s fake news, alternative facts, mainstream media propaganda or our government’s lies, it is getting increasingly harder in this Orwellian world of ours to discern truth from lies. In words that are even more true today than ever before, Jung writes, “the lie reaches proportions never known before in the history of the world.”[i] Lying has gone pandemic in our world. From the spiritual point of view, lies are a murder at the level of soul. According to Buddhism, lying in one form or another—be they big or small, lies of commission or omission, to oneself or others—is the root of all evil. As the Buddhist Maharatnakuta Sutra says, “A liar lies to himself as well as to the gods. Lying is the origin of all evils.” One of the most important requirements for confronting the forces of evil is for us to stop lying to ourselves, which is the very act that helps us to cultivate the ability to discern between truth and deception.
Our culture doesn’t supply the adequate vocabulary necessary to describe, express and thereby expose evil. Evil itself has dumbed us down, as we no longer seem able to talk intelligently about the subject. Evil’s inability to be languaged is one of the things that allows it to get away with the murder that it does. Speaking of evil, Denis de Rougemont, author of The Devil’s Share writes, “It is emptying all words of their meaning, turning them inside out and reading them backwards, according to the custom of the black mass. It is inverting and ruining from within the very criteria of truth.”[ii] The sacred mass is about communion with the divine; de Rougemont points out that, as if in a black mass, the darker forces co-opt words, the medium of communication, to have the opposite of their desired effect – to cut us off from our communion with the divine, as well as separate and divide us from each other. The relationship between lying and evil is symbolically expressed by the figure of the devil, who Christ called “a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44)
One way we are all geniuses is our incredible ability to deceive ourselves. When someone lies and falls into the perverse situation of believing their own lies (a form of hysteria called pseudologia phantastica), they can develop a type of charisma such that their lies, through psychic contagion, become very convincing to others. Jung writes, “Nothing has such a convincing effect as a lie one invents and believes oneself, or an evil deed or intention whose righteousness one regards as self-evident.”[iii] Lying to oneself, and then absolutely convincing oneself that one is not doing so, is an extreme form of self-deception that is to be unconsciously hiding from oneself. To quote the former dissident Vaclav Havel who eventually became the first President of the Czech Republic, “Lying can never save us from another lie.” In other words, once we step on the path of lying, lies feed on and off of themselves, weaving a never-ending web of deceit in which we become caught.
Once we become sufficiently committed to—and possessed by—this process of hiding from ourselves, as if in the throes of an addiction, we then become compulsively driven to sustain the lie that we are perpetrating on ourselves by whatever means necessary, lest we snap out of our self-generated cycle of self-deception and have to confront the lie that we have been living. Once our self-deception becomes air-tight, however, it continually doubles-down on itself without end so as to avoid both the light and the dark. We then become an alien to our true selves.
Believing our own lies is a classic version of doublethink: in trying to reduce our own cognitive dissonance, we successfully deceive ourselves, pull the wool over our own eyes (and then forgetting that we have done so), trick ourselves out of our (right) mind, literally brainwashing and hypnotizing ourselves in the process. The result is a split—and toxic—mind that has “danger” written all over it. The consciousness of the person so afflicted, as philosopher Herbert Marcuse put it, has become inured to its own falsity.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in the classic The Brothers Karamazov, writes,
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
When we lie to ourselves, we lose the ability to discern truth from falsehood, both within ourselves and out in the world. This ultimately leads to a lack of self-esteem and even self-loathing, which results in losing our ability to truly love - the greatest tragedy of all.
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