Skip to main content

The Problem With Lying

Lying is important in allistic conversation.  But lying confuses me.  People often lie to be polite.  But it isn't polite to lie to me.

This isn't a moral or an ethical issue.  I already have significant communication impediments, and lying adds another barrier to understanding.  It destabilizes interactions by introducing unpredictability.  I can't guess whether or not someone is likely to lie, and I can't begin an interaction if I don't know how it's going to proceed.  If someone lies once, maybe they will always lie.  Or maybe they never will again.  Or maybe whether they might lie depends on a system of factors so complex that I can't hope to understand it.  Lying to me, even to be polite, will always cause a misunderstanding.  I cannot be led along a path of lies to the truth.  I will always lose my way.  That is: I will make the wrong inference.  Knowing this, when confronted with implications I refuse to infer.  And if my interlocutor cannot elaborate honestly, the conversation simply stops.  So this isn't about lying being ethically right or wrong.  This is about lying being an ineffective way to communicate with me.

For this reason I find myself withdrawing even more.  Polite liars are by and large just as incapable of saying the plain truth as I am of seeing through their obfuscation.  And, this is key, in most cases the truth doesn't matter.  Often, the best outcome of correctly interpreting someone's convoluted intimations is the revelation of something mundane.  So it's a lot of work for nothing, at least from my point of view.  Why not then withdraw?  I don't want to waste anymore anxious energy trying to solve riddles for meaningless rewards.  I would rather be inside myself where it's safe.  At least solitude is honest.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Man Is Not Great: The Evolution of Anthropocentrism

Why do humans care whether their species is special? Why are they so invested in their specialness that they're uncomfortable with the idea that they aren't? Why is it a bitter pill to swallow that humans aren't uniquely important in the universe, that they aren't the intended end of evolution, and that their wondrous and diverse subjective experiences emerge from the same physical processes observable in "lower" animals? I think that the maladaptive human tendency to insist upon their specialness in the universe is an extension of an adaptive tendency to self-advocate in their tribes. Consider fear. The predisposition to turn around when you feel like something might be behind you is likely to save you when there really is something there. Most of the time, when you can't help but turn around on the dark basement steps, there's no threat. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s better to turn unnecessarily than to do nothing in a moment of danger. That...
Post a Comment
Read more

Threat and Opportunity

Humans see everything as either a threat or an opportunity. These are the only classifications they have. A threat could be a corporal threat, like a violent person, or it could be a threat to their attention, like a boring person or a waste of time.   You're not in control of whether something looks like a threat or an opportunity. You can certainly apply control to turn one into the other, but your first impressions of anything are unconscious. I'm a waste of time. There's nothing to be gained from socializing with me because I'm profoundly socially impaired. I have no status and no way to earn status, so I'm a threat to attention. People who choose to pay attention to me find the endeavor prohibitively expensive of their energy. Attending to me is necessarily a struggle against the Darwinian impulse to conserve energy.  We can call this a rejection response.   I've said that humans naturally have a psychological allergy to me, but that's not a good...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Save the World

The following isn't related to autism.  It's an edited transcript of my side of a conversation with an AI.  I'm including it here because I think it's important. It should be pretty easy to arrive at the notion that, if we want to minimize our environmental impact, we should look back at a time when we were making a minimal impact and return to that. But that is not a suggestion anyone is making, and I don't think it's a suggestion anyone is likely to make, wherever these conversations are being had.  The conversation about conservation always begins with the tacit question, "How can we continue breeding unchecked forever, and how can we continue to deplete natural resources indefinitely?"  If you start from the idea that what we are doing now must not be impacted by whatever solution we come up with, then you're not going to come up with a good solution. This issue seems complex.  I don't think it's actually complex at all, however. I thin...
Post a Comment
Read more