What if I told you that everyone is a liar? That you are a liar. I am a liar. It is true, I have bent the truth and embellished a little in order to gain something. Whether we are conscious of it or not we all participate in a form of lying. In Stephanie Ericsson’s “The Ways We Lie”, Ericsson shows us the various embodiments a lie can take. Throughout the text, she explores the normalization of lying in not only her life but in society through the different forms of a lie and prompts us to stop accepting the lies we are told. The normalization of lies, lying, and liars have made us almost accustomed to them, so much so that we cannot even recognize when we are being lied to; however, it is important for us to stop allowing lies into our lives by recognizing how we lie, why we lie, and the effects of our desensitization to lies.

In a world full of diversity, not only of culture but of thought, it is no surprise that everyone has a different definition of a lie. A lie to some might be the bending of the truth, while to others a lie may be the action of leaving out particular details. In Stephanie Ericsson’s “The Ways We Lie”, she presents ten different forms of lying: the white lie, façades, ignoring plain facts, deflection, omission, stereotypes and cliches, groupthink, out-and-out lies, dismissal, and delusion. While many may view most of these as obvious forms of lying, there are some that people may not view as lying, it is not technically a lie, but yes it is a lie. For example, Ericsson said, “All the "isms" —racism, sexism, ageism, et al.—are founded on and fueled by the stereotype and the cliché, which are lies of exaggeration, omission, and ignorance. They are always dangerous. They take a single tree and make it a landscape. They destroy curiosity. They close minds and separate people.” Ericsson discusses the social issues that exist in our society today and how they are rooted in stereotypes or cliches. Stereotypes and cliches are lies; they are assumptions made based on one individual instance that later becomes a generalization for an entire group of people. Following or believing stereotypes is a form of lying, we are lying to ourselves about the nature of those being stereotyped and most importantly we are lying to that group of people, telling them that the stereotypes are who they are when in almost every instance that is very far from the truth. Later in the text, Ericsson states, “...the tendency to see excuses as facts. It's a powerful lying tool because it filters out information that contradicts what we want to believe...Delusion uses the mind's ability to see things in myriad ways to support what it wants to be the truth.” Ericsson defines delusion as another form of lying, except in most cases of delusion you are the one lying to yourself. Delusion allows us to completely disregard particular information as if it does not exist, specifically when that information does not support what we want to believe is true. Delusion is a reality of our own making, a warped reality. In “Why We Lie, And The Neuroscience Behind It”, an article for Forbes written by Christine Comaford, she writes about how lies are a part of our everyday life, specifically in the workplace, and how our brains register both telling and hearing lies. In the article, Comaford states, “Three key parts of our brain are stimulated when we lie. First, the frontal lobe (of the neocortex), which has the ability to suppress truth—yes, it’s capable of dishonesty due to its intellectual role. Second, the limbic system due to the anxiety (hi, amygdala!) that comes with deception—and yes, when we’re lied to our “Spiderman sense” here can perk up, just as we can feel guilty/stressed when we’re doing the lying. And third, the temporal lobe is involved because it’s responsible for retrieving memories and creating mental imagery.” Comaford describes what parts of our brain are being used when you tell a lie: the frontal lobe, the limbic system, and the temporal lobe. It is especially interesting to read that our frontal lobe has the capability to lie because it is intellectual; this means that everyone who has a brain is more than capable of lying. Also, the involvement of the temporal lobe is really important to how we lie because the most common form of lying is the act of making up situations or facts so the temporal lobe, because it is responsible for imagery, can create very vivid situations that to others will be very believable. Being able to know how we ourselves lie makes us less susceptible to being lied to because we will be able to recognize which form of lying others are utilizing because we can recognize the method from our own experience, but why do they lie to us? Why do we lie?

