/lit/ - Literature

There are a few things to be understood.

One is, lies are very comfortable - mostly so when you don't know the truth. Somebody says to you, "I love you." He may be lying, he may be lying not knowing that he is lying, because he has been saying the same thing to many people. He does not mean much, but to you, it touches your heart.

Now to know the truth may be disturbing. He may be lying; he may be unconscious, a compulsive liar. The truth may be that he has never loved. That seems to be the situation in the world, that people have never loved, they have only believed that they love; otherwise there cannot be so much misery. Love would have removed all this misery.

Secondly, lies are easy. You don't have to seek and search and go on for a long pilgrimage. You can invent them. You cannot invent truth, you can only discover it. And people are ordinarily choosing the shortcut. Why go the hard way? And the lie seems to be a very shortcut - you cannot find more of a shortcut. You can invent it at any moment, any lie

But to discover the truth you have to risk your life. You have to go against the whole structure of lies around you. You have to become a lonely traveler, not even certain whether anything like truth exists or not. It needs tremendous courage. Lies don't need any courage; any coward can do it. All the cowards are doing it: fabricating, manufacturing beautiful lies, decorating them, presenting them to each other. For a moment it looks to be giving happiness, but a lie after all is a lie. Soon you have found it is a dead toy. You have been deceived, hence the misery.

But still people don't see the basic cause. They think, "This man has deceived me, this woman has deceived me." It is not a question of this man or this woman. This whole society is living in such a way where the lie has become the way of life. The better you can lie, the more logically you can make your lie appear, the more respected you will be.

Lies bring respect, rewards, Nobel prizes. Truth brings death, crucifixion. So why should people bother about truth?