Level 3 dishonesty: Involuntary lies

There is a popular but false belief that, in order to be dishonest, you must be aware of the fact that you are being dishonest. In fact, involuntary and willful lies differ only in one’s awareness of them. Involuntary and willful lies are the same in that they are contradictions between your thoughts, feelings, or actions and your honest perception of and interaction with the world around you, to include your actions with other people, but differ in that you are not aware of your choice to lie.

While you remain in a state of dishonesty, your ability to detect whether you are lying or not diminishes.¹ In this way, involuntary lies are as much of a choice as willful lies; the former are caused by the latter.²

The more you lie, the less of a reason you need to lie. Once you are willing to lie about one thing to a certain degree, you are willing to lie about all things up to that degree. With more frequent or intense lies, you will feel less guilty about lying.³ With each lie, you feel less guilty about lying. As you slip further and further away from the truth, you will be able to lie with less and less intentional effort. Eventually, a person becomes capable of telling the most insidious lies without the slightest inner resistance or realization. They lie as easily as they breathe—with no need to think before acting, and without any activation of their sense of guilt.

When you get to the point where you stop noticing at least some of the lies you tell, you have become a pathological liar. Pathological liars don’t have to think about lying to do it any more than you have to think about your heart in order for it to continue to beat. Through repeated choices to lie, pathological liars reach the point where they can’t help but lie. They subconsciously generate lies sufficient to avoid any thoughts that would make them feel bad, including hiding memories of things they did or said and replacing the real reasons they did things. They will only notice their lies when someone more honest points them out, causing a temporary boost to their damaged conscience, and causing a sense of guilt for the first time in a long time. This almost always triggers an outpouring of wrath rather than gratitude and contrite repentance.

Never underestimate the terrible state of a person who can honestly excuse themselves when called on their lies by saying “I didn’t lie intentionally.” Pathological liars are morally much worse than intentional liars. A pathological liar doesn’t notice when they lie because their conscience is so seared⁴ that that can lie without any internal disturbance whatsoever. If one’s conscience is so inhibited that they don’t even notice lying, they have not only lied about many things many times, but they are capable of terrible moral transgressions without any necessary additional decay in character. You should exercise great caution around such people. The fact that so many people openly deny objective truths today may leave you seeing those around you very differently than you have until now.