Addiction teaches us the truth about lies

Professional truth-seekers are having a rough time with Donald Trump this year. His propensity to tell lies about even his own lies is confounding pundits. He may be duping himself as regularly as he misleads the wider public. Yet cringing at Trump’s mendacious ways should not offer the rest of us a pass for overlooking our own capacities for self-deception.

Adam Hearlson’s cover story on the opioid epidemic ("Facing the opioid crisis") highlights the need for people to be courageously honest in confronting the scourge of addiction. Self-destructive habits receive much of their lifeblood from daily dishonesties. “Ten percent of my battle has to do with alcohol,” a friend in recovery likes to remind me. “The other 90 percent is all about honesty.” A woman in my congregation who’s been attending 12-step meetings for 17 years is fond of saying, “You are always as sick as your sickest secret; and there is no health as long as it remains a secret.”

Yet little white lies plague more than the addicted. Small deceptions function like a narcotic in many of us, allowing us to feel nicely respectable to others. In his book The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves, Dan Ariely describes different varieties of dishonesty. When we lie and cheat in big ways, he argues, we start to feel bad about ourselves. But smaller versions of untruthfulness leave us with relatively strong self-esteem. In fact, when we manage the moral pluses and minuses in life enough to keep our lives headed in positive territory, we feel mostly wonderful about ourselves.