Tell the Truth, or at Least Don’t Lie (12 Rules for Life)

rule eight is tell the truth or at least don't lie and originally that rule was just tell the truth but then i thought about it which you should do if the rule is tell the truth and um i thought no you better be careful about about putting forward a rule like that because to tell the truth implies that you know the truth and you don't know the truth because you're too ignorant to know the truth like you don't know the truth about anything fully right if you push your knowledge out far enough if i ask

you why about something you're doing enough times it's usually only three or four times by the way you're out answers you don't know and if same generally if i ask you how something works like how does a helicopter work well you know the little whirly things spin and i don't know this thing like rock like entity rises into the air it's like really that's a pretty sad explanation and and you know that's kind of the level of detail that you have about a lot of things so you know you're pretty you're pretty ignorant like everyone

else it's just so well there's just so many help there's just too many things to know you know and they're detailed and difficult and so you get by with pretty shallow understanding of of most things and so you can't really tell the truth but i think you can not lie you know and that's not even the same as not being wrong because of course you're also going to be wrong and you have stupid theories too and they're not even necessarily lies a lie is when you know that what you're saying is not true and you

say it anyways that's a lie and it's a lie that you've decided yourself on the basis of your own knowledge that's a lie you've decided that that's your own moral judgment and so i rewrote the rule to suggest that it's not a good idea to say things that you know not to be true and i would say by the way as a practical issue it's also a worse idea to write things that you don't think are true because you know you're your your your mind is organized at the highest level of abstraction in language and

and it's important that your mind is organized because if you're not organized then you're disorganized and then things don't go well for you in the world just like they don't go well for anything that's disorganized and so you have to be very careful with what you say and what you write writing especially because it's like it's focused speaking it's focused speech like it takes more intense thinking so in some sense writing is even deeper than speaking but you don't want to speak things that you believe to be untrue and you certainly don't want to write

them because that changes you and it changes you in the direction of the deception that you're undertaking while you do the speaking or the writing and you might think now i can write whatever i want and i can just leave it be but that's not true and the reason for that in part is because your knowledge is shallow and so if you take rather shallow knowledge and then you write something detailed that's false you end up convincing yourself in all sorts of ways that you don't even notice that what you wrote that was a lie

was true and then you're stuck with that and it's it's not stuck with it psychologically exactly although it's also that it's stuck with it neurologically because when you learn things and you make new connections you you re you change the structure of your brain and then that's that i mean you know you're it's plastic to some degree but you're messing around with your psychophysiology and that's a bad idea and you know it's a bad idea because you kind of know like everybody knows that if you want to get through the world if you want to

get from point a to point b if you want to get to wherever you're going it'd be good to have a map and it'd probably be good to have a map that isn't full of holes and errors because otherwise you're not gonna get to where you're going you might not even know where you are to begin with and that seems like a bad plan if you're going to undertake a journey and you are going to take undertake a journey because your life is a journey so pathologize your speech then you pathologize the systems that guide

you and then that relates back to rule seven which is well you have an instinct for meaning let's say and it can guide you and you need it and then if you pathologize it by introducing material that you know to be untrue then you distort and and and warp and and and and pathologize the very structure that the the very feeling that you need to place yourself firmly in the world and then you can't rely on yourself and this is a very bad idea because you need to rely on yourself especially in situations of crisis

you know when you have difficult decisions to make and it's it's like well it's not obvious whether i should go right or whether i should go left right because there's a lot riding on both decisions and so you're sweating it out or maybe you have three or four decisions to make at the same time it's like you can talk to your friends and all that and but you you're the guy in the final analysis man it comes down to you and if you can't trust yourself because you've filled yourself up with nonsense then you'll make

the wrong decision and then hey maybe you'll pay for it for the rest of your life and and maybe you'll deserve to as well and so it's very you know you hear now and then university students say uh undergraduates they say well it just i just write what the professor wants to hear and then i get a good grade it's like first of all most professors aren't that corrupt there are corrupt professors but most of them are not that corrupt you have to be pretty damn corrupt before you go that far before a student will

hand you something that's well crafted and well thought through and you'll actually punish them for it you've gone way off the malevolent end of the academic spectrum when you do that now you know maybe you're a bit biased and you'll give them a b plus instead of an a and it's not like that's particularly forgivable but it's not a catastrophe but so i think it's a bit cynical on the part of the undergraduates usually but more importantly it's like what are you going to do you're going to do your whole four-year degree and all you're

going to do is write what you think your professors want to hear and you think you're going to come out educated you think you're going to come out the person you were when you went in it's like no you're not because you've rewritten a different self and you've practiced deceit with regards to your highest moral faculty right your capacity for articulated speech you've practiced that for four years and so then definitely when you come out you're way worse than you were when you went in and that's not education that's that's that's the antithesis of education

better not to be there better to lay bricks right and not and i have nothing by the way against bricklayers way to be bricklayers as far as i'm concerned but at least they can lay a straight brick wall and it will stand up and there's something honest and solid about that much better that than to go and produce written material that that that you don't that your soul isn't in that's that's what the damn education system is for insofar as it's not you know there to train you professionally it's to develop you psychologically and spiritually

and to turn you into a citizen you know into a competent human being you compromise that because of expediency an excuse usually it's it's a very bad idea i would highly recommend against never doing it and i would say the same thing at work whenever it's very psychologically dangerous to say things you know not to be true so and and in part it is because it warps that instinct for meaning