A friend tells the truth to protect you, to prevent you from making serious mistakes and creating future problems.
An enemy tells the truth about every little error or indiscretion you make to blow it into a big issue in order to condemn you and bring you down. Or they tell a lie disguised as truth.
The difference is, a friend sometimes has no choice but to lie to shield you from immediate danger while your enemy lies to gain an upper hand over you. Sometimes the difference can be very murky. You got to be wise or street smart enough to know the difference between a lie or the truth, a friend or a foe. Otherwise you get ruined by an enemy or run the risk of losing a friend forever.
When dealing with family, for goodness sake, tell your loved ones the truth no matter how unsavory the truth is, especially that which would directly affect them. Otherwise that fact would come back and bite you in the butt sooner or later.
Sometimes keeping quiet about the truth is equivalent to telling a lie. One example is the One Eyed Mum story that recently went around the internet. My opinion is it's melodramatic but not completely unrealistic. Some mothers are capable of such gross silly notions that they're protecting their kids by shielding them from reality. Fact is, they're causing more harm than good.
When I was a kid, my dad would tell me about monsters to discourage me from going to places that would get me into trouble. My mom would tell me not to cut my nails at night, presumably because during her time doing so might cause something else to be cut due to dim lighting. Then there's the thing about the grain of rice that cries if you cannot finish it. I'm not sure which is more harmful, telling the truth or telling a lie to achieve a result that you assume your loved ones will benefit from.
ReplyDeletePerhaps that's why we have what they called a 'white lie', which is not supposed to be harmful.
ReplyDeleteI saw an interesting documentary on Animal Planet.
ReplyDeleteA group of researchers studying the learning skills of baby chimps wanted the two baby chimps involved in the research to be able to roam around freely but also have some restrictrions and boundaries.
What they did was , one day they took the baby chimps on a walk outside and as soon as they approached the fence (that they didn't want the chimps to cross), a man dressed in a gorrilla suit jumped on them and beat his chest menacingly and they ran away acting scared.
They said it was a method of imposing psychological barriers somewhat in the same fashion as human parents who perpetuate the 'bogeyman' myth'
The baby chimps were visibly shaking...No one knows the long term effects.
The researchers called it a 'Necessary Evil'