It is safe to say we have all told a lie, whether it was a white lie or a major lie, but what goes through our heads before we tell the lie? What is our motivation to avoid speaking our truth? Comaford states, “We lie to save face, to avoid hurting other people’s feelings, to impress others, to shirk responsibility, to hide misdeeds, as a social lubricant, to prevent conflict, to get out of work, and many more reasons.” Comaford lists a multitude of reasons as to why we might lie, we lie for our own personal benefit or for the benefit of those around us whom we care about. Similarly, Ericsson says, “We lie. We all do. We exaggerate, we minimize, we avoid confrontation, we spare people's feelings, we conveniently forget, we keep secrets, we justify lying to the big-guy institutions.” Not only does Ericsson give reasons for lying, she even goes as far as to mention how we might go about doing so. Both Comaford and Ericsson express lying for the benefit of others, specifically to avoid hurting the feelings of others. We use white lies as a form to do so, for instance, what do you say to your friend when they ask you how they look? Do you tell them the truth and say their hair has looked better, or do you respond with a lighthearted ‘of course’ in order to avoid making them feel insecure? Of course, not all lies are altruistic, some are utilized by opportunists trying to get ahead at any expense. Acknowledging the reasons for our lies allows us to understand what situations make us feel as if we need to lie. Knowing this gives us the opportunity to be able to remove ourselves from the situation or recognize the situation when others are placed in it. At the end of the day, regardless of why we lie, it comes down to whether we believe the benefit of the lie outweighs the consequences.

After continuously telling and being fed lies it becomes difficult to differentiate the truth from the lies. That is a direct effect of our desensitization to lies, lying is a normal and even essential part of our society now. For example, in “The Ways We Lie” by Stephanie Ericsson she states, “Our acceptance of lies becomes a cultural cancer that eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes as invisible to us as water is to a fish.” Ericsson describes our inability to see how our inclination to lie has impacted our ability to see the truth and differentiate between right and wrong. She also states, “When do we stop turning over our personal power and responsibility to liars?” Ericsson is referring to how we allow politicians, oftentimes corrupt, to make decisions for our lives. Politicians historically do not have the best track record for being honest, they lie to get elected into power and then abuse the people who put them there. In the New York Times article, “The President’s Taxes: Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance” by Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and Mike McIntire, they write about President Donald Trump and his tax returns, which he had kept hidden from the public since his campaign in 2016 due to the incriminatingly low amount of tax dollars he has paid as well as his many failed business ventures. The article states: “The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes.” Donald Trump based his campaign on being a self-made, successful businessman, but his tax records indicate the opposite. Donald Trump is the epitome of a liar, yet he is the man Americans chose to put in office in 2016. Our inability to see through lies and façades led us to give a liar executive power over our entire country. Our societal desensitization to lies puts us in jeopardy, we will continue to believe lies because we do not know better.

We need to stop allowing people to lie to us, as liars we have the ability to realize when and why we are being lied to. It is time we realize how our willingness to lie and be lied to has caused us to live in a delusional life where our acceptance of lies has affected our reality. We as a society are a cultivated group of liars. We lie every day and we do not even register it; sometimes we do not even feel remorse for doing so. We have started to believe our own lies and those fed to us by others. Our society has become so accustomed to lies that when we are presented with the truth, we can not recognize it, so we do not believe it. Gaining the ability to see how we lie allows us to recognize the lies being told to us. In the vast forms of lying is stereotyping and delusion. Stereotyping is a very damaging form of lying because you are generalizing people into a category that is incorrect that creates a reputation or certain expectation for the group of those being stereotyped. Delusion is definitely the most dangerous and maybe most prevalent form of lying. The act of delusion is purposefully ignoring facts that do not coincide with the reality that we have created in our heads. This is very dangerous because the further into delusion you go the more difficult it is to see the truth. Our brains play an integral part in our lies. When we lie our brains are working very hard, the frontal lobe is subduing the truth, the temporal lobe is creating mental images of our lie, and the limbic system is feeling remorse or stress for telling a lie. When we lie, we lie for a variety of reasons. We lie to protect those we care about and we lie for our own personal gain. We think that it is necessary to make others feel good at the expense of our morality, or we believe that we have to get ahead at the expense of others. Either way, we always choose to lie instead of being forthcoming with the truth. The lies we have grown to accept have blinded us to the very apparent truth, so much so that we have even jeopardized our safety as Americans. A large portion of Americans ignored the truth and chose to believe, a politically inexperienced businessman, with the future of our country. They gave him the highest form of authority, an authority which he abuses. Not to mention the fact that he lied in order to get elected and continues to lie in order to protect his ego and reputation. Shockingly after the unmasking of all his lies, there are people who continue to believe him. So in the words of Stephanie Ericsson, “How much do we tolerate before we become sick and tired of being sick and tired?”