Incoherence inhibits your ability to obtain what you seek

One of the reasons that authenticity ought to be more common is because it is the obviously optimal way to obtain whatever it is you seek. Authenticity doesn’t require altruism, just common sense. To lie is to move away from whatever it is you desire. Because reality is governed by laws of cause and effect, any willful deviation from your estimate of how things really are is a choice for worse outcomes, less confidence, and more negative surprises. Dishonesty always removes you from reality, and this is always bad.

The pernicious idea that reality is subjective is a cancer that has metastasized in the modern world. The insistence by modern culture that reality is whatever you want it to be creates cascading implications, each with cascading consequences:

• There is no law of cause and effect.
• You deserve whatever you desire.
• Any negative experience is someone else’s fault.

Today, we find people challenging objective reality in ways so extreme that doing so just a few years ago would have resulted in them being committed for insanity. Here are just a few examples:

• They pretend that men can choose to be women, and women can choose to be men.
• They pretend that men and women are the same, and that they are interchangeable.
• They pretend that people don’t age, and that older people are interchangeable with younger people.

Those increasingly encouraged to dissociate from reality under the lie that reality is just a social construct unsurprisingly suffer from unprecedented amounts of mental illness and general inability to cope with even normal challenges in life. Those who deny reality are doomed to accumulate the involuntary effects of choosing to ignore it.

Denying reality will cause you future pain in terms of consequences that could have been avoided as well as regret over the loss of better outcomes that could have been yours if you had been more honest.

Joy comes from meaningful progress towards worthwhile goals.¹

Many deceive themselves, pretending that anything other than learning and living according to the truth can result in happiness.² No matter what you seek, dishonesty cannot draw you nearer to it; it can only offer empty promises based on what is not true, and therefore cannot enduringly occur.³

A dishonest person cannot make as much progress towards goals that are as worthwhile as they could if they were honest. To the degree you think, feel, or act contrary to the truth, you cannot effectively aim, no matter what you are aiming for. To intentionally act contrary to the truth, as far as you know it, requires you to believe that throwing a dart away from the target will result in something closer to the center than actually aiming. Of course, this is absurd. Yet, all dishonesty is at least as absurd for those who claim to believe in objective reality.