Your awareness helps you discover what you want and how to obtain it. Lies successively weaken your capacity to determine what is best by reducing your awareness of what options exist and your ability to accurately estimate the cost and benefit of each. Every choice is a selection among options, and to the extent you are unaware of the choices available, inaccurate in your calculation of net benefit, or inconsistent in your preference for what is best, you will fall short of the ideal in what you think, feel, and do.
In order to see what is best, you must know the available options and the long-term cost and benefit of each. To make better decisions, you need greater awareness. The more of reality of which you are aware, and the more accurate your perception, the closer you will grow to knowing what is best in every situation.
As our world continues to grow in complexity, your ability to recognize, extract, evaluate, and act on information becomes more important.1 A little honesty is sufficient to determine what is best in simple situations, but as the complexity of a situation increases, the degree of honesty must increase geometrically in order to obtain the greatest outcomes.2 While complexity makes it more difficult to know what is right, it also makes it more difficult to know what is wrong. The more complex the world becomes, the easier it becomes to lie and the harder it becomes to detect a lie. Complexity provides more opportunities to obfuscate the truth and increases the amount of wisdom necessary to detect a lie, all while increasing the short-term benefit (and, importantly, the long-term cost)3 of lying.
Every lie you live will reduce your awareness of information, reduce your ability to differentiate between truth and falsehood and erode your ability to correctly compare value between alternative options. The more you lie, the more trapped you become by your dwindling ability to detect what is true, valuable, useful, and good:
8 The way of peace they know not; and there is no judgment in their goings: they have made them crooked paths: whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace.
9 Therefore is judgment far from us, neither doth justice overtake us: we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness.
10 We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men. (Isaiah 59)
As your awareness declines, you will be less likely to choose the options that lead to the greatest long-term benefit because you will have a less accurate idea of the options that exist4 and what they are worth than you would if you had greater awareness.
Footnotes
- 1. In a complex system, the effects of limits in depth, breadth, or accuracy increase geometrically. ↩
- 2. The more complex a problem, the smaller the set of potential solutions, and the greater the cost of deviations from them. ↩
- 3. The more complex a problem, the greater the difference between short- and long-term optimality. For example, in a sufficiently complex system, you might be able to generate outsized short-term returns from an investment only to lose it all shortly thereafter, while other opportunities would have predictably generated a lower but net positive yield. This danger lurks in most modernization. For example, the pattern of local optimization through combining diverse entities or locations into fewer and more similar units to generate economies of scale exposes the system to greater danger in the event of change. ↩
- 4. You will see fewer of the options available to you, and you will think that you have options available that you do not. This effect happens at all scales: the set of options you perceive in the moment, on short time scales, and in the long-term will all distort as you turn away from the truth. The more impeded your awareness of options, the less happy you will be, as happiness can only be maximized by selecting the momentary and lifelong choices that actually lead to the greatest joy. ↩