File of Lies

Illustration by Robert Neubecker

Hi there. As I told in my other entries, I will try to write as often as I can, although I dont really feel like it very often.

My idea is to use this blog as a way to do introspection but also to share the knowledge, opinions and thoughts I have gathered until now. There are a lot of things in my mind lately, but I guess the best thing is to define a bit how my mind works, so, for that reason, the first entries will be an introduction. I should say that I will keep this informal, at least at the beggining, and in the future I might add more formal elements to future posts (references, links, etc) if I can keep it, and people actually read it (fat chance hahaha)

In the current entry I will talk about "Lies".

So, more specifically, how do I define the concept "Lies"? 

I can define a lie as something that is not truth, although I was quite abstract with the concept of truth in my last entry (also, that would be quite incorrect becuase it would say that fantasy = lie). So I will try to descrive it again.

A lie is an idea, thought, concept, that someone believes is real, and it is not, or if it is real, is not exactly as the one who believes it.

I have noticed that the world is full of lies. You can say that the human brain evolved to lie, and the more intelligent humans are, the better they lie. Lies serve a lot of purposes, like control over others (when we lie to others), or as a way to control oneself's feelings (when we lie to ourselves).

If you walk around you can see lies of all kind everywhere, both when talking or looking to other people, or reading in books, magazines, advertisements.

• some of them are designed to control us, so they make us act in a way that will benefit others. Examples of this are advertisements, politicians...
• others were small lies that were created by ignorance or good will, but they scalate until becoming so big that become independent entities. An example of this can be a religion designed to make people behave in what someone though was "the proper way", but years after the creator of the religion died, people start to fight against each other in order to "protect it".

the world is full of lies that wants to control us to do something 

(buy something, believe in other things...) - photo of Tokio, unkown source

Lies are constructs that reduce our freedom, and keeps us away from truth. I dont like the lies that the world tell to us, but, even if try to fight against them, I dont think they are the worst of them.

No, the worst of them are the lies we tell to ourselves.

This might shock the reader, but is not a thing that is reduced to "some people". All people lie to themselves. Our brain evolved to do so. We lie to ourselves everyday for different reasons. 

• to ease our guilt when we did something wrong ("it was not my fault!")
• to feel better about ourselves ("I came up with this idea, so it should be the best")
• to feel worse about ourselves - thats related with depression, but in a nutshell, sometimes we meke ourselves feel bad in order to feel "special" and "different" ("maybe I am not the best, but at least I am the worst in something, so I am special, even if it is in the bad way")*

*I dont claim that the source of depresion is just that, there are more factors. But I will say that, in my experience, lots of people that are depressed, become depressed because a part of them like to think they are "different" and "special". And that line of though is dangerous, because, this "happiness due being special" make them feel "unhappy", and the "unhappiness" bring more depression, entering in a spirar lof sadness and lies.

In my life I discovered that our mind is full of lies, and those lies limit ourselves and make us "slaves". We lose freedom becuase the lies prevent us to get closer to the truth.

As I told in the last post, truth is the reality, and exists, but we are unable to reach it. However, we can get closer to it, and the more closer we are, the more free we become, and the more happy we can learn to be.

We are convinced that we are free, that we have "free will". However, when we learn about the lies of our mind, we realize that we were not as free as we though. So the only way to be really free is to figure out the lies of our mind and be ready to fight them. Also, the lies of our mind are the things that make us vulnerable to the lies others tell in order to control us.

The concept that better symbolices the lies of the mind is what in psychology is called "cognitive bias".