When Can You Lie?
Having explored varying cultural approaches to truth, let’s tuck into lies. While lying may seem like a reasonably clear-cut subject, the acceptance of “little white lies” within most cultures and wildly varying definitions of “white lies” demonstrates it is not. Different cultivars feature a fascinating variety of domains in which lies are acceptable, rituals that prohibit lies (such as the secular “pinkie swear” or religious oath to God), and rituals that absolve lying individuals of guilt (such as the practice of crossing one’s fingers).
Catholics, for example, leverage a common mechanism many cultures use to permit lying: A prohibition on lying but not on linguistic deception. In one story, a Church father is being chased by the Romans while in disguise. They overtake his ship and, not recognizing him, ask: “Have you seen the person we are looking for?” to which he responds, “Yes! He was going that way” (and points in the direction his ship was headed before being apprehended). In the context of the story, this misdirection is seen as 100% ethical and the same as not lying at all, even though the Church father was deceitful.
You’ll see this mechanism more commonly used in lower stakes contexts—like a fundamentalist Catholic saying to an atheist that: “I think you could teach me a lot,” to be polite while secretly meaning that they have nothing to learn from the person about religion but might have something to learn from them on another topic.
Another Catholic lying mechanism leveraged by many cultures involves the concept of “Mental Reservation” (we’re showcasing Catholics a lot in this section not because they utilize more loopholes around lying, but because they are better at documenting them than other cultures, making these mechanisms easier for an outsider to understand). According to a report by the Dublin Archdiocese, “mental reservation is a concept developed and much discussed over the centuries, which permits a churchman knowingly to convey a misleading impression to another person without being guilty of lying.”
The report presents the following example:
“John calls the parish priest to make a complaint about the behavior of one of his curates. The parish priest sees him coming but does not want to talk to him because he considers John to be a troublemaker. He sends another of his curates to answer the door. John asks the curate if the parish priest is in. The curate replies that he is not.” adding “This is clearly untrue but in the Church’s view it is not a lie because, when the curate told John that the parish priest was not in, he mentally reserved the words ‘…to you.’”
These sorts of loopholes around dishonesty seem to have evolved to make it difficult to lie to top-level officials inside the culture and relatively easy to lie to people outside the culture (as well as less informed and sophisticated members within the culture). They allow for this because top-level officials will understand these loopholes and know how to ask questions in a manner that circumvents them.
As for rituals like being able to lie when you cross your fingers: We suspect these are just soft culture artifacts that begin to appear in hard cultures over time to make it easier to follow.
Many cultures also commonly permit lying in certain situations—particularly scenarios in which lying enables one to advance the culture’s goals or serve the culture’s values. Taqiyya, for example, is an Islamic concept that essentially means it is OK to hide or otherwise misrepresent your religious beliefs if failing to do so will get you killed or otherwise seriously persecuted (jailed, etc.).
Taqiyya stands in stark contrast to clear rules in early Christianity against denying one’s faith, but we imagine those rules were more a product of cultural obsessions with martyrdom in early Christianity than a condemnation of lying, as we see reports of other forms of deceit happening in the early Church.
It almost cannot be overstated how important martyrdom was among early Christians. Martyrdom resulting from an adherent’s unwillingness to deny their faith was particularly common in the early Christian Church and perceived as uniquely virtuous. This form of martyrdom was actually so important to early Christians that when Constantine legalized the faith, many of the most devout Christians had a bit of a “freak out” and wandered out into the desert to live alone and pout over not being able to get themselves killed attesting their faith (the practice of monasticism eventually evolved out of this).
That Muslim culture framed throwing one’s life away as a not-particularly-virtuous act was what likely gave birth to Taqiyya. It was probably pretty clear to Mohmmad that if he did not explicitly say it was immoral to get yourself martyred in that way, Muslims might start doing it too. The downside to Taqiyya-like practices is that they allow surrounding cultures to build suspicion that your actual religious beliefs are more insidious or extreme than you are letting on. Such suspicion can be leveraged by those who want to persecute your group.
Though lying is typically convenient and/or beneficial in the moment, there are three important reasons why cultivars evolve prohibitions against it:
- Lying to outsiders: If people of a certain culture are consistently honest, you will be much more likely to do business with them than with members of a less trustworthy culture. Once a group develops a reputation for lying, they may as well always lie, as outsiders must assume that everything they say is a lie. (Debt in countries where lying is more common costs more because it is costlier to manage.)
