Interviewer: "What's your biggest fault?"
Candidate: "I'm honest"
Interviewer: "I don't think that's a problem!"
Candidate: "Who the hell cares what you think!"
OK, more serious answer. No, we should not always all be honest. Sometimes there are little white lies that make people feel good (or, at least, not bad) at no cost. Other times, lying is a deeply moral act:
"Are you hiding Anne Frank in your attic?"
"No" is the correct reply, regardless of whether it is true.
And sometimes we lie to save our own lives or our own senses of self. These are probably OK too. If we each had a really honest sense of how important we are in the grand scheme of things, the suicide rate would be a lot higher.
Finally, as Terry Pratchett noted, believing in little lies is practice for believing the big ones - like truth, mercy and justice. And humans need fantasy to become the place "where the falling angel meets the rising ape".
Read other answers by Peter Flom on Quora:
- What are the biggest lies you can tell in the fewest words?
- Can the US President lie to his people?
- Under what situations should we tell lies?
from Quora http://ift.tt/29kiZ3L
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