Lies lies lies

Sometimes I wonder whether the truth is all that important. Lies are these evil things that become an indictment of the character of the person telling them. That's the common perception anyway, but what happens when the lie is justified? Is there any way to readjust morality to allow for it?

Heard of this German movie, I forget the name, but it was about this guy whose mother had been in a coma when the Berlin Wall fell, so she didn't know that East Germany was no longer communist. So he tries to maintain the illusion that things are as they were, in order to avoid upsetting his ill mother. As events progress, the web of lies becomes ever larger. Eventually, things fall apart, inevitably. In such cases, was it immoral for the son to have constructed the falsehoods to protect his mother? Should he simply have told her the truth and risked damaging her health?

Ah, things become complicated when you set aside simple morality and look at motivation. We all live in a web of lies we weave about ourselves. If we see someone we dislike, we generally attempt to be polite, hiding your distaste. There is a constant denial of the most primal desires, such as the sexual drives or disinclinations towards work. Such are all inaccurate representations of the truth of yourself. But can anyone condemn such actions? After all, if we told everybody exactly what we thought of them, society would dissolve into a collection of bickering, acrimonious individuals. The greater good comes to take precedence over personal desires. The only we can do this is by pegging personal gain to social gain. Which is mostly the case. You might be an emotionally more satisfied person if you screamed at your superior for his incompetence, but you would be a less employed individual.

Personally, I think lies are really completely acceptable. The truth is such a subjective thing that it really doesn't matter. It's almost impossible to find two completely concurring opinions on any single fact. In that case, why don't we just pretend to adjust our own thinking to move towards a common consensus that is tolerable for all parties involved. I adopt the philosophy of the lowest upper bound of tolerance. There is a reserve level for any situation, beyond which things cannot be allowed to progress. The thing is to find the lowest upper bound for every other individual in the interaction, and work within that to find a position which is within the bounds for both. This naturally requires a great deal of negotiation, but negotiation is really nothing more than the layering of falsehoods on top of the truth of your opinion. Each party pretends that he or she is happy to move that bit more, and that the final resolution is satisfactory. That is pretty unlikely. The best most can hope for in the result is mutual tolerance. If not, then the positions were similar in the first place, so there would have been no real need for negotiation.

Sigh, it's a saturday afternoon, and I should have better things to do than type here.