Club contest, 1st place
Area C3 contest, 3rd place
Fellow Toastmasters, Honored Guests.
I'd like to talk to you tonight about something that everyone of us does, and nobody admits.
Please clear your dirty minds, I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about lying.
I started thinking about this when I told my daughter that it wasn't her parents who watched her and knew that she wanted a toy kitchen, it was the old man with the beard at the mall.
Why do we lie, and is it really wrong to do it?
Clearly I have a moral dilemma. I chose to approach this dilemma from three different viewpoints.
The first viewpoint is religion. If there is one thing all of the world's religions agree upon, it is that lying is wrong. You would hope for love your fellow man, even if he doesn't follow your beliefs, but no, it's lying is wrong.
In the 4th century, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote not one, but two books about lies. He says that lying about the teaching of religion is the worst lie of all, and then categorizes the rest of lies into 8 groups that differ primarily by 'who is hurt, who is helped.'
The most benign lie is one where nobody is harmed, and someone is helped. Honey, I'm sorry, I left the dryer on high, and that's why your jeans shrunk.
The second worst lie is harming someone while helping nobody. Of course OJ Simpson didn't kill his ex-wife and her boyfriend because that glove didn't fit.
I found it strange that the person most responsible for the promotion of Christianity, who condemned lying, knew so much about lying. It was not consistent. I went to my next viewpoint.
Governments. The one thing all governments agree on is that lying to them is wrong. You would hope for world peace or feeding the hungry, but now, they all agree only on lying to them is wrong.
And it is clear they take it seriously. In the state of California, the maximum prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter is 4 years. The maximum penalty for perjury, lying to the government, is 4 years. One lie equals one life.
Right now, a major league baseball player is facing charges of perjury because he allegedly used steroids, that are not illegal, and were not prohibited in baseball at the time. However, because a congressman, all of whom of course never lie, called him forward to a committee and forced him to testify against himself, told him to admit to embarrassing evidence to the entire world, or have the world assume his guilt if he is silent, he may go to jail for doing something that wasn't a crime.
So the laws of man are also inconsistent.
The third viewpoint I considered was the laws of nature. As a scientist, I can assure you that these are not written down in detail, so I had to make assumptions.
If we are indeed the result of a massive competition by the survival of the fittest species, one could view our achievement as the apex predator as a war. Using a war analogy for natural selection, I referred to perhaps the most insightful book on war, 'The Art of War' by Sun Tzu.
Sun Tzu declared that "All warfare is based on deception." This makes sense, the best way to lose a battle is to tell your opponent when and where you will attack.
Machiavelli, perhaps wrongly attributed as the King of (Human) Liars, advised in The Prince "never to attempt to win by force what can be won by deception." Or, he says that it is better to lie than to hurt someone. Which is contrary to the state of California.
The Laws of God and Man say lying is wrong, the Laws of Nature suggest lying is mandatory. A cynical man could observe that perhaps the Laws of God and Man suppress lying among their followers in order to maintain a competitive advantage, but I am not cynical, and in my one-way conversations with dead people, I forgot to consult the one person whose opinion matters most to me.
Me. What do I think about liars and lying?
Very rarely in my life have I felt more pain than when someone I trusted lied to me, except for the dirty, guilty feeling I had when I lied to someone who trusted me. The only times I've lied is because I believed that it would do less harm overall. Perhaps St. Augustine had a point.
So in my own belief, I think lying is wrong. Usually. And I am the only judge of when a lie leaves my mouth, as you are the judges of when lies leave your mouths.
And because of my distaste for lies, I thought it would be right to tell the audience the words of Michel de Montaigne, that before one starts weaving the tangled webs of deceiving, the most important observation about lying.
The more you lie, the more you have to remember.
Fellow Toastmasters, honored guests, thank you for your time.
