Been seeing this hashtag (which literally means “famous lying lines”) on Twitter and even on Facebook lately. How timely! These are days marked by much lying. In politics, specially. But we won’t go into that. Lying in politics, after all, is such a banality. It’s a wonder people still go out and vote. Filipino voters are such gluttons for punishment — or, more specifically, gluttons for lies.
I suppose, in fairness to all, we are mostly gluttons for lies even outside the polling booth. We clock in everyday at companies where lying and insulting employees’ intelligences has been institutionalised. We routinely lap up the lies of reality shows and clickbait articles. We engage in the big lie of SmallTalk in the many social obligations and situations we have to suffer every now and then. And our eyes and ears feast on a colorful buffet of lying advertising material every minute of the day.
Buy [insert fashion brand her] and make a statement!
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Nowadays people don’t even have to open their mouths to lie. We have the increasingly affordable technology of Vicki Belo to thank for that. Suddenly “many fish in the sea” has been given new meaning. One needs to be careful to check all those dangling baits for sharp hooks when navigating these seas. Just the same, I’ve had the sad fortune of seeing lots of friends reeled in by such lying predators.
Which brings me to the ones I find most disturbing of all: we continue subjecting ourselves to relationships built on lies that we keep coming back to. Some people call it “battered wife syndrome” — relationships where a cycle of abuse followed by “apologies” recur in a deadly spiral to oblivion. The abuse need not be too dramatic and may even be very subtle — poor sods being reeled in and strung along by relationship hobbyists. It’s abuse, just the same when one considers how short life is.
I suppose that is the humor behind the hashtag that sticks to the psyche. Life is really a game in which gaining maturity is really an on-going honing of our skills at sifting through a haystack of lies to find the small handful of needles of truths. Indeed, such truths being the needles that they are even sometimes end up pricking us and drawing blood when we do find them.
[Image courtesy The Anjana Network.]
Frustrated artist doing geek for a living.