Some people love to live in lies.
I’m not saying that they themselves are dishonest. Some of them might be brutally honest as a default. What I’m saying is, they will believe a pack of lies with every fiber of their beings.
I get it. No one wants to believe they fell for lies. People want to be comfortable in their beliefs, especially when it comes to believing in their own goodness or the goodness of someone they love. We see it in cult members. Present them with the truth, and they’ll claim up and down that this was from “the enemy.” That enemy could be “the Libs,” the “woke media,” “Satan,” or “fake news.”
We can see this in people, too. I was recently talking with my husband who hasn’t wanted to know where he’s missed the mark as a husband because then he’d have to change. I get it. Change is hard. Until recently, he’s deflected, doubled down, and “what about’ed” until I was ready to scream. Facing his own shortcomings was hard for his ego to absorb. He was more comfortable believing that he was perfect and I was being unreasonable. It was a painful wake-up for him to realize that expecting him to take on some of the management of our household was reasonable and that he hadn’t been doing any of it. He lived into the truth and is working to bring the truth and his own self-assessment into alignment; he’s changing for the better, and he’s feeling more positive about himself.
I know a young woman who is pretty much a pathological liar. She’s told a plethora of lies about her mom to whoever will hear them, and two of the people she’s lied to are her Great-aunts. She’s also lied about her little sister who was getting closer to one of those aunts. Her mom told them the truth, sharing with them the painful things this young woman has done to her family. They didn’t want to hear that. On one hand, when I heard this, I thought, how could two such intelligent, intuitive people buy this crap? But on the other, perhaps deep down, they know that it is crap. They know, but they don’t want to admit they know. If they admitted knowing, they’d have to admit to being gullible, and sometimes that’s too painful to bear.
It’s not so very different from those who are in cults, whether it’s MAGA, the LDS church, or Christian Nationalists. There is their version of the truth. There is a carefully curated enemy. And they have been taught that the enemy lies to them, whether through the media or through other people. Then one day, it happens. This one little nugget of information gets through that jostles them. It’s enough that it plants the first seed of a question in their minds. Then comes a painful choice: Do they double-down on what they believe, or do they allow their natural curiosity to lead them down a rabbit hole of discovery? Neither is comfortable. One way leads to stagnation. The other way leads to growth and change. Yet, even though they may stagnate, that little germ of a question won’t leave, won’t be silent, just lays dormant until the next jostling.
Daring to live with uncomfortable truth can lead to painful, necessary growth that ends up being transformative. Living with the comfortable lie might feel okay for a while, but eventually, reality catches up. If you’re someone who’s believed a lie, realizing you were gullible is painful. Who hasn’t been there? But there’s beauty in being the kind of person who lives to trust others. Unfortunately, not everyone is worthy of your kind of beauty.
