To tell the truth

Truth hardly ever works. People don't want to speak it, people don't want to hear it. "Truth will set you free" is a common saying, but I've got another one for you: "The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable." --Attributed to James A. Garfield.

It starts early. We lie to our parents to keep ourselves out of trouble. It's a natural instinct, one that we still use as adults, to save our phony baloney jobs. It starts with denying you broke your mother's vase, and then becomes telling your boss that you weren't playing on the internet instead of working. The moral code would tell us that it is wrong to do this, because it is lying, and lying is bad. But I think I would feel worse about losing my job for telling the truth than I would about lying to the boss.

You’re not going to tell the truths that are going to hurt people. You're going to approve a person you don’t like on your facebook, you are going to tell someone they look like a goddess when they look like hell, you are going to tell a friend that she’s absolutely right in an argument, even when you know she's wrong. Is the truth really a better alternative in these kinds of situations? Avoiding conflicts is a great benefit. The alternative, telling the truth and hurting people’s feelings in the process, seems unnecessarily cruel.

The truth is just not appropriate all the time. It's not even appropriate most of the time. Truth can be hard and unforgiving. It’s scary. It can be very painful. Some of the time, most of the time, a carefully considered lie can be the moral high ground. I wonder if Mr. Garfield is right and truth can actually set you free, if you can get past the miserable stage?