- Lying within a culture: Monocultural teams become dramatically more efficient if a cultivar can prevent lying among adherents. When you’re not obligated to vet information shared by a fellow team member and there is no risk fellow team members will behave dishonestly, your team can easily outcompete even better-run organizations that do need to worry about such things.
- Lying to leaders of a culture: As described above, some cultures have developed loopholes that only prevent lies by subordinates to superiors but not by superiors to subordinates. These loopholes grant most of the benefits of lying while at the same time enabling group leaders to operate with relatively low fear of misinformation. This markedly increases the efficiency of the central hierarchy. (It makes sense that loopholes like these would evolve within cultures that lean heavily on institutions that centralize power.)
You may think a cultural stance against any form of deceit is the correct choice, however categorical bans on deception can produce unintended consequences. Calvinist tradition condemned all forms of deception in all contexts (to the extent that even pursuits like acting were heavily frowned upon, as acting is technically a form of deceit). The Salem Witch Trials exemplify a common weakness of such systems: Because the culture was so unaccustomed to even the idea that a person might lie, a handful of teenage girls realized they could just make stuff up and people would accept their statements as fact.
In Catholic heretic trials, it was assumed that individuals might lie, so court practices were created to account for this, which led to dramatically fewer senseless deaths than Calvinist witch trials, in which participants generally assumed that no Puritan would ever lie or be deceitful. Learning to deal with deceit on a day-to-day basis is critical if a culture is to develop resilience against what we can only call “stupidity cascades.”
Keep in mind that fastidious honesty doesn’t even guarantee that a culture will be seen favorably by other cultures. Ebenezer Scrooge, the classic Calvinist stereotype (discussed in detail in the appendix section “Calvinist Stereotypes in Media”), is pictured as going very far out of his way to never lie or break a business deal, like most Calvinist stereotypes.[[163]](#_ftn163) While there are dozens of examples of Scrooge’s honesty in A Christmas Carol,[[164]](#_ftn164) his candid remarks most commonly serve to make him look bad—the point being that the Calvinists are often framed as unethical in popular media even though they are vehemently honest and never misleading (normally due to the Calvinist view that most charity is self-indulgent virtue signaling).
Sidebar: From the perspective of his own culture, Ebenezer Scrooge was very ethical. He had not withheld money from Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit so he could spend it on himself (he lived in constant cold, never spending more money on coal than necessary, inhabiting a sparse, dark room to save money on oil, and eating homemade gruel to avoid reliance on waitstaff). Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit presented an incredibly inefficient use of philanthropic capital. It is not as though Scrooge was amassing money for his kids or something (he didn’t have any)—Scrooge is what an outsider sees when bumping into a long-term-oriented person who is disinterested in virtue signaling (and who therefore thinks there are more effective uses for capital than handouts to his personal network). While Charles Dickens’ witty prose is like catnip to Simone, we cannot help but joke that A Christmas Carol is a non-Calvinist’s “corrective rape” fantasy about a Calvinist strawman.
So, what do we recommend for our personal House cultivar? The drawbacks of traditional Calvinist honesty strike us as being too great, plus they offer little upside, so we aren’t keeping it. As there is little downside to a culture always being honest to other members of that culture so long as said honesty can be effectively enforced (presumably by flagging and heavily shaming individuals who do lie within that culture while also kicking them down a peg in the cultural hierarchy), we maintain a “don’t EVER lie to fellow members of House Collins” policy.
As for outsiders, it would seem sensible to lie when it suits you while understanding that you will be punished if you are caught—with one hard caveat: Never lie to one of your benefactors (an investor, a customer, a constituent, or someone who has otherwise put their faith in you). While there are downsides to being fastidiously honest in social situations, there are almost none for being fastidiously honest in business and it is an easy distinction to draw in life. Our family already has a reputation for being obsessively dedicated and honest as managers (with our foregoing pay for well over a year to ensure we did not lay off any staff during the pandemic and our brother and sister-in-law refusing a raise from their board because it wasn’t in the initial contract they signed). Being honest in business to an extent that looks stupid or comedic to outsiders is very useful in that it makes it easier to raise money, often reduces the cost of debt, and gives you a competitive edge even when your company is selling an equivalent product at an equivalent price.