People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
~Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
A little lie grows and grows
Pondering the lies
His egos flys
So inflated it touches the sky
Why do I listen to this guy
To defy
I should deny
Simply put, the overarching reason that we lie to ourselves is self-protection. We want to avoid potentially painful reality and the disruptiveness of truth in favor of maintaining a false equilibrium. In essence, we become accustomed to telling ourselves untruths because it’s easier.
A Psychological term known as “cognitive dissonance” is behind the reason why we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves untruths. When we experience cognitive dissonance, we feel an uncomfortable tension between who we believe we are and how we are behaving.
100 days 100 confessions 