Tao and Zen

I've said in the past that I'll generally believe anything that I'm told from a person I love. It's true, too. It's really worse than that; I'm a tremendously credulous person. I don't necessarily believe everything I read, or the words of strangers, but I'll often believe things even people I don't particularly like tell me, if I know those people.

This can be a bad thing. If I believe something that turns out to be a lie, that can be pretty hurtful, particularly if I acted on that information. At the least, I'll look pretty stupid; at the most, other people can be hurt by the actions I take based on the lie. In most cases, though, all that's going to happen is that I look stupid. Saying that I believed something somebody told me doesn't really help that situation, because it's considered smart to be skeptical (and that's not necessarily wrong).

So, in short, I look stupid a lot, because I believe things that people say. Obviously, nobody likes to look stupid, particularly in situations where the lie was fairly obvious to everyone else. I'm no different; in fact, I really hate looking stupid.

On the other hand, I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to believe someone I love, or someone I care about, even when I know that person has lied to me (or otherwise been deceptive) before. Even if I am fairly sure that a person is habitually dishonest, I won't assume that what he or she says is a lie until I've been presented with fairly good evidence, or unless it's otherwise proved to me that this new thing is, in fact, untrue.

Even then, I rarely assume lies are malicious. Very often, I know, a person either really believes the lies he tells, or there is some reason behind why he tells lies in general that I want to try to understand. I have been in relationships in the past with habitual liars, and I never knew it to be the case that those people meant to hurt anyone. They weren't, in fact, dishonest people; it's just that on a regular basis, the things they said didn't fit the actual facts. Not unless or until such people turned on me was I angry at their lying; I just forgave it, every time.

From my perspective, lies hurt the teller far more than the person they're told to. First of all, it's very difficult to recover from the reputation of being dishonest. But more importantly, deception is a trap. Nobody is a villain in his own mind, so the liar must really believe the things he is saying, even if initially he knows he is lying. The more one lies, the more one becomes trapped in deceptiveness, to the point where everyone is an enemy and everything is a bad thing. Watching someone become trapped in deception is tragic; the best thing one can do is just step away and hope that eventually, the person can extricate himself without one's self to remind him of the initial set of lies that led to the spiral.

There are some days when I wish that I didn't so easily believe everything I am told. However, it's my nature, and so I've come to accept it. I think that even though I sometimes get hurt by it, I end up being happier in general, and I am a stronger person for the hurt I've suffered because I chose to believe a lie told me by someone I love or care about. Certainly, I'm stronger than that person, and that's some consolation.