How a person perceives a lie depends largely on his belonging. However, a completely different approach is also possible.
The heroine of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel «Love in the Time of Cholera» Fermina Daza finds out that her husband is cheating on her and asks him what’s going on. The husband, wracked with guilt, tells her everything. Fermina is dead.
“She hoped,” writes Marquez, “that he would behave like a real man: he would deny everything, swear on his own life that nothing had happened, be indignant at false rumors, utter curses against a society that was ready to tarnish the honor of a decent person, and in nothing will not confess even if evidence is presented to him.”
Fermina is a Catholic, for her the authority of her husband is more important than the truth. A person of Protestant culture, on the contrary, may forgive betrayal, but he will never forgive a lie. Bill Clinton was on the verge of political collapse, not because of his sexual activities, but because he lied about them under oath — and was somewhat forgiven when he publicly admitted everything. I will not forget the speech of a woman senator who demanded impeachment: “My five-year-old granddaughter asked: “Grandma, are you going to elect a new president?” “No, granddaughter,” I replied, “we already have a president.” “No,” the granddaughter said sadly, “he lied.”
For some, there is no concept of «holy lies». for others — «holy truth.» Whose position is closer to the truth?
The way a person perceives a lie largely depends on his confessional and cultural affiliation. However, a completely different approach is also possible. The mathematician Vladimir Lefebvre, who lives in the USA, published in 1982 a book called «The Algebra of Conscience», where he divided all people into two groups: some behave according to the laws of the «first» ethical system, others — according to the laws of the «second» *. In the first ethical system, there is no compromise between good ends and bad means—in other words, the end does not justify the means. In the second — justifies, there a fly in the ointment will not spoil a barrel of honey. For people of the first ethical system there is no holy lie. For people of the second — there is no holy truth.
Do cultural and mathematical theories of this kind help to make decisions in difficult everyday situations? If I have to decide whether to tell the truth or lie for my own good, would a knowledge of Protestant ethics or the algebra of conscience help me? If I want my decision to be extremely rational, then it will help — I can look at my unconscious impulses more or less objectively.
If I want to discard rational arguments and just listen to my inner tuning fork, then it will rather interfere. And my life experience tells me that it is precisely such irrational decisions that often turn out to be more correct.
* V. Lefebvre «Algebra of conscience». Cogito Center, 2003.