Necessary Lies

It’s always a good idea to tell the truth, right?

I mean, this is kind of human 101: any good moral code should have honesty at its core. You can’t communicate with anyone if you can’t trust them, and communication is one of our main human superpowers.

Well, actually…

…there are times when lying is actually a good idea. These might be called white lies, implying that they’re harmless, although not all little lies are actually harmless.

I’m talking about lies we tell to children in order to get them to understand how the world works, for one thing.

We exaggerate and tell kids that their flesh will melt off if they touch the hot stove. We tell them not to swallow watermelon seeds, or else a watermelon will grow in your stomach. Gum takes seven years to digest. You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.

There are lies we tell kids so that we don’t have to explain uncomfortable things, like how storks bring babies, or how there’s someone watching you all year-round, determining whether you get a reward or not at the end of the year. These lies kick the explanation can down the road a few years, hopefully to a time when the kid is ready for your explanation.

Death is a big one. Kids aren’t always ready to deal with the loss of a loved one, so adults might tell one of those little lies to try to make acceptance easier. Maybe the loved one has “moved on to a better place”, or maybe they’re just sleeping for a long time.

As kids get older, they need different useful lies. Is it okay to tell a seven year old that if they take someone else’s meds, they’ll feel bad, even if that might not be true? It’s tough to explain the idea of long-term psychological addiction to a child, or that their physiology might be a bit different due to a slight difference in hormone balance.

Telling someone everything is going to be okay, especially when you know it might not be, is a bit more tricky. A prisoner of war might act as a bright ray of hope by telling everyone everything will be fine, and that sort of pretend-optimism has proven to lead to higher survival rates. Act as though you know you’re going to be just fine, the thinking goes, and it might actually turn out that way.

And then there are the lies we tell kids (and adults) in school. These are lies we deliberately decide to pass along, with the idea that a lie can make the truth easier to grasp.

Take physics. There’s an awful lot going on under the surface, and things at the very smallest scale—or at the very largest—are not what they seem to us. Suffice it to say, physics is complicated, and understanding the way the world works takes some intellectual maturity.

That’s why we give them the Bohr model of the atom today, even though we’ve known for decades that atoms don’t orbit a nucleus like planets going around our Sun. This really simple representation of an atom does the trick, though, and gives you a useful starting point toward actual understanding.

I bet you were taught that gravity was one of the four forces of nature, but unless you made it through to more advanced physics classes, you might not know that gravity is the warping of spacetime, not really a force that pulls like the other fundamental forces.

History is rife with little lies. Remember how the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand started World War I? No, it didn’t, and stop being silly.

Christopher Columbus didn’t exactly discover the Americas, either. I’m honestly not sure how this is taught in school today, because even when I was in school, there was some awareness of early Viking expeditions to North America led by Leif Erikson five centuries earlier, not to mention the original American settlers who first came to the land many millennia ago.

Even still, Columbus represents a monumental and symbolic start to colonialism, and this watershed moment affected the world in profound ways. Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was a trigger, so at least it gives you an idea that there was some kind of conflict between nations. It’s a start, in other words.

So, some lies really do seem to be necessary, although the truth always seems to be waiting for when you’re ready. Oversimplification in the name of greater safety or understanding seems justified by necessity.

How do you personally deal with this intersection? Are there lies you have to tell people on a regular basis? How do you navigate between a lie that might be helpful and a lie that might be harmful?