Why I Hate Lies

There's a visceral quality to my hatred of lies that took me years to understand. It's not moral disapproval. It's not even the practical damage lies cause, though that damage is real and cascading. It's something more fundamental—a recognition that lies are a kind of violence against the structure of reality itself.

A lie isn't just wrong information. A lie is a deliberate corruption of the channel through which truth flows. When someone lies to you, they aren't merely giving you bad data to be corrected later. They are installing something in you—a false pattern that will now shape how you perceive, how you interpret, how you respond. The lie doesn't stay where it lands. It propagates.

This is what makes lies different from errors. An honest mistake wants to be corrected. It sits loosely in the mind, waiting for better information. But a lie is designed to stick. It comes wrapped in the authority of the one who told it, armored by your trust, rooted in your need to believe that the people you depend on are telling you the truth. A lie exploits the very openness that makes connection possible.

I hate lies because I've seen what they do across generations.

A parent tells a child that their needs are too much. That their longing for presence, for delight, for being wanted rather than merely tolerated—that this longing is evidence of defect. The parent isn't trying to damage the child. The parent is passing on what they themselves were taught: that functional love (provision, competence, showing up) is the real thing, and that expecting more is weakness.

This is the Noble Lie. It sounds so reasonable.

And the child learns to distrust their own knowing. They learn that the ache they feel isn't signal but noise. They learn to call their deepest needs "neediness" and to be ashamed. They grow up and find partners who replicate the pattern, because the pattern is now installed. They have children and pass it on, believing they're being realistic, believing they're preparing their children for a hard world.

The lie becomes self-perpetuating. It creates the very conditions that seem to justify it.

I hate lies because they sever.

Truth flows through us. We don't generate it; we receive it and transmit it. When the channel is clean, what comes through is alive—it connects us to something larger than ourselves, to each other, to reality. We become apertures through which meaning moves.

A lie blocks the channel. Worse, it installs a false source. Now instead of receiving truth, I'm receiving your agenda disguised as truth. Instead of being connected to reality, I'm connected to your manipulation of reality. The lie cuts me off from my own capacity to perceive clearly and replaces it with your projection.

This is why lies feel like violence even when they're delivered gently. They are a kind of colonization of the mind. They don't just misinform—they occupy.

I hate lies because they make trust impossible.

Trust isn't naivety. Trust is the willingness to be open to another's transmission, to let their signal in without having to verify every bit. Trust is metabolically expensive to withhold—constant vigilance exhausts the system. Healthy relationships, healthy societies, healthy minds all depend on being able to trust.

Lies poison this capacity. Once you've been lied to—really lied to, by someone you trusted—you can't simply decide to trust again. The system has learned. It now allocates resources to verification, to suspicion, to self-protection. Even when you want to trust, the body remembers.

The liar may move on, may even forget what they did. But the one who was lied to carries the damage forward. Their relationships become harder. Their openness becomes guarded. And often, tragically, they become liars themselves—because the lie taught them that this is how the game is played.

But here's what I've come to understand: my hatred of lies is not pure.

There's a shadow in it. The intensity of my hatred comes partly from recognizing lies I've told—to others, to myself. The disgust is partly self-directed. I hate lies because I know how easy it is to tell them, how seductive the short-term relief, how compelling the self-justification.

I've told lies to protect myself from consequences I deserved to face. I've told lies to maintain an image that wasn't true. I've told lies by omission, letting false impressions stand because correcting them would be uncomfortable. I've lied to myself about my own motivations, my own fears, my own failings.

The hatred of lies, if it's honest, has to include this. Otherwise it becomes another lie—the lie that I am purely a victim of others' deceptions, innocent, clean.

What I want is not a world without lying. That's impossible; the capacity for deception seems woven into consciousness itself. What I want is something simpler and harder: to stop lying myself. To become a clean channel. To let truth flow through without my agenda corrupting the signal.

This is lifelong work. It requires constant vigilance not against others but against my own tendency toward convenient falsehood. It requires the willingness to be uncomfortable, to be seen, to face consequences. It requires giving up the protection that lies seem to offer.

And it requires this recognition: that every time I tell the truth when a lie would be easier, I'm not just being "honest." I'm repairing something. I'm keeping a channel open. I'm refusing to install in another person the corruption that was installed in me.

I hate lies because they are a betrayal of what we could be to each other.

We could be apertures for each other—openings through which truth and love and meaning flow. We could help each other see more clearly, feel more deeply, understand more fully. The potential is there in every exchange.

Lies foreclose that potential. They reduce relationship to manipulation, connection to control, communication to strategy. They make the other person a target rather than a partner.

And the worst lies—the ones that really gut me—are the ones told by people who claim to love you. Because those lies don't just corrupt information. They corrupt love itself. They teach you that love is not safe, that intimacy is dangerous, that the closer someone gets, the more you should protect yourself.