Whilst taking my cold and windy walk tonight, I got to
thinking about the difference between lying and duplicity. As I understand it,
it’s this:
Lying is the deliberate telling of an untruth or the making
of a statement that is intended to deceive. Duplicity is the self-serving and fraudulent
taking of two positions that are diametrically opposed. And the example that I
feel illustrates the difference:
Suppose you’re in a loveless but convenient relationship, the continuance of which you don’t want to jeopardise. You have
an affair with somebody else and your partner grows suspicious. You make up a
fictitious story to cover your whereabouts until two in the morning, and you
deny having an affair. They’re lies.
In a different scenario, your partner questions your lack of
warmth towards them. You protest that they still mean everything to you, you
make up some excuse to cover your behaviour, and you state categorically that
you would never have an affair with anybody else, even though you currently have somebody in mind. They’re lies, too.
Put the two together and you have duplicity.
I find lies very hard to tolerate, but I accept that they’re
a common side effect of human frailty. I’ve told a few of them myself in my time, although things have to be very desperate indeed to persuade me to tell one these days.
Duplicity, on the other hand, is what I could never do. Telling lies injures my
self-esteem; duplicity would torture my soul. Duplicity is something I can never tolerate
in myself or others. I've been on the receiving end of it, and it's a real deal breaker.
2 comments:
Lies of that magnitude would eat at my soul.
When I was dating multiple people at once earlier, I wasn't even straight-up lying to any of them, just leaving out certain details, and I still felt awful, like I was hiding something from them and being immoral.
And when I do lie, I get paranoid very quickly, which usually doesn't end well for me.
So now I like you even more, Maria.
Lying is a multi-faceted phenomenon, though. I often found that a major motivation was the fear of hurting the other person. It seems somehow ironic that it's easier to tell the harsh truth to somebody you don't care about or somebody you're angry with. It often takes a surprising amount of courage to tell the whole truth to somebody whoes feelings you don't want to hurt.